PERSONAL CANON: SKULL AND BONES

The word "gimmick" almost always comes with a certain sneering tone of superiority attached: the suggestion is inherent that a thing was less gimmicky, it would be improved as a result. This is not a hard-and-true relationship. There is, for example, the career of director & producer William Castle, whose film career could not be reasonably summarized without heavy reliance on the word gimmick, for nearly all of his best films are noteworthy not just for having gimmicks, but for how those gimmicks are in many cases the most defining element of the whole: entire movies where you get the feeling that an entire plot was built around finding a way to justify putting electric buzzers in the theater seats. And yet Castle's best work, which I'd consider at a minimum to include The Tingler (Percepto, the aforementioned buzzing seats), 13 Ghosts ("Illusion-O", polarised lenses revealing hidden spectres), and our present subject, House on Haunted Hill, are all very close to perfect versions of what they are. Namely, exaggeratedly unserious horror films finely tuned to appeal to a matinee audience of kids looking to be entertained more than spooked.

Of all these, House on Haunted Hill is perhaps the best, and one of the most entertaining for reasons that have nothing to do with its gimmick, unless you consider the casting of Vincent Price in a movie like this to be a gimmick. Which wouldn't be a terribly unreasonable argument to make, given the nature of his roiling, campy, hambone performances in movies of this sort. Price, more than anything else, is what gives this film and The Tingler their sense of heightened fun, for even when he's playing a sour, miserable shit (as he is in House on Haunted Hill, more than just about any of his other roles), he's doing it from a place of warped, spiky fun.

The particular role that Price plays in this film is Frederick Loren, a wealthy industrialist hosting a "haunted house party" at the suggestion of his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart). "She's so amusing", says Price twice during his opening narration, in a rancid & ironic tone of voice that makes it clear that Frederick does not regard Annabelle as amusing, or anything else that's terribly affectionate. In fact, the Lorens are a pair of mostly hideous people, the kind whose marriage presumably did not start out in a healthy place ("I wanted to marry you" she reminds him at one point, Ohmart's expression neatly filling in the unspoken "because you had money"), and has since turned into something of a bloodsport; he has chased away all of her friends after a string of infidelities, she has tried to accidentally poison him on at least one occasion, and both of them talk freely about how delighted they'd be if the other dropped dead on the spot. Castle's career isn't wanting for corrosive marriages, but the Lorens' might well be the most toxic he ever depicted, and Price and Ohmart dive into their scenes together with unseemly relish. It's an odd focal point for a haunted house movie - and an even odder one for a supposed kiddie matinee flick - but damned if it does give House on Haunted Hill the exact sardonic note that gives it a special personality totally unlike the vast majority of the late-'50s B-movies that have remained so much less fresh and entertaining than this one.

Loren's guest list for the party consists of five desperate people who all stand to make $10,000 each if they can survive the night: psychiatrist David Trent (Alan Marshall), newspaper columnist Ruth Bridgers (Julie Mitchum), test pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), a secretary from one of Loren's companies, and Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the house's owner, who hasn't set foot in the place since a terrible night many years ago during which his brother died at the hands of whatever supernatural forces inhabit the building. The whole thing, including its title, is an evident knock-off of the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, later turned into the genre film masterpiece The Haunting, but whereas that book was a sober account of paranormal terror, House on Haunted Hill, even at its most scary and intense (which I'd take to be the scene where Nora finds a head in her suitcase), is still quite a flippant lark, barely even bothering to stitch the various scenes of people (mostly Nora) poking around in dark corners and getting the bejeezus scared out of them together using narrative, when it can just as easily rely on having Price swan in, chomp on the scenery while passive-aggressively humiliating his wife, and swanning out. And once the film arrives at its conclusion and all things are explained, it's even more flippant than one might have thought to give it credit for as it was all unspooling. I would not dream of giving it away, mostly because it is way too goofy to believe, bringing in a rational motivation for all the things that happen that frankly makes less reasonable sense than "it was all the work of ghosts" ever would have.

The important thing to note is that it's plainly meant to be goofy - from the moment that Elisha Cook's head comes swooping at us against a black background to deliver the first of two expository monologues, certainly from the moment that the opening credits are presented in a font that would be better-suited to the adventures of a bunch of teenagers on a beach than anything with the word "haunted" in the title, this is a fllm anxious not to be taken seriously. It's a film that understands that spooky old buildings with hidden corridors and vats of acid in the basement are ultimately more fun to think about than scary to experience, and that's never clearer than in the final five minutes, when the Castle gimmick finally shows up: a living skeleton appears onscreen and at that exact moment, a skeleton is whisked from some shadowy corner of the auditorium to hover eerily above the audience. This was called Emergo and it was prone to not working, which I think only adds to the silly charm of it *. That's the level of knowing silliness this movie operates on, and it taps into the feeling of being a 10 year old in a rickety but well-intentioned local haunted house, pretending to agree that everything is scary when in fact it is just cool, because skeletons! Who doesn't love a good living skeleton when they're 10? Nobody that I'd want to chat with at a cocktail party, that's certain.

Key to all this - to all of this, it is the reason that William Castle was one of the all-time best purveyors of junk food horror movies, and why House on Haunted Hill is one of his masterpieces, if not, indeed, his overriding masterpiece (I go back and forth with his other "Vincent Price in a terrible marriage" film, The Tingler, which has the all-time best gimmick of his career) - is its sincerity. There are many people who've made crap B-pictures that plainly just wanted to take a job and cash a paycheck; there are people who've made high-budget A-list horror films who clearly thought that they were above such tawdry nonsense (AKA "everyone who directed an Exorcist film besides Renny Harlin"). The number of people who have made B-pictures and seemed to genuinely love that they were doing it is a small list indeed, and rare indeed is the B-movie artist whose work suggests such enthusiasm for his job - it puts Castle on a rarefied level next to the like of John Carpenter, a director you could not otherwise compare him to. House on Haunted Hill might be dumb and corny and reliant to a ludicrous degree on Price's withering sarcasm, but it not only knows what it is, it loves being what it is, and that's enough to make it one of the very best "boo!" movies that I have ever seen.