COMING TO GET YOU

History remembers 1953's House of Wax as the first big studio film shot in 3-D during that gimmick's earliest incarnation. History remembers this so well, in fact, that history tends to overlook that House of Wax has perhaps even more significant a claim to fame: it was more or less the movie that first linked Vincent Price to the horror genre. I can't make that claim entirely divorced of hedging: it would be another half-decade until he appeared in The Fly, the first film in the almost uninterrupted run of horror movies he'd appear in throughout the second half of his career (we could maybe stretch a point and call the starting point of this run his 1957 appearance as a non-threatening Satan in the horror-free The Story of Mankind), and he'd already appeared in three horror-ish films in 1939 and '40, Tower of London, The Invisible Man Returns, and The House of the Seven Gables. But there were a lot of years and movie separating those films from House of Wax, and even if it took a while for him to stumble into a follow up, it was this film that created, perfectly formed in its first appearance, the archetypal Vincent Price Bad Guy. To wit, an erudite, well-educated genius who is turned by tragedy into a crazed madman willing to commit any number of murders to satiate his muse. And he's disfigured, to boot, an unnecessary but helpful addition to the form.

The film itself was a fairly loose remake of 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum (which is, ironically, most significant for being a last: it was the final major studio feature shot in 2-color Technicolor), which means basically that the opening sequence, climax, and narrative hook are all the same, but the mix of characters is completely different. Mostly because Mystery of the Wax Museum was every inch an early-'30s movie, and things like fast-talking girl reporters and Depression hucksters weren't part of the cinematic landscape anymore in 1953. It's the same basic nugget, though: Henry Jarrod (Price) is the genius creator of the finest wax museum in New York around the turn of the century, but he lacks the mercenary edge to exploit his talents for profit. This aggravates his business partner Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts), who elects to set the museum on fire to collect the insurance money. Jarrod will have none of this, and tries to fight Burke, but he's overpowered and left for dead as the fires rage.

Some years later, Burke is enjoying the fruits of his arson, swanning around New York with his flighty girlfriend Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones), but this all comes to a crashing halt one night when he's attacked in his apartment by a man all in black, of whose features we can see only that they appear to be grotesquely scarred. This killer stages Burke's death to look like a suicide by hanging, and in hardly any time, he chases after Cathy, as well; but just as he's strangled the life out of her, he's interrupted by her roommate Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), who flees in terror and finds refuge in the home of her mother's friend, Mrs. Andrews (Angela Clarke), and more to the point, her friend's hunky son Scott (Paul Picerni). Scott is a sculptor, terribly excited to study at the new wax museum that's about to open, and guess who's running it: the not-so-burned-to-death Henry Jarrod, whose hands have been uselessly crippled and who uses a wheelchair to get around, but is otherwise in fine shape after his ordeal, and anxious to finish rebuilding his great collection with the help of two shifty assistants, Leon (Nedrick Young) and the burly, mute Igor (Charles Bronson back in the wee early days of his career, still using his birth name of Charles Buchinsky).

Scott is amazed by the detail and lifelike quality of Jarrod's work, but not half as amazed as Sue, who finds in the sculptor's new Joan of Arc statue the very spitting image of the dead Cathy, whose body was stolen from the morgue. At this point, even the most naïve of 1950s audiences is pretty much up to speed with the movie, which acts like it's a mystery, though the only thing that's even slightly questionable by the time the film hits the intermission at its halfway point (the technological limitations of early 3-D meant that only around 45 minutes could be played straight through) is whether the hideous facial scars are Jarrod's disguise, or if his apparently hale and hearty face is the mask covering his wounds. And even this isn't much of a surprise, though even the film seems guiltily aware that, in fact, a wax mask would be brittle and unyielding and not really likely to convince anybody that it's a real face.

At the basic level of communicating its story, House of Wax really isn't as strong as Mystery of the Wax Museum, simply because it's so astonishingly predictable, and with the benefit of hindsight pertaining to Price's career, it's easy to get out in front of it almost from before it even starts. In every other way, though, I far prefer the remake, which is one of the most absolutely fun of all horror studio pictures in the 1950s. It would be frivolous to avoid admitting right off that a big part of this is that same 3-D gimmick: despite being infamously directed by one-eyed André De Toth, who thus had no idea what the hell he was doing or what it looked like in the end, House of Wax has some of the most engaging dimensional effects ever, both in terms of creating a deeper, richer world, and in terms of sheer idiot spectacle. The second half is introduced with a lengthy sequence in which a barker (Reggie Rymal) entices people to come to the House of Wax by showing off all kinds of tricks with a paddle ball on the longest elastic string you could imagine - absolute gaudy bullshit that makes no sense whatsoever on a story level, and even the other characters know it. It might well be the most overt "you're watching a 3-D movie, so let's throw shit in your face" scene I have ever seen outside of a theme park attraction. And I am not ashamed to confess that I love it.

But in other places, the 3-D adds wonderfully to the inherently spooky atmosphere of the wax museum: it's slightly exaggerated, stretched for effect, and it place the wax statues in a position where they feel hyper-present, in way, all their limbs and poses distended in an aggressive way. And when that fire starts! It's one of the absolute best moments of 3-D as immersion into a dramatic, distressing situation ever filmed. Now, that leaves us with a good 65 minutes out of 88 where the 3-D pretty much just sits there doing nothing at all: no Pina is this, where every frame is aware of the depth and shape it offers. It's not even Creature from the Black Lagoon. Beyond question, though, the film gains a lot of impact and effect from its use of the technology: I have seen and enjoyed in 2-D in the past, but it absolutely belongs on the list of films that are just plain better when they have that added dimension.

On the other hand, ol' Flat Vision De Toth, as I doubt very much that he was called at the time, turned out to be great for the film in one respect: because he wasn't thinking of it in terms of dimensional gags, he was driven to make it work on its own terms as a piece of visual storytelling, and while being in full color means that House of Wax isn't nearly the moodiest or most vividly atmospheric of '50s horror pictures, it's pretty damn impressive just how much mood it gets, whether from the creepy artifice of the wax museum itself, or from Jarrod's torture chamber-esque molding room in the basement. It's not only because of its star that the film looks forward to the Roger Corman cycle of Edgar Allan Poe movies from dawn of the '60s: there's a similar use of great sets lit with a certain mustiness and gloom to create a hugely persuasive world for the gaudy, silly action to take place.

And about that star: we can talk about 3-D or sets or even the rest of the solid cast (Carolyn Jones rises to pretty fantastic in her twittery, weird performance, the rest stay stalled at "good enough to get the job done), but the reason House of Wax works is Vincent Price. It really is that simple. That man had screen presence like nobody's business, and a flawless, unmatched ability to play melodrama in a relaxed, naturalistic way. As good as that was in his early roles as a shady lover or criminal, and as enjoyably as he undoubtedly is when he's playing the hero of his horror movies, he was always at his very best playing theatrically expansive villains, and with Jarrod, we even get to see how that robust hamminess evolves out of the tamped-down enthusiasm he shows in the earliest scenes, when he's merely an eccentric artist. The transformation from that to the declamatory monster of the final scenes is as evocative as anything in the script at dramatising Jarrod's descent into madness, and the way that Price plays through his thick make-up rather than using it as a cheat (a trick he'd refine into mastery by the time of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, where he'd give a rich, elaborate performance despite being unable to move his face at all) gives a fullness and even pathetic scope to Jarrod's monstrosity that makes him one of the most engaging of all '50s horror madmen.

The scenario is clunky enough, and there are just enough flat-out dumb moments - the film's very final beat, a lame 3-D gag, is among the worst - that I can't in good faith call this one of the decade's standout horror pictures, but it's awfully damn entertaining, and it's essential viewing for Price alone. A horror film about the high cost of giving into mindless spectacle, it's awfully satisfying mindless spectacle itself, and in any number of dimensions, it's a delightfully garish exercise in low-grade creeps.

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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.

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