 |
| images c/o movie-screencaps.com |
Over the years I've talked a lot about gothic horror and its enduring influence and legacy. We often think of it as a predominantly 19th century phenomenon; if they can name any gothic horror novel at all, the average person might name Dracula and Frankenstein and run out of steam. And while it's certainly true that 19th century Euro-American culture informed the relatively new literary genre of horror, gothic horror has persisted well into the 20th and 21st centuries, much in the same way that 1950s rock and roll is still around, we just call it rockabilly now. William Castle's House on Haunted Hill is quintessential gothic horror, at a time when ghost stories, gothic horror, and the long legacy of the eerie was really taking off.
Beginning from around 1957 through the 1960s and well into the 70s saw a fresh wave in gothic horror's popularity, probably both as a response to the weird science fiction of the 1950s as well as the tendency for creators and audiences to revert to old, more comfortable habits in times of uncertainty. Hammer Film was probably the vanguard for this movement, with popular Dracula and Frankenstein franchises, Night of the Demon (coincidentally also founding folk horror as a distinct genre), and movies like The Gorgon and even their sole Sherlock Holmes flick, The Hound of the Baskervilles. We also had Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe cycle, The Innocents, and Mario Bava's Black Sunday (and later, Kill, Baby, Kill.) Even television got in on the action, with the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows beginning in 1966 and the less serious Adams Family in 1964. House on Haunted Hill didn't start this trend (we can probably trace the actual beginning to 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein) it nevertheless served influential on later horror films... while also being deliciously campy.
A wealthy eccentric named Loren (played by Vincent Price in one of his most iconic roles) who suspects his wife wants to kill him, invites five people, equally eccentric, to a "haunted house party" at a mansion he has rented that is reputed to be haunted. The house is old, and has barred windows, no electricity, and no phones. At midnight, the house's caretakers will lock the doors and seal everyone in until eight the next morning. Anyone who stays and survives the night will win $10,000. After the guests are sealed in, a number of weird, ghostly happenings occur, from blood dripping from the ceiling to mysterious assaults in the dark. And it all seems to center around the eccentric's wife...
House on Haunted Hill is a camp classic. It's never totally clear if it's actually haunted or not, though a flooded vat in the cellar remains filled with acid. The final scene is a winking nod to the film's own campiness, as a skeleton, emerging to scare the unfaithful, murderous wife into falling into the acid vat, is actually a puppet being manipulated by Loren. This is accompanied by one of the film's most lasting legacies, that of "Emergo," a gimmick cooked up by Castle in which theaters would rig up a skeleton puppet to fly over audiences during the climactic scene. Between this and the various scares throughout the film, it makes for ideal Halloween fare, good goofy fun.
If the premise of the film seems familiar, that's probably because it's not too dissimilar to the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill. To make things more confusing, also in 1959 came Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House, which was later adapted into the 1963 queer classic The Haunting and then again into The Haunting of Hill House, the modern TV show... which has a followup season based on The Turning of the Screw, also known as the basis for The Innocents. Gothic horror is never going away.
And why would we want it to?
No comments:
Post a Comment