An eccentric millionaire and his steely fourth wife invite five strangers to their spooky mansion of a challenge-party. The guests and their hosts are to be locked in the mansion overnight without telephone access or electricity. Those who survive until morning will each receive $10,000 from their hosts. Those who don’t survive will have the funds forwarded to their heirs. However, the house supposedly comes with a grisly past involving ghosts and murders, and the evening proves to be anything but serene for all involved in this mayhem.
William Castle’s haunted house thriller is a masterpiece of illogical action. A chandelier falls from the ceiling and nearly kills two of the guests, ceilings keep dripping blood on another guest, a bloody head turns up in a guest’s suitcase and then abruptly vanishes, and the cellar contains an oversized subterranean vat filled with acid – and all of this is treated with an “oh, those things happen” attitude by the characters.
The seven-member cast spends a lot of time running in and out of rooms, pausing for lengthy discussions of the relatively brief but supposedly frightful disruptions that hiccup throughout the night. And the convoluted twist ending becomes obvious too far in advance to have any impact.
Castle’s direction is dull, the production design fails to give the impression of a truly haunted mansion, and Von Dexter’s music score does little except take up space on the soundtrack. A few of the actors try their best to make this silly thing watchable – Vincent Price as the sinister host and Carol Ohmart as his less-than-adoring wife have a funny-nasty Albee-style vibe in their relation, while an inebriated Elisha Cook Jr. staggers about making impotent warnings about the house’s grisly past and its ectoplasmic residents.
“House of Haunted Hill” was a popular film during its release thanks to Castle’s masterful promotion skills, including the use of “Emergo” gimmick with a plastic skeleton flying on a wire at several theaters during the screening. Today it is venerated with a cult following that views it as a camp classic. Whether you can call this mess “camp” is a matter of personal taste, but saying is a “classic” is beyond comprehension.