When you do the sorts of work that I do, you will be asked, on a regular basis, to name your favorite horror movie. When this question inevitably comes to me, I generally point toward William Castle’s 1959 follow-up to Macabre, House on Haunted Hill. “This is, in part, precisely because it isn’t the best movie I can think of, by any traditional measure,” I wrote in an earlier essay on this very site, “which frees it up to instead be so many other things.”
Rather than risk reinventing the wheel, I’ll quote a bit more of my thoughts about House on Haunted Hill from that essay. “There is no doubt in my mind that House on Haunted Hill is nowhere near the best horror film ever made, whatever that even means; not the most important, not the most inventive, and certainly not the scariest. It isn’t even the best haunted house movie that I can conveniently think of. Instead it is charming, creaky, sardonic, delightful.”
This is a pretty good summation of the appeal of most of William Castle’s pictures, for those of us who love them even without the gimmicks. As I previously mentioned, even John McCarty’s not-exactly-glowing assessment of Castle’s filmmaking in his book The Fearmakers ultimately concludes that “Castle’s brazen mimicry does not strike one as contemptuous or mean-spirited, but, rather, winning.”
Certainly, few of Castle’s films could be considered more “winning” than House on Haunted Hill, which marks his first collaboration with that most winning of horror stars, Vincent Price, and his second with writer Robb White, who also provided the screenplay for Macabre.
House on Haunted Hill also trots out one of Castle’s most famous gimmicks. “Bill, can’t you come up with another gimmick as good as the insurance policy on Macabre?” publicity director Johnny Flynn asks Castle in Castle’s memoir, Step Right Up! “How about some sort of sound effects? Like the wailing of ghosts we can play in the lobby.”
Castle wasn’t convinced, however. “Fellas, what is the most exciting scene in the picture? When the skeleton comes out of the vat – right? Suppose – after coming out of the vat – we had the skeleton walk off the screen and go into the audience.”
John McCarty describes the gimmick thusly: “He supplied theater owners with a box and skeleton to be nailed up alongside the screen and maneuvered by means of a pulley. At one point in the film, the villainous protagonist, Vincent Price, manipulates a skeleton on wires to frighten his haunted-house victims. As the movie skeleton disappeared off-screen, the box alongside the screen opened up and the theater skeleton flailed about over the heads of the audience. The effect scared nobody, but it was outrageous and a lot of fun, and House on Haunted Hill was also a big hit.”
Dubbed “Emergo,” this latest gimmick is also the time that Castle comes closest to the Blackouts or Dark Seances of the midnight spook shows of old, and their proclivity for “breaking down the fourth wall and transforming the members of the audience from viewers to participants,” as I wrote in my own book Glowing in the Dark.
To repeat a quote that I trotted out in my very first installment of this column, “By far the most common element of these Blackouts were glow-in-the-dark ghosts and skeletons that were paraded across the stage, swung out over the audience on what were essentially fishing poles, or otherwise made to appear to ‘float’ in the air above the crowd.”
While Castle makes no mention of these midnight spook show Blackouts in his memoir, he is obviously operating in the spirit of them, especially when it comes to Emergo, which was captured in action in a famous photo by New York photographer Weegee in 1959.
The photo, which is currently held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, shows a group of excited theatergoers with what looks to be an inflatable skeleton suspended in the air above them. (Incidentally, we originally tried to get this photo for the cover of Glowing in the Dark, but it didn’t come to pass.)
If the Emergo skeletons were inflatable, this may have been the result of an early incident during the gimmick’s first test at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Franscisco. Castle recounts the event in his memoir:
“The image of Vincent Price flashed on the screen. He was manipulating his wire contraption and pulling his skeleton out of the vat. The skeleton onscreen was slowly walking toward the audience. Holding my breath, my gaze was riveted on the black box on the side of the screen. Nothing happened.
‘Oh, my God – it’s not working!’ My face was tense. Another few seconds passed – still nothing. ‘Johnny, for chrissake… what happened? I’ll kill that projectionist! … Where’s the goddamn skeleton?’
After what seemed like an eternity, the box opened slowly. Looking constipated, the skeleton staggered out, dangled for a few seconds, then bounced back into the box.
‘Johnny, the sonofabitch skeleton is supposed to come out – not go back in – and the fucking thing doesn’t light up.’
The audience was howling. Suddenly the box opened again. The skeleton popped out and went halfway up the wire. Something snapped and it fell into the audience. The kids rose from their seats, grabbed the skeleton and, hollering, bounced it up into the air. The theatre was a madhouse!”
Obviously, the kinks were eventually worked out, and House on Haunted Hill – and its gimmick – became another hit for Castle. Today, House on Haunted Hill is likely the director’s best-known and most often seen feature. This is partly thanks to the star power of Vincent Price, and partly because House on Haunted Hill fell into the public domain when filmmakers flubbed some bureaucratic mumbo jumbo.
Thanks to this, House on Haunted Hill has been treated to innumerable home video releases, been included in piles of cheap horror mega-packs, and shown up as clips in countless other horror films over the years, meaning that just about everyone has seen at least some of Castle’s sophomore horror feature. It also got a remake in 1999 to inaugurate the Dark Castle Entertainment production label.
Directed by William Malone, the 1999 House on Haunted Hill may not quite have Castle’s zeal for showmanship, but it does embrace the camp exuberance for which his films were known, albeit with a late ‘90s twist. While there was no Emergo gimmick to accompany the film’s Halloween weekend release, Warner Bros. did at least get into the spirit of promotional gimmickry, giving out scratchcards to theatergoers offering them the chance to win cash prizes.
In 2007, the ’99 film received a direct-to-DVD sequel, Return to House on Haunted Hill, which brought along its own gimmick, this one more akin to the “Punishment Poll” that Castle would use for his 1961 film Mr. Sardonicus. Dubbed “Navigational Cinema,” the idea took advantage of a unique aspect of watching movies on DVD or Blu-ray by incorporating various “branching” moments in the film when the viewer can choose which event takes place next, leading to a proposed 96 possible variations on the viewing experience.
Did it work? Despite E! News calling it “just plain fun,” it failed to make Return to House on Haunted Hill into a hit, and we haven’t exactly seen a raft of other “Navigational Cinema” features in its wake, but it’s certainly the kind of audience participation gimmick that Castle would probably have loved.
Besides his work as Monster Ambassador here at Signal Horizon, Orrin Grey is the author of several books about monsters, ghosts, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters, and a film writer with bylines at Unwinnable and others. His stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and he is the author of two collections of essays on vintage horror film.
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