Let the Games Begin: House on Haunted Hill (1999)

When shock master Stephen Price (Geoffrey Rush) and his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen) host a party at a spooky house, the invitation list mysteriously gets replaced with a group of strangers. Doom crier and house owner Pritchett (Chris Kattan) tries to warn the folks about their fates, but before he can leave he gets locked into the house with hosts and attendees, as well. This leaves producer Jennifer Jenzen (Ali Larter), Dr. Blackburn (Peter Gallagher), journalist turned vlogger Melissa Marr (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras), and athlete Eddie (Taye Diggs) to plumb the mysteries of a house where old security measures (heavy steel plates blocking all the windows and doors) have locked them inside. The good news. If they survive the night, they each get a check for $1M. If they don’t, well, their share gets divided up among the survivors. It’s a wonderfully cynical game, inviting the attendees to be on their baddest behavior.

As it turns out, all the legends about spooky happenings and lots of ghosts is true. Back in the day, Dr. Vannacutt (Jeffrey Combs) ran the place as an asylum, which made it easy to gather specimens for his macabre investigations. A lockdown and a fire ended that little ghoulish parade. However, all the ghosts of the madmen and the staff are still around and driven by their darkest impulses. Just like the attendees are driven by dark impulses. Needless to say, this is going to get messy. Director William Malone helms a fun little amusement park ride of a movie in his remake of William Castle’s classic, House on Haunted Hill (1999).

Anyone who complains about the number of remakes coming out of Hollywood in recent years has not really been paying attention to film history. We’ve always endured a heady number of remakes, particularly in the horror genre. Filmmakers start out as fans, you see, and they want to revisit some of the same things that freaked them out while in the impressionable age when they discovered the genre. I suspect this is also the reason a lot of sf adaptations are also over twenty years old. If a filmmaker is in their thirties, they look back to the sensawunda they got as a seven-year-old or a young teen. The golden ages for developing that lurve for sf. Of course, this is overlooking the entire, far more cynical view of Hollywood supposing that if the original had a built-in audience, then the risk associated with that gamble of backing a new movie can be mediated by exploiting said audience.

When the production company Dark Castle Entertainment launched their efforts by producing a slick, 1990s-era remake of a William Castle classic flick (1959’s House on Haunted Hill), they probably expected to move upwards to bigger and better productions in that vein. Well, that never quite happened. At least talking about their initial run of horror pictures, the company’s efforts peaked with the first release and offered diminishing returns after that. At least so far as the first eight entries go. After their first straight to DVD flick, Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007), they left their mission statement (and William Castle’s catalog) behind for other things. Some of them have found success, more seem to have been panned than garnered interest. Of those initial eight offerings between 1999 and 2007, it’s fair to say that House on Haunted Hill is the most crowd-pleasing of the offerings.

No one was more surprised by this than I was.

When House on Haunted Hill was announced, I recall wondering, “Why?” The Vincent Price version was a charming little picture, a slice of horror film history. It might not have been stupendous filmmaking, but it was a fun little thing. When I learned more about the Dark Castle Entertainment group’s idea of remaking William Castle flicks, I changed my mind and decided it might be interesting to see what they came up with. As it turns out, I enjoyed the Hell out of Malone’s interpretation. Like Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Chuck Russell’s version of The Blob (1988), and David Cronenberg’s spin on The Fly (1986), William Malone and screenwriter Dick Beebe do an intriguing job of paring out the interesting elements from the original, tossing them into a stew with very different ingredients, adding a solid cast, and then creating something interesting. It’s people running around a scary house where ghosts abound, but that’s just a framework for more personalized elements. While the end product is not quite as overall successful or innovative as some of the remakes I listed above, it nevertheless manages to deliver a satisfying story with a few good scares, some inventive characterizations, and some clever touches.

Of course, it’s hard to beat this movie’s mix of creeptastic elements, which centers on a great cast wandering around an effectively spooky insane asylum/house while facing off against human horrors, gooey practical effects, and the occasional CGI wonkiness. Also, there’s a bevy of ghosts to be found on the premises. Where the original picture quibbled about the supernatural’s existence, this flick decides to put the evil front and center and even gives them a smirking Jeffrey Combs as their ringleader.

Screenwriter Dick Beebe builds on the 1959 original, staying true to the sorts of moralistic EC characters to be found in Robb White’s conception. We have the quick brush strokes of character, creating vessels with plenty of space for the individual cast to pour their own talent and personality into. There are initially pleasant characters who turn sinister when they reveal they’ve been bad guys all along, there’s a fine example of the way husbands and wives should never be, and there’s a plucky pair of young’uns who must rely on their own courage and spirit to survive the night. There are some surprise moments—such as when one of the poor partygoers is locked inside a strange machine that combines a zoetrope and turbine and suffers a flurry of ghastly, ghostly images that fill in backstory and plot elements as well as serve forth scary pictures—and there are occasional gaping holes of logic that get glossed over during the propulsive plot ride. This ain’t Bergman; it’s a Saturday evening date flick.

House on Haunted Hill is a wonderful example of tools and talent coming together to make an entertaining little feature film. Is this high art? Not in the sense of being a picture about serious people thinking serious thoughts, but for the art of horror cinema, it’s a rather enjoyable, sometimes surreal entry in the history of horror flicks. Coming out of a decade that was dominated by CGI monsters and effects that never looked real enough and served as a crutch for lacks in budgets and raw storytelling skill, the movie has a good sense of what it wants to accomplish and goes about doing so with skill and imagination.

Consider for a moment that cast list: Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Jeffrey Combs, Peter Gallagher, Taye Diggs, Chris Kattan, Ali Larter. There are also a brief appearances from Lisa Loeb, James Marsters, and a snarky Debbie Mazar (the last in cut scenes, sadly). Any way you slice it, this is one hell of an interesting cast for a little horror flick. There’s no real campy performances either. They approach the material straight, and their gravity or bleak senses of humor make the whole thing a lot better than anyone expected it to be. On this basis alone, the movie should remain a solid entry in the 1990s era dark fantasy/horror flicks.

However, the movie also has a terrific look and sensibility. The locations are neat to look at, the production design is creepy, and the effects are a treat to see. Whether we’re looking at the cobwebby basement or the open architecture of the foyer, the Suspiria (1977) inspired stained glass, or the corners of the electroshock therapy lab, the place has a well-realized sense of character. The house itself gets top billing, after all, or at least title billing.

The effects are also a lot of fun. KNB were involved with the makeup FX, so of course that aspect is top notch. The looks for the ghosts are interesting. What’s more, the interplay between location and supernatural characters is intriguing. The overall feeling one gets while watching the picture is one of a bunch of creative sorts with a passion for spooky movies putting forth both a love letter to the original film as well as a playful “What would’ve happened if the ghosts were all definitively for real?” experiment. While this feature might not be a vehicle for mass conversion to the varied delights of scary cinema, it’s fan service of the best sort. We don’t feel condescended to. We can share in the joy and fright.

Where the movie stumbles is in the final act. As I mentioned before, CGI was still big at the time of production, and it rears its ugly head in that finale. You see, there’s a big old conglomeration of darkness with various faces and voices that moves through the house. Some of this is done with actually shot footage touched up with CGI, and the whole thing is … disappointing. The scenes are essentially real people running away from a visual effect, a formless blob that occasionally sprouts CGI fractals or touched up footage amidst beautifully designed locations. It doesn’t look good these days (and I don’t remember being all that impressed with it when the movie came out). There’s a cheesy charm to it, I suppose, but it’s a letdown from everything that came before. Still, the movie ends well with a last-minute revelation, a spectral intervention, and the cut scenes provide a coda involving an escapee who should not really have been allowed to escape (and doesn’t).

When the movie is working at its best, it has fun and fright. At its worst, it’s people hustling before a blob of supernatural chewing gum can swallow them.

I don’t intend to be rude when I declare House on Haunted Hill to be stupid amounts of fun. William Malone knows how to produce a fun little rollercoaster ride, and his talent with live actors, physical sets, and staging of things to allow practical and CGI effects is terrific. Whether the computer effects could meet expectations or not? Well, that’s a whole other matter. Still, the movie is a mix of classy and trashy spook house fun and worth a visit or even a revisit as the seasons turn chilly.

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House on Haunted Hill is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming editions.

Writing for “Let the Games Begin: House on Haunted Hill (1999)” is copyright © 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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