I’ve spent considerable oxygen defending this film’s creature effects, its shlocky acting, and its oddly paced, tensionless plot. This post will not attempt to expand on these elements but instead, aims to suggest that William Malone’s “remake” of a 1959 William Castle film occupies an important, or at least an interesting place in horror history.

Some here will be intimately familiar with William Castle, but for those who aren’t – as a tween, he goaded Bela Lugosi into giving him a manager position with the Dracula stage play. A few years later, he leased a theater from Orson Welles and painted swastikas all over it to create a buzz around a play he had written in a weekend. As a filmmaker he is known as the master of the gimmick. Tickets to his first independently produced feature, Macabre (1958) came with $1000 life insurance policies in case audience members died of fright. Most famously, he sent crews to install vibrating motors in theater seats for his 1959 film, The Tingler. Castle would go on to direct over fifty features (and produce several dozen more) and is cited as a huge source of inspiration for filmmakers from Hitchcock to Zemeckis. For more on Castle see his memoir Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America or the 2007 documentary, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, directed by Jeffrey Schwartz.

1959’s House on Haunted Hill stars Vincent Price as a wealthy kook offering $10,000 to any party guests who can survive an overnight haunted house party held in his wife’s honor. SPOILERS. It’s all a ruse to bring an end to a fractious marriage. Price uses some combination of traps and puppets to see his wife dispatched in a vat of acid. It’s worth a watch if only to see Price chew the admittedly cheap scenery (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9RedbhV8Pc). Castle strung plastic skeletons from theater ceilings to swoop around during screenings. Fast forward a half-century….

In 1999, Dark Castle Entertainment was formed by Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis. William Castle’s daughter, Terry, would serve as co-producer of their first feature, a loose remake of her father’s House on Haunted Hill. The cast stands as a perfect capstone of 1990s B-filmmaking: Corky Romano, Final Destination Girl, Sonya Blade, Xenia Onatopp, that guy who helped Stella get her groove back, and Geoffrey Rush, whose Vincent Price reprise brings an involuntary smile to my face. The house itself is a testament to brilliant matte painting and, incidentally, is no longer a house. The Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane is the setting for the night’s festivities and the prize for surviving has been upped to a cool million. A NYT reviewer suggested Alan Greenspan should look to this as a clear instance of “inflation aborning.”

Atop a matrimonial murder plot this go around are plenty of ghosts, echoes of the Art Deco era crimes committed by the psychopathic Dr. Richard Vannacutt, played by Jeffrey Combs. Creature effects and design were done by KNB, with support from Dick Smith (in his last film credit). If for no other reason, see the film to see one of Smith’s old, unused monster designs from the golden age of practical effects (or spoil it here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI7w-5S2rrA). Some creepy stop-motion and some cloggy CGI would make the film’s crescendo truly harrowing if it had bothered to give us any characters to root for, but regardless, it was a fun, spooky romp when it was released in October of 1999. And in William Castle fashion, select theaters handed out scratch cards with a chance to win a cash prize, presumably if you survived the film.

So why bother with this movie? House on Haunted Hill (1999) had enough of a return to fuel a second remake, Thirteen Ghosts (2001) which occupies a soft spot in many hearts. Dark Castle Entertainment would shortly thereafter abandon Castle reboots and instead produce/distribute a number of quirky, imperfect horror films, Ghost Ship (2002), Gothika (2003), The Reaping (2007), Orphan (2009), Splice (2009), before being absorbed into Universal. In an era when remakes are unapologetic about their cash grabbiness, House on Haunted Hill represents something different. Evidencing this, is Jeffrey Combs.

I just watched Combs in a vignette from Shudder’s Creepshow and I, for one, am grateful that he always seems to be waiting in the wings when a new love letter to horror is penned. And that is what this film is. Geoffrey Rush’s character is another example of the rich, internal language of horror. He is simultaneously channeling Vincent Price and William Castle himself – a devious huckster whose disbelief and cynicism erode as real terror rises to the surface. The film has its flaws, but here, twenty years later (sixty out from the original), I think it rewards those who view it less as a bricolage of all that was bad in 90s horror and more as a film by and for fans of the genre. Many of William Castle’s films do not hold up, but House on Haunted Hill (1999) offers a way to experience that legacy, plastic skeletons, seat tinglers, and all.