Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (December 23, 2025)
One of the better-known entries in the Vincent Price canon, 1959’s House on Haunted Hill places its characters in a potentially deadly situation. Wealthy Frederick Loren (Price) and his wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart) decide to throw a party in a supposedly haunted house.
This bash comes with a twist beyond its creepy setting. Loren recruits five guests with the promise of a $10,000 prize – if they survive the night. We follow their adventures and see which partygoers – if any – make it through the evening and collect the money.
Producer/director William Castle seems to be remembered mostly for the gimmicks he used in his films. In the case of House, theatrical screenings came with a technique called “Emergo”. At certain points in the film, a fake skeleton would fly over the audience.
Maybe when holographic video becomes a commercial endeavor, a home release of House can replicate that cheesy gimmick, but until then, the movie will need to stand on its own. 66 years after its initial release, does House entertain?
Not really. Perhaps its greatest impact stems from a film it influenced, as the immense profits earned by the low-budget House apparently inspired Alfred Hitchcock to create his own cheap thriller.
This resulted in 1960’s Psycho, arguably the genre’s finest entry. While I appreciate that legacy, House doesn’t compare favorably with Psycho.
Unlike Hitchcock’s classic, the Castle film seems campy, silly and largely devoid of tension. Really, it often feels like little happens in House.
The movie takes an awfully long time to bother to indulge in its formal premise of the partygoers trapped in a building for the night. The 75-minute film gets almost halfway into its running time before the guests need to commit.
This means a slow build without much behind it. House doesn’t do much to develop the characters and exposition remains nil.
We get basic notions for the roles but not more than that. This makes this opening half fairly tedious, as those elements just stretch the story without much purpose.
Once the guests find themselves formally trapped, matters don’t improve. The only potential tension here comes from the nature of the events: is the house really haunted or are the actions staged?
To avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal the truth, but I will say this: who cares? The movie plays out in such a way that the ultimate resolution doesn’t matter because the viewer loses interest along the way.
For a really short movie, House sure drags. It comes with an awful lot of build-up before it gets to the meat of the story, for as mentioned, the flick nears its midway point before the “contest” actually starts.
If House used that time well, I wouldn’t mind. Instead, it simply pads the running time with little useful material.
The characters bicker a lot but don’t seem to do much, and that doesn’t change even after the action supposedly heats up. The running time fails to bring us much in the way of depth or exposition, and the “scares” lack any bite.
Those factors become the major drawbacks to House. If a horror movie lacks fright, what purpose does it serve?
Perhaps in more talented hands, House could’ve become a winning scare-fest, but Castle seems more concerned with cheap shocks than anything else. That leaves the flick as a campy, silly dud.
