House on Haunted Hill (1959)

I would stay the night at a haunted house for $10,000.  The trick is this: Stay in one place for the whole night, and never separate from the group.  Why doesn't anybody ever do this?  Come on, losers!

House on Haunted Hill is a fun little chiller brought to us by the great P.T. Barnum of B-Movies, William Castle.  He added another layer of fun to his movies with his love of twists, gimmicks, and trickery.  Even though these gimmicks were primarily to put butts in seats, there was a real sense of showmanship behind them too. 

The characters in this movie are a lot like the audience of a William Castle movie.  They have been issued a challenge by a millionaire to stay the night in a haunted house.  If they stay all night, they get $10,000, no ifs, ands or buts.    The millionaire is played by Vincent Price, a man who is on his 5th unhappy marriage.  The other four wives have met unfortunate ends. 

One of the guys staying in the house is played by the jittery dude from Stanley Kubrick's The Killing.  He's a bit of a drunk, but he knows the history of the house, and he explains to the others (and the audience) that there have been a lot of grisly goings on in there.  Bodies found with missing heads, a giant pit full of acid in the basement.  A question to all you homeowners: If you buy a house with a giant acid pit already installed in the dungeon, do you keep it?  Does that increase the property value? 

So the group gets locked in, and there are some ghost sightings, but to me they don't look like ghosts, they just look like an old lady on wheels.  But still, severed heads appear and disappear.  One particular lady appears to be seeing all these things.  Then somebody turns up dead, hanging from a rope.  Also, I don't know how far ahead Vincent Price planned for this, but he has a bunch of adorable little coffin shaped boxes containing a handgun for each of his guests, just in case.

Anyway, the plot makes little sense, and once the twists start adding up, one after the other, the house of haunted cards comes tumbling down with even a little bit of questioning.  Who is betraying who?  Is the house really haunted or not?  How long did they have that planned?  Not important.  What matters to Castle is that the shocks keep coming.  He surely knew if he kept surprising the audience, the logic of the surprises wouldn't really matter in the long run.

I've read that House on Haunted Hill played in theaters specially rigged to release skeletons upon the audience at certain times in the movie that might call for skeletons.  See?  That sounds like fun, doesn't it?  That's what William Castle's movies were all about.  Fun.  And as ridiculous and hilariously convoluted as House on Haunted Hill was, it was still a lot of fun.

The Wolf Man (1941)

Here we are, edging our way towards Halloween, and here I am with another classic horror film to review. Over the last year, I've been catching up on the classic Universal monster movies. It seems to me that they are required watching that I've somehow managed to miss out on all this time. Now that I've seen the first three Frankenstein movies (2)(3), The Invisible Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere. I've been meaning to get to The Wolf Man for a while.

The Wolf Man, directed by George Waggner, stars Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, a man who is returning home to his family estate in Universal's Old-Timey Village Set, after the death of his older brother. While there, he meets Gwen, a local who works at the antiques shop across the way. In the shop he finds and purchases an interesting old cane with a silver wolf's head for a handle, and in so doing learns of the town's rich mythology around lycanthropy.

Through persistence and creepiness (always works in old movies), Larry also manages to land a date. A band of gypsies are in town so he takes her and one of her friends to see a fortune teller (Bela Lugosi). The seer reads Gwen's friend's palm, seeing a pentagram on it, meaning she is the next victim of the werewolf. He freaks and tells her to go while she still can and takes off himself. Moments later, she is indeed attacked by a wolf. Talbot attempts to rescue her, beating the wolf to death with his cane, and gets bitten in the process.

The next morning, Talbot wakes up to find the bite healed completely. The police are also visiting. They're investigating the murder of the fortune teller, who they found beaten to death with Larry's cane. By this point, Talbot has put two and two together, whether he wants to admit it or not: The wolf that bit him was the fortune teller, and it is only a matter of time before he, too, will become a monster.

I was quite surprised how completely character-driven The Wolf Man was. The Wolf Man himself only has five minutes of screen time, tops. The movie is more about Larry Talbot dealing with the dread and inevitability of becoming a monster. Lon Chaney Jr. is really great at this. He has extremely expressive eyes. Even when he is outwardly denying that something is wrong, you can read on his face that he knows the truth.

I don't really understand why he never becomes a full wolf, even though Bela Lugosi did. Instead he becomes the hairy dog man we all know and love today. I suppose you could rationalize it by saying he's still early in his transitioning and that were he to make it further along in his transformation he will eventually become a full wolf. The truth is surely that Universal simply wanted Chaney to play the monster, not just hand those duties off to a trained dog.

The make-up effects and transformation were groundbreaking for their time, though they were still early days for these things. As I said above, the Wolf Man has very little screen time. It must have taken forever to transform him. The first time it happens we only see his legs change. We don't get the famous series-of-dissolves on Chaney's face until the very end.

The direction by George Waggner is decent, though I thought James Whale's work in the Frankenstein, Bride, and Invisible Man was far better. Still, Waggner got some great performances out of his cast, and obviously, he helped Chaney to create a truly iconic monster, who would have been nothing if the man behind him weren't so well fleshed out.

Another thing that struck me that I'm guessing people nowadays don't really consider is that the Universal movies weren't just done one after another. I think we tend to sort of clump them all together that way when we think of them. You just associate Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as one big group. The fact is, these movies were all made over the course of several decades. I honestly don't know why that's important. I just found it interesting, I guess.

The Wolfman, while not my favorite of the Universal monster movies, was still 100% worth seeing. Lon Chaney Jr. steals the whole show, though, surprisingly, it was his performance as the man that carries the movie, adding more weight and underlying humanity to the tragic circumstances he must endure as the wolf.

The Uninvited (1944)

A couple of years ago, around Halloween, I found a list of director Martin Scorsese's favorite horror movies. I didn't watch any of them that year, but I saved the list. If you can't trust Martin Scorsese's taste in movies, then who can you trust, right? The Uninvited, a haunted house film from 1944, directed by Lewis Allen, is the first of the movies from that list that I'll be reviewing this month.

The Uninvited stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as Rick and Pamela, a brother and sister who stumble across a beautiful abandoned cliffside home. The first sign that something is weird about it is that their dog wouldn't come with them up the cliff. They had to carry him. But then the dog sees a squirrel and all is right with the world again. It chases the squirrel into the house and they follow. As Rick and Pamela explore, they fall in love with the beautiful house, and decide then and there (well, Pamela does) that they must buy it. Isn't it weird that this brother and sister are acting married? I thought so too, but be quiet, these were more innocent times.

Tracking down the owner in town, they negotiate a deal. He's willing to let it go for insanely cheap. They meet with some resistance from his 20-year-old granddaughter, Stella, whose mother used to live there, but they buy the house. After they move in, strange things start to happen. They discover a studio room in the house that gives them the willies. A bouquet of flowers wilts and dies in moments. Rick hears a woman crying at night. Their dog runs away.
Rick has become infatuated with Stella and they let her come visit. She becomes possessed by some force that makes her almost walk off a cliff. Luckily, Rick catches her.

These strange incidents cause them to do some digging around on the history of the house and Stella's family. What they find is a winding trail of secrets and intrigue, and the only way for them to unhaunt this house will be to sort it all out.

I've got to say, The Uninvited sounds a lot more fun on paper than I had watching it. It was definitely an interesting story and a well made movie, but I felt it moved too slowly and the creepy stuff happened far too infrequently to hold my attention. There are long gaps between the haunting events, and I just wasn't invested enough in the family intrigue.

But it's not all bad. It's actually a pretty important film, from what I've learned. It was apparently one of the first times in Hollywood history that ghosts were used as something unsettling and otherworldly as opposed to for comedy. The cinematography is excellent, really atmospheric and moody. There are some really interesting and effective haunting scenes, a highlight being a seance they conduct for Stella. They could have got away with not showing an apparition at all for the ghost, but they do show it, and it looks pretty cool, especially for its time.

So The Uninvited wasn't for me, but that doesn't mean it's not for anyone. I'm guessing people more interested in horror film history will appreciate it. Martin Scorsese did, so who am I to judge?