House on Haunted Hill Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

House on Haunted Hill Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 18, 2014

Note: This film is available in the bundle The Vincent Price Collection II.

Vincent Price’s career spanned everything from classic noir ( Laura) to somewhat questionable biographies (he played a rather unlikely Joseph Smith in Brigham Young in a film which always delighted this non-Mormon Utah native), but Price’s lasting legacy will probably always be the horror films he started making in the 1950s with the now iconic House of Wax 3D. Scream Factory, the horror themed imprint of Shout! Factory, gave Price fans a great Halloween present last year when they released The Vincent Price Collection, which included a gaggle of Price’s American International Pictures releases, often made in collaboration with Roger Corman. Scream is back now with a second volume just in time for this year’s Halloween festivities, casting a somewhat wider net that features some of Price’s horror themed outings for other production entities (as well as some AIP features). Once again generally strong technical merits and some fun supplements make this an enjoyable “treat” for horror fans.

A gaggle of strangers wandering into a supposedly haunted mansion may have been a cinematic staple since at least 1932’s The Old Dark House, but for many the paradigm of this subgenre has been and will probably forever be 1959’s goofily entertaining House on Haunted Hill. Directed by the inimitable William Castle, who provided some original theatrical exhibitions with one of his sillier gimmicks, a flying skeleton he branded as “Emergo,” The House on Haunted Hill helped cement Vincent Price’s reputation as a leading horror star, after the overwhelming success of the previous year’s The Fly. Price plays an eccentric millionaire named Frederick Loren, who has invited a handful of people to try to survive a night in a haunted house, with a significant (for the late fifties, anyway) paycheck waiting for them should they make it through to sunrise. However, a brief prelude featuring the house’s owner Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook) lets the audience know from the get go that things are not going to go well for everyone on the invitation list.

A not exactly representative cross-section of the citizenry ends up at the spooky House on Haunted Hill, including a pilot (Richard Long) named Lance and an employee of Loren named Nora (Carolyn Craig), whom the film posits as a pseudo-romantic couple, even if nothing is ever really overtly developed in that regard. Also on hand is Loren’s harridan wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), who in an early scene is shown not to be so happily ever after married to Loren. In fact, both Loren and Annabelle seem to have mayhem, and maybe even murder, on their minds, with each other as the intended victim. Rounding out the house “guests” are a psychiatrist named Trent (Alan Manning), a hard nosed columnist (Julie Mitchum, Robert's real life sister), and Pritchard, the owner who starts out the film warning everyone about disastrous consequences to follow.

While “Emergo” may have been the advertised gimmick to get posteriors into seats back in the day, House on Haunted Hill actually relies on a perhaps somewhat subtler conceit buried beneath its contrived setup: this is actually not that much of a haunted house movie as it is a mystery caper with murderous overtones. Sure, there are ghosties and goblins and even a crazed woman in a fright wig, but it’s all at the service of what turns out to be a fairly rote, but still fun, tale of several people scheming against each other.

One kind of notable thing about House on Haunted Hill is how it traffics in some psychological underpinnings in the way the Corman Poe outings often do, at least with regard to the obviously tumultuous marriage between Loren and Annabelle. If the Corman films exploit images that evoke a Freudian unconscious or even Jungian archetypes, in House on Haunted Hill, the Freudian element is pure Id, a raging, almost uncontrollable fury that seems to spark the characters. With just the slightest (sixties friendly) hints of sado-masochism running rampant through the Loren marriage, House on Haunted Hill has a bit going on beneath the surface, even if attention is being largely directed toward that huge plastic skeleton flying overhead.

House on Haunted Hill Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

House on Haunted Hill is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.77:1. This is one of the nicer looking and more consistent offerings in the newest Vincent Price set from Shout!, one that boasts occasional slight damage in the form of scratches and the like, but which retains abundant detail and a nicely variegated gray scale. Black levels are quite abundant and contrast remains strong throughout the presentation. Grain is also natural looking, once again spiking slightly in optical effects sequences.

House on Haunted Hill Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

House on Haunted Hill's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono mix offers very good fidelity, with some nice high end that never tips into shrillness when occasional hysteria breaks out and there's loud screaming. Dialogue is well rendered, and the track has no issues like distortion or dropouts. The low end here isn't especially remarkable, but the midrange is nicely full bodied.

House on Haunted Hill Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (1080i; 1:40)


• Vincent Price: Renaissance Man (1080i; 27:20) profiles the legendary actor.


• The Art of Fear (1080i; 12:13) is an old MGM Home Video piece on horror films with interviews with Steve Haberman and others.


• Working with Vincent Price (1080i; 15:26) features some fond reminiscences of Price courtesy of interviews with people like screenwriter Chris Wicking.


• Introductory Price (1080p; 13:16) is an interesting piece on the Iowa Public Television Vincent Price Gothic Horrors.


• Still Gallery (1080p; 1:58)


• Vincent Price Trailer Collection (1080p; 19:27). Trailers are typically public domain, so there's quite a vast array of content here covering several different studios.


• Audio Commentary with Author/Historian Steve Haberman. Haberman talks a bit about the interesting dynamic between the spouses at the center of the story, while also delving into Castle and various cast biographies and filmographies.

House on Haunted Hill Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

House on Haunted Hill is just flat out silly, and may even be seen as camp by some cynics, but it's also unabashedly fun and even darkly humorous a lot of the time. Price and Ohmart make great foils, and the supporting cast is fine. Technical merits are excellent, and the supplements on this release are also great. House on Haunted Hill comes Highly recommended.