HOUSE on HAUNTED HILL (1959) HOUSE of WAX (1953) Was a Stepping Stone in Vincent Price’S Career Path Towards Being a Horror Star
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HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959) HOUSE OF WAX (1953) was a stepping stone in Vincent Price’s career path towards being a horror star. A second step along the way was THE FLY (1958), although he played the “straight” role, the brother of the man who got his head switched with a fly. Producer/director William Castle made a coup when he cast Vincent in HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959). It was probably at this point that Vincent became a commodity in the horror genre. His character in HAUNTED HILL crystallizes the whole “Vincent Price Persona” – urbane, sophisticated, utilizing his smooth-as-velvet voice to convey menace, and tossing out sly comments on the macabre goings-on as they occur. The plot has Vincent playing an eccentric millionaire (really, is there any other kind?) who rents a haunted house for an evening so he and his wife can have a party. If the guests survive the night, which given the house’s history, is questionable, they will each be given a reward of $10,000, which was mega-bucks in 1959. Just to boost the odds against their survival, all of the guests are given a gun as a party favour, which of course increases the chances of someone in a panic shooting another guest. Sounds like fun, right? Price exchanges barbed quips with his wife. It’s clear they both hate each other. The movie takes a pretty dim view of marriage, like a low-rent version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, if George and Martha lived in a haunted house. The guests sit around drinking alcohol, waiting for something scary to happen, and Castle manages to deliver a few pretty good shocks and creepy moments. Looking at the film a second time, a lot of what happens makes little sense, but no one really cares. William Castle’s specialty was scaring the crap out of little kids. The visuals and the soundtrack are pretty aggressive at times. The scary ghost noises (diabolical laughter and clanking chains) wouldn’t be out of place in a fairground spook ride, or one of those sound eects records for children’s Halloween parties. Castle’s brilliant idea for selling the film was to have a big plastic skeleton on a wire which was hand- cranked over the heads of the audience at a crucial point of the film. He advertised this as “EMERG-O!” to make it sound like some huge technological advance. What Castle didn’t foresee was a theater full of rambunctious kids pelting the poor skeleton with popcorn boxes and whatever there was at hand. Castle’s had notions of making the movie-going experience akin to a carnival ride. He was something of a visionary, since in the 70’s we had things like “SENSURROUND” and now we have carnival rides being turned into movies (I’m looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean). Once dicult to see (TV screenings were actually rare when I was growing up – I had to wait until the mid-70’s to see it), the film has fallen into the public domain, which means it’s become available in countless VHS and DVD releases from various companies over the years, often in those 20 movies in a set packages that you see at Wal-Mart. (THE FALL OF THE) HOUSE OF USHER (1960) American-International Pictures (or AIP) made their name with low-budget monster movies like I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN, THE SHE CREATURE, and many others, which would be sent out to theatres and drive-ins in pairs to make double-features. Director Roger Corman proposed an experiment to the heads of American-International: Instead of making 2 cheap black and white movies, why not combine the budgets and make one expensive movie in colour? HOUSE OF USHER was chosen as the story because Poe’s work was in the public domain. One of the conditions of the project being approved is that the movie had to have a monster. “The House is the Monster,” Roger replied. That seemed to satisfy his bosses, but in fact the true monster is played by Vincent Price. Vincent Price was signed on to play Roderick Usher, who lives in a decaying mansion with his sister Madeline and a servant. Roderick is obsessed with the Usher family history, which is rampant with insanity and evil behaviour. (“The House itself is evil!” he declares at one point, putting across the original idea of the House as monster.) He is determined that the Usher family die out when he and his sister pass away. A monkey wrench is thrown into his plans when a young man shows up at the door intending to marry Madeline and take her away to start a family. What’s a brother to do? Why, bury his sister alive, of course! Vincent Price really seemed in his element here, gripping the audience by sheer force of personality. No one knew it at the time, but USHER would kick o a whole series of Poe films starring Price, which would last for a full decade, petering out with CRY OF THE BANSHEE in 1970. Since so many of the Poe films ended with a house burning down, Corman would frequently re-use footage from USHER’s house-burning scene. This would become something of an in-joke with fans, who would recognize the images. All advertising materials call the film “HOUSE OF USHER” but when you watch the film itself, the title card reads “THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”. I suppose this was a mouthful for people talking about the film, so they would just call it HOUSE OF USHER for short. THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961) After HOUSE OF USHER became a surprise hit, a sequel was in order. This meant filming a second Poe story. Roger Corman settled on THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. Screenwriter Richard Matheson had to fabricate an entire story, since the original short story isn’t very long on plot. It isn’t very long, period. In some ways it’s a replay of USHER, using the plot device of a young man visiting a sinister old dark house (or castle, in this case) presided over by a mentally unstable Vincent Price. The young man starts unearthing secrets, eventually having his life placed in danger (as depicted on the stunning poster). Still, they’re two very dierent stories. In the climax, Vincent goes mad and takes on the personality of his dead father, who was an expert on torture with the Spanish Inquisition. Like the motion of the pendulum itself, Price’s character swings from one extreme to the other, from anguished and tortured to gleeful torturer. The dialogue he is given for both states of mind is extremely stylized, with Matheson breaking out the thesaurus to find dierent ways for Price to say “Hades” just before he sets the pendulum in motion. Even though it’s not a faithful adaptation of Poe, it manages to capture the spirit of Poe, with the Price character mooning over a lost (deceased) love, premature burials, victims being walled up alive, and just the general air of unhealthy obsession. Like HOUSE OF USHER, It was extremely popular on first release, and even surpassed that film in terms of box oce. FUN FACT: B arbara Steele, fresh o the movie BLACK SUNDAY, plays Price’s wife, but because of her British accent (which wouldn’t have fit in with everyone else’s American voices) she ended up being dubbed. THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964) One of the most attractive-looking of the Poe films, it benefitted from being filmed in England on expensive, left-over sets from BECKET. This was a definite step-up from the working conditions at American-International. After the silliness of THE RAVEN (1963), MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH was a much more serious film, with Price playing one of his most villainous roles, Prince Prospero, who believes that God is dead, has chosen to worship Satan, and tests the Christian beliefs of his prisoner, the young Francesca. In the end, though, the film seems to reject the idea that either Deity has any influence on the world, leaning instead toward a view that life and death are completely random. Praying to either God or Satan will not alter your fate. These are some pretty heady ideas being expressed at a time when horror films (and Price’s films especially) were considered kiddie matinee material. This might have been to the film’s detriment, since audiences didn’t want Vincent to pontificate on the existence or non-existence of God, they just wanted him to go “Boo!” What makes Price’s character dierent from the usual villains that he played is that Prospero has weighed the pros and cons of good and evil, and has chosen evil. At times he seems to be experimenting with the concept just to see how far he can take it. By the end of the film, something about him has softened, and he asks The Red Death to spare Francesca. (and by kissing Prospero, does this mean Francesca in her turn has been slightly corrupted?). If Vincent Price had ever appeared in a Bergman film, THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH would likely have been the result, and it even received some criticism for being “plagiarism of Bergman”. On the other hand, MASQUE, like many of the Poe films, uses colour sumptuously, while Bergman in this time period filmed in austere black and white.