House on Haunted Hill (1959)
★★★ — House on Haunted Hill (1959)
There's a moment in House on Haunted Hill where a plastic skeleton rattles across the screen on what is quite clearly a wire, and I genuinely couldn't tell you whether to be frightened or burst out laughing. I went with laughing. And honestly, I think that's the right call.
Look, I have no doubt that in 1959 this thing was doing serious damage to people's nerves. A haunted house, a mysterious millionaire, a group of strangers locked in overnight with murder potentially on the menu. The bones of it, so to speak, are solid. You can absolutely see how audiences at the time would have been gripping their armrests. But watching it now, in 2025, it sits much more comfortably in the "so corny it's good" bracket than anything approaching genuine dread.
The effects are, to put it charitably, of their era. Inexplicable gorilla hands appear at one point, and I'm still not entirely sure what narrative purpose they were meant to serve. The scares are telegraphed from about three postcodes away. The dialogue is so wildly dramatic it feels less like a screenplay and more like someone dared the writer to outdo a Victorian penny dreadful. The acting is theatrical in that very specific old Hollywood way, where subtlety has been cheerfully shown the door and everything is performed to the back row of a theatre that doesn't exist.
And yet. And yet.
There's something genuinely charming about the whole enterprise. It plays like a Halloween haunted house attraction come to life, all creaking doors and flickering lights and shadowy corridors, and there's real pleasure in that, even if the pleasure isn't quite what the filmmakers originally intended. It has atmosphere, even when the mechanics behind that atmosphere are embarrassingly visible. You're watching people try very hard to scare you, and there's an endearing quality to that effort even when it doesn't land.
And then there's Vincent Price. Good grief, Vincent Price. The man is simply a joy to watch in anything, and here he's clearly having the time of his life. He delivers every line with this magnificent, silky menace, all raised eyebrows and barely suppressed smirks, and he makes the whole thing feel like it's in on its own joke without ever quite winking at the camera. He's the best reason to watch this, and probably the reason it still gets talked about at all.
If you've been making your way through the horror films of that era, you'll know the genre was doing interesting things in the fifties. I've had a lot of fun with Invaders from Mars, which has that same wonderfully earnest quality where you can feel everyone involved being absolutely convinced they're making something terrifying. House on Haunted Hill belongs in that same conversation, as a relic of a horror culture that operated on completely different assumptions about what an audience could take.
It's not scary by any modern standard. The plot has holes you could drive a hearse through, and a couple of the twists land with a thud rather than a gasp. But none of that really matters, because the film isn't asking you to engage with it seriously. It's asking you to sit in the dark, let Vincent Price wash over you, and enjoy the ride.
Three stars. Camp, creaky, and completely worth your time if you're in the mood for something that wears its age like a badge of honour.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1959 | Watched: 2025-04-16
Where to watch
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Related on Movies With Macca
More with Vincent Price: The Thief and the Cobbler (1993)
More from the 1950s: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Invaders from Mars (1953)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More mystery: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · One Way or Another (1975)
