House on Haunted Hill (1999)

reviewed by
Stephen Graham Jones


The House on Haunted Hill: it's alive

The premise of The House on Haunted Hill is as schlocky as they come: whoever lives through the night gets a million dollars. Forget about all the foreshadowing and character motivations and exposition &etc that a typical horror movie usually has to wade through in order to get to the haunted house. The House on Haunted Hill neatly circumvents all that, via 'random' invitations. Meaning of course there's that many more minutes it can devote to horror. Which is to say it can pack more scares into two hours than your typical horror movie.

It all starts in a mental hospital that would do Terry Gilliam proud: all electroshock and twisting pipes--the interior of the house on haunted hill, where the inmates are in the process of doing to the doctors what the doctors have been doing to them all along. Disturbing Behavior type stuff, times about twenty-six. And the mad doctor here is none other than evil Dr. Vannacutt, a cenobite candidate if there ever was one. Fifty years later, all that remains is the building, which entertainment park mogul Steven Price (Casanova Frankenstein himself, Geoffrey Rush) chooses as the extravagant site of his wife Evelyn's (Famke Janssen, recovered from The Faculty perhaps, going for another Lord of Illusions role) birthday party. Add to this five anonymous guests and the fact that Steven and Evelyn are each using the 'party' as a means of murdering the other, and you've got The House on Haunted Hill.

But it's more than that, too. If The Blair Witch Project disturbed us with the unseen, then The House on Haunted Hill disturbs us with what we have to see. From the opening credits until the last ten minutes (when it loses it, trying to portray evil as black smoke) it's something of a mix between the imagery of a Marilyn Manson video and the stop-motion feel of a Jan Svankmajer short, with some Jakob's Ladder thrown in for good measure. And forget about The Haunting. This is a whole nother neighborhood, a significantly darker neighborhood. Too, with Zemeckis and Silver at the controls, you know the whole thing's going to be a music-fed adrenaline rush, complete with the necessary level of comedy, which Chris Kattan's Pritchett delivers time and again.

In keeping with the spirit of things, the guests/contestants--Eddie (Taye Diggs), Sarah Wolfe (Ali Larter), Melissa Marr (Bridgette Wilson) and Dr. Blackburn (Peter Gallagher)-all do what they're supposed to do, which more or less just includes fighting among themselves, separating, and investigating those things which should never ever be investigated. And of course they tend to die gruesome little deaths, which just serves to remind us that this isn't Hitchcock: the horror is no longer in the motion being completed off-screen, in our minds. Now it's right there, for better or worse. A lot of the images we take with us too, whether we want to or not. Specifically, how director William Malone rearranges the human face from time to time--lengthening the jaw, erasing the eyes, enlarging the mouth, all of which disturbs us at a primal level. We're comfortable with an augmented face, so long as it has recognizable, bilateral features. Take that away though, and things aren't so comfortable anymore.

The House on Haunted Hill does make you want to look away at times, yes, but it's that kind of wanting-to-look-away you pay for, too, you peek through your fingers for. And, as narrative counterballast, it does have it's tongue-in-cheek moments. Take how Pritchett's Brad-and-Janet mobile has characteristically broken down, as if the flaw in that particular model is that it tends to putter out in the presence of lonely, deserted houses. And, as with most horror, The House on Haunted Hill has its weak moments as well, when a character's comeback to whatever situation falls flat, but so be it. The next scene is guaranteed to either make you forget it or die trying, which is what a good Halloween release is all about.

(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com


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