House on Haunted Hill

I would say that the 1959 film, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is the best film on Halloween that exists. Halloween, at first, suggests horror, but behind that horror there is the knowledge that such things as witches and monsters do not exist. This is the intent of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. In the film, a wealthy mogul named Fredrick Loren (played by the legendary Vincent Price), invites a group of five people to a house he owns. The house is supposedly haunted, and is a notorious eyesore in an abandoned part of town. Loren tells the five that they will all have a little party, and if they can stay the night, he will pay them $10,000. This seems like easy money to the five, and they all show up for the fun. However, everything goes wrong, and in shocking scenes filled with empty space and gorgeous lighting, the ghosts come out. There is a lot of clever and smart filmmaking at work. Not only is the story quite clever, and the end brilliant, but the way that tension builds (and the reasoning for why tension building is important) is occasionally quite scary. What Price and director William Castle accomplish is a shared hysteria. The five visitors are all unreliable source of information, and the camera never follows any one of them too carefully. This makes for a treasure of a film, entertaining and well made.
House on Haunted Hill: ★★★1/2