Horror Madness, Round One: The Haunting Vs. House on Haunted Hill
See the introduction and full slate here.
This week, two mid-century murder houses battle for dominance, as William Castle’s 1959 classic, House on Haunted Hill:
Faces off against Robert Wise’s The Haunting of 1963:
I thought long and hard about whether to pit these two against each other so early. Not because it would be too hard (it isn’t, at all), but because it would be far too easy. Who knows how I’ll feel later, but The Haunting could win this whole thing. It could be the greatest horror film ever made, based on one of the greatest horror novels ever written. Martin Scorsese thinks so, and who am I to disagree?
House on Haunted Hill is simply not as great, but it’s a lot of fun. I do wish I could have given it a chance against something else, to give it a little more time in the bracket before elimination. I couldn’t see a way to it, though. These two had to go up against each other, for a few reasons.
For one thing, The Haunting is only called The Haunting because the title of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, sounds too damn much like House on Haunted Hill. They were both made in black and white when Hollywood had almost entirely abandoned the format for color. And they were both made by men who were, in different ways, Hollywood legends.
Robert Wise had the more obviously prestigious career, working as an editor on little flicks like Citizen Kane before getting his start directing under brilliant horror producer Val Lewton. He directed classic sci-fi, noir, and musicals: his two Oscars for directing were for West Side Story and The Sound of Music. He was a pro, is my meaning.
William Castle didn’t make movies like West Side Story or Citizen Kane. Castle put buzzers in movie theater seats, and set them to activate at his films’ scariest moments. He stopped a film right before the climax to break the fourth wall and poll the audience on the villain's fate. He claimed to film in processes called “Emergo” and “Illusion-O.” He had life insurance policies handed out to audience members before the start of one film, in case anyone died of fright. In some screenings of House on Haunted Hill, a fake skeleton was flown over the audience on a rope, inducing screams. The closest Castle ever got to a prestige picture was when he produced Rosemary’s Baby. He wasn’t Martin Scorsese’s favorite, but he was John Waters’ favorite. His success at making low-budget, black-and-white horror hits inspired Alfred Hitchcock to make Psycho.
It’s not just the titles and the prominence of the directors which link these two films together within the haunted house sub-genre. They’re both a particular kind of haunted house story, one that doesn’t try to explore our fear of finding ourselves unwanted or threatened at home, but instead explores our strange attraction to that very fear. This is the important, defining element: all of the characters in both of these films know they are entering a possibly haunted house. They enter their respective haunted houses with varying degrees of belief, but they all enter them willingly. This is important too: they end the film with their belief in the supernatural still unresolved. We never get definitive proof that ghosts are real; they could be, or they could be the faked efforts of a deranged millionaire, or the delusions of our unstable heroine.
Both of these films are interested in that ambiguity, and in the ambiguity of the characters’ motivations. But The Haunting interrogates and examines a weirdness that House on Haunted Hill takes for granted. Shirley Jackson, and Robert Wise (along with Nelson Gidding, the screenwriter) wanted to figure out what kind of sad, damaged, strange woman would feel at home in a house full of ghosts. Hill House is the first place Eleanor has been happy in her entire life; the first place she has felt valued and wanted. The other characters view her death as a tragedy, but Theo - the most intelligent, most perceptive one of the bunch - notes that she got what she wanted. To take a line that Eleanor repeats throughout the book: “journeys end in lovers meeting.” The love story of Eleanor and Hill house ends with them together, happily (and dead) ever after.
William Castle’s film isn’t particularly interested in character study or character development, because he already knew what kind of person would want to knowingly visit a haunted house: it’s exactly the kind of person who goes to a haunted house film. Castle was a meta-horror innovator; he loved audience participation. For him, the characters and the audience were the same, and in it for exactly the same reasons: for the pure visceral thrill of being scared. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need to tell the audience what kind of person would answer an invitation to a ghost party at a deranged millionaire’s mansion. If somebody had bought the movie ticket in the first place, that proved that they already knew.
The Haunting has to win it. It’s beautifully shot, and beautifully acted. House on Haunted Hill has nothing like the rich psychological depth of The Haunting’s source material, nor does it have a lead performance as arresting as Julie Harris’s. House on Haunted Hill doesn’t have one scene that’s as good as this one:
Of course, The Haunting doesn’t have Vincent Price or bouncing skeletons, and I wish I could find a clip for you because Price is a delight as he always was. The Haunting is art, it’s everything that’s best about what the horror genre can do, but House on Haunted Hill is so damn fun. I have to give it to the art this time, but a big part of me wants to give William Castle a win: whatever else you can say about him, he worked for it.
The winner, with only a little ambivalence, is The Haunting.