Sunday, October 31, 2010

Movies... For Free! House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Showcasing classic movies that have fallen out of copyright and are available freely from the public domain (with streaming video!)...

House on Haunted Hill
House on Haunted Hill, 1959.

Directed by William Castle.
Starring Vincent Price, Carolyn Craig, Richard Long, Elisha Cook Jr., Carol Ohmart, Alan Marshal and Julie Mitchum.

A low-budget b-movie horror from 1959, William Castle's House on Haunted Hill stars Vincent Price as eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren, who invites five random strangers to attend a party for his fourth wife Annabelle (Carolyn Craig). Loren then offers them a proposal: to spend a night in his haunted mansion - the location of a series of brutal murders - in return for $10,000 each, payable upon their survival. Warning the guests that their host is psychotic, Annabelle soon commits suicide and the strangers begin to experience a series of macabre events with no means of escape from the terror...

Director Castle employed a unique promotional gimmick known as 'Emergo' during the film's original theatrical run, which utilised a pulley system to frighten the audience by dragging a plastic skeleton above their heads. House on Haunted Hill proved to be a huge financial success and prompted Alfred Hitchcock to develop a low-budget horror of his own, resulting in the 1960 classic Psycho, while it was also the subject of a remake in 1999 starring Geoffrey Rush and Famke Janssen.


Embed courtesy of Internet Archive.

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