With all its terror and gore, you may have forgotten how oddly funny House on Haunted Hill can be. What nobody (except Chris Kattan) realizes is that there's no way to really protect oneself from what lives inside the walls of the house. Once the doors and windows of Hill House are sealed, things take an ominous turn when Evelyn casually invites the guests over to a casket filled with smaller caskets that each hold a pistol. The viewer is left to wonder how and why these characters were selected and whether this is merely one extravagant practical joke by Price.

Each guest is hard up for money, and Price has promised each guest one million dollars if they can survive the night at the house. Price quickly shreds his wife's guest list and creates his own, but then something strange happens: an unseen force rewrites the guest list, inviting a group of strangers to Evelyn's party. Richard Benjamin Vannacutt, who ultimately met his demise at the hands of his patients in 1931. We soon learn that the house had originally been a psychiatric hospital run by the wicked Dr. The basic premise of the film revolves around Evelyn Price (Famke Janssen) asking her husband Steven (Geoffrey Rush) to throw her a birthday party at the creepy but seemingly benign house. Vannacutt and other ghosts wandering the house, along with Geoffrey Rush's gruesome discovery in the main control room (i.e., a guy missing his face) are enough to give even the bravest viewer a scare. The electroshock scene with Famke Janssen also relies on mostly practical effects while managing to be a particularly disturbing moment in the film. Veteran makeup artist Dick Smith did much of the makeup design for the film, including a ghastly monster woman with only a gaping mouth for a face.

Lovecraft stories, as well as the famous Rorschach inkblot test - which makes sense, given that the house has been used as an insane asylum.Īside from the now simplistic CGI, the film actually has some excellent practical and makeup effects that are scarier than anything that could be digitally designed. The inspiration for 'The Darkness' trapped inside the house came from H.P. If you rewatch House on Haunted Hill today, one of the few things that gives away its age is the dated CGI effects.

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