“You can hear them at night, they whisper to each other, and then cry.”

Justin’s rating: Would you watch this haunted movie for… TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS?

Justin’s review: I will freely admit that I have a prejudice against older movies. I know, that kicks me right out of the Proper Movie Critics Club, but I’m willing to say it like it is. Older movies aren’t usually that fun to watch from a modern perspective. They’re slow, ponderous, and stocked with acting styles that seem very unnatural. Really, I need a very good reason to queue up something that was made before 1980.

But Vincent Price in a haunted house? Yeah… yeah, that’ll do it. I want to see what filmmakers’ idea of a scary movie was like in 1959.

House on Haunted Hill is actually styled more as a mystery with scary movie overtones, but it works surprisingly well from both angles. Millionaire Frederick (Price) invites a handful of desperate people to spend the night locked up in a reportedly haunted house for $10,000 apiece. This is a sum that is repeated early and often, no doubt greatly impressing audiences back then. Heck, I’d sleep in a weird house for ten grand. My home is plenty weird enough, and I don’t get anything for a night’s slumber.

As much as Frederick claims that this is a party for his fourth wife Annabelle, it’s clear that there’s something greater going on here. Why were all of these specific people invited? Did Annabelle actually attempt to poison Frederick, as he claims? Are there really ghosts of the many people who were murdered in this residence still floating around the halls? And why is there a VAT OF ACID in the basement?

Forget the stodgy men and the vapid women; the real star of House on Haunted Hill is the house itself. The weird exterior (an actual Frank Lloyd Wright creation) is only the start of a tour through this Haunted Mansion-like dwelling. I was quite impressed with the Victorian set dressing that reeked of age and mild decay. It’s the kind of place that, just by looking at it, you would totally believe that a ghost or two would set up shop here.

House on Haunted Hill was originally more of a novelty than anything else. The filmmakers forced audiences to sit through an initial minute of what amounts to a Halloween sound effects reel and equipped some theaters with skeletons that would zip over their heads. But while a couple of the visuals and jump scares are still eerie, I found the general atmosphere of the movie to be far more effective as a slow burn. Every time the house’s owner, Watson, went on a drunken ramble about the murders and ghosts, he chipped away at my cynicism until I was left ready to believe him.

As a horror oldie, this movie still holds up despite its languid pacing and occasionally ridiculous moments of acting (Nora, our Final Girl here, spends most of her time standing stock still and staring with wide eyes or screaming while shaking her head “no”). Allegedly, it’s the movie that helped to get Hitchcock to make Psycho, and we all know how that triggered a whole line of slasher dominos.