William Castle’s daughter, Terry, would serve as co-producer of their first feature, a loose remake of her father’s House on Haunted Hill. In 1999, Dark Castle Entertainment was formed by Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis. Castle strung plastic skeletons from theater ceilings to swoop around during screenings. It’s worth a watch if only to see Price chew the admittedly cheap scenery ( ). Price uses some combination of traps and puppets to see his wife dispatched in a vat of acid. It’s all a ruse to bring an end to a fractious marriage.

For more on Castle see his memoir Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America or the 2007 documentary, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, directed by Jeffrey Schwartz.ġ959’s House on Haunted Hill stars Vincent Price as a wealthy kook offering $10,000 to any party guests who can survive an overnight haunted house party held in his wife’s honor.

Castle would go on to direct over fifty features (and produce several dozen more) and is cited as a huge source of inspiration for filmmakers from Hitchcock to Zemeckis. Most famously, he sent crews to install vibrating motors in theater seats for his 1959 film, The Tingler. Tickets to his first independently produced feature, Macabre (1958) came with $1000 life insurance policies in case audience members died of fright.

As a filmmaker he is known as the master of the gimmick. A few years later, he leased a theater from Orson Welles and painted swastikas all over it to create a buzz around a play he had written in a weekend. Some here will be intimately familiar with William Castle, but for those who aren’t – as a tween, he goaded Bela Lugosi into giving him a manager position with the Dracula stage play. This post will not attempt to expand on these elements but instead, aims to suggest that William Malone’s “remake” of a 1959 William Castle film occupies an important, or at least an interesting place in horror history.

I’ve spent considerable oxygen defending this film’s creature effects, its shlocky acting, and its oddly paced, tensionless plot.

House on haunted hill 1999 cast