Horror Virgin #3: The House on Haunted Hill (1959 & 1999)

Frederick: Why don't I give you the grand tour? Here's the legendary wine cellar. Mind you don't slip.

Elisabeth: Why on earth is there a vat of acid in a wine cellar?

Frederick: One of the owners found it useful in murdering his unfaithful wife.

Elisabeth: You madman. You're possessed with jealousy. As if you ever let me out of your sight long enough to ... holy ****! I just saw an old woman in that corner!

Frederick: Yes, the old caretaker's wife. She's blind, you know.

Elisabeth: So she's not a ghost? Well, that's just silly. As silly as a vat of acid in a cellar, knives tucked into couches, and phony severed heads. As soon as this haunted house actually shows signs of being haunted, it's a trick.

Frederick: Illusions, my love. Tricks are what whores do for money. You know all about that. Oh heavens, who turned out all the lights? It must be the ghosts!

Elisabeth: Or it's that animated skeleton. Really, Frederick! This would have scared me when I was four. I had a very real fear of walking skeletons when I was young. I think it originated with an episode of The Wizard.

Frederick: You are unimpressed, darling. I am ever so disappointed.

Elisabeth: Disappointed I survived the night, you mean! This whole plot of yours was designed to get rid of me. This isn't a haunted house movie, it's simply an Agatha Christie mystery dressed up with a few falling chandeliers. I suppose anything was going to be a disappointment after Halloween, but this? This is just silly. Why can't haunted house movies ever deliver on the background stories? I want to actually see some of that stuff they go on and on about, or at least meet the ghosts they produced.

Frederick: If ever a man had grounds for divorce ... but have it your way. Perhaps you'll find the remake more to your liking.


House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Steven Price: Sure is a funky old house, ain't it?

Elisabeth: This isn't a house, this is a mental asylum. No, wait. It's half and half. How can it be both? That's just symbolic of what a mess the film is going to be. From the first ten minutes, I don't think you can even call this a remake. It's just a few half-hearted homages to Vincent Price.

Steven Price: Now there's the sweet little horror virgin I married.

Elisabeth: I'll admit that mental asylums are the only places I find to be as scary as haunted houses. This is certainly off to a much more disturbing start, although I can't decide what's scarier: the gruesome experiments, the appalling performances of our guests, or the way the dial is immediately turned to eleven in an attempt to outdo the original. How very tedious.

Steven Price: Every time you use that word, you make me hot ... just rarely in the sexual sense. Now, we're stuck with together until morning, princess, so why not make the most of it?

Elisabeth: There are some genuinely good scares here, Steven, I'll give you that much. The opening scenes with the mad doctor are quite gruesome, and the setting (even if it isn't a haunted house) is spot on. The constant screaming and wailing of the sound effects are very creepy. The best scene by far is the sequence with Melissa filming what can't be seen with the naked eye through her camcorder. It's an effect they use again with your wall of television screens and the butchering doctor. Now that's scary. How cool would scenes like that be in a proper haunted house movie? Or used throughout a film? It'd be like Ghost Hunters, only more lethal.

Steven: Rather more like our marriage, precious.

Elisabeth: Have I missed my chance at the party favors, yet?

Steven: Oh, I found time for us to trade gunshots. Don't you think every horror movie needs a shoot-out scene? Or do you keep those for your cowboys?

Elisabeth: That shoot-out of yours is just more proof of how sloppy this movie is. You could build on that camcorder stuff, but you have always fallen short, darling. The film never does anything that creepy again. Just as something starts to get to me, something really dumb happens. The only thing sillier than a vat of acid? A tub of blood.

Steven: Can I trouble you to ask which version you liked more? Cut loose, show me the real you.

Elisabeth: I didn't like either one, but if forced to choose, I'd pick the original. I know they say it's a campy classic, but its restraint shows a bit of class,and it keeps up the atmosphere. It knows what it is. The remake veers all over the place, and anything good about it is undone by that CG ending. Between the two lies something almost as terrifying as you ...

Steven Price: So that's it? No grand proclamations, no Anglo-Saxon analysis, no likening to Greek poetry?

Elisabeth: Not this time. I'm afraid the remake is the perfect example of why I don't see most modern horror movies. I pick the wrong ones to watch, I suppose, and then I just paint them all with the stupidity brush. Now, I need to take a very scalding shower, and scrub all the places you, your vats of acid and blood, and your dancing skeletons left an imprint ... and if I have an "accident" before next week's installment, dear Steven, my readers will know where to look.