House on Haunted Hill
Short description
An eccentric millionaire named Stephen Price, who has made his fortune in amusement parks and horror attractions, invites a group of strangers to spend a night in a former mental institution perched on a hill. The building carries a grim history: decades earlier, a doctor subjected his patients to cruel experiments, and the events that followed left no one inside alive. Price and his wife Evelyn, whose marriage is deeply unhappy, plan the evening as a party for her birthday, complete with staged scares and tricks. When the guests arrive, however, they are not the people who were expected, and neither the hosts nor the visitors understand how they came to be there. Each guest is offered a million dollars to remain until morning, but the house proves to have a will of its own.
William Malone directed the film, which sits between his 1985 debut Creature and FearDotCom in 2002. Dick Beebe wrote the screenplay, and Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver and Gilbert Adler produced it for Dark Castle Entertainment. Geoffrey Rush plays Stephen Price, with Famke Janssen as Evelyn, and Ali Larter, Taye Diggs, Chris Kattan and Peter Gallagher among the guests.
Released in October 1999, the film cost about 37 million dollars and returned roughly 43 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 5.6 out of 10 from 63,000 votes, and on TMDB it also sits at 5.6 from around 981 votes, while the film critics' rating stands lower at 4.8 from 61 reviews.
What's left behind the scenes
- In the initial guest list compiled by Jeffrey Rush's character, you can find the names of those who worked on the film: director William Malone and one of the film's producers, Gilbert Adler.
- Famke Janssen performed the scene in which the glass ceiling shatters herself. For this, it was crucial that the actress remain in one place and maintain complete stillness, which she did, but she still suffered injuries from the falling shards.
- The idea to set the film's action in a former asylum came to William Malone when he was filming one of the episodes of the "Tales from the Crypt" project (1989-1996) in a similar institution and noticed how frightened the crew members were.
- The Darkness is depicted as a collection of ghosts. Its appearance was inspired by illustrations for the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) and inkblots used in the Rorschach test (a psychological test in which the perception of inkblots by the subject is recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both).
- When creating the malevolent entity that attacks the survivors at the end of the film, the animators used images of nude women. They took footage of a dancing nude woman, created a mirrored reflection of the image, and then multiplied it many times in different sizes, creating the image the audience sees.
- The filmmakers did not intend for Jeffrey Rush to resemble Vincent Price (1911-1993), who played in William Castle’s (1914-1977) original film “House of Haunted Shadows” (1959). The script for the original film described Price’s character as an unremarkable businessman. Rush disliked this idea and suggested making the character resemble director John Waters. They decided to try this, but once Rush was in makeup and costume, it turned out he looked very much like Price, and the film’s director, William Malone, decided to leave it as it was.
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