When people ask me for horror movie recommendations, it’s usually with the caveat that I have to come up with something they’re not familiar with or haven’t seen in a while. One of the titles that regularly comes up is a movie that was critically panned when it first premiered in theaters in the late 1990s.
Well, buckle up because I’m going to tell you why this underrated gem is well worth your time.
During a time when the genre pivoted toward post-Scream teen slasher tales like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend, a film was released that disrupted the status quo and paid homage to the moody, pulpy thrillers of the past — four decades in the past, if we’re keeping track.
House on Haunted Hill is the film I’m talking about. I think it’s required Halloween viewing and, lucky for you, the movie is streaming free on Tubi right now.
A loose remake of a horror classic, it’s a schlocky outlier that leans heavily into the style of the late ’90s, while retaining the 1950s vibe of its predecessor. It features a pretty solid cast, a wicked sense of humor and offers a delightful respite for audiences who were looking for something other than a group of college kids running from a masked killer.
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House on Haunted Hill is the 1999 remake of William Castle’s 1959 B-movie classic, which starred Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart. The gist in both is pretty much the same, centering on a wealthy (and peculiar) married couple who invite five guests to play a daring game: Survive the night, and each person takes home a cash prize. As you may suspect, things don’t end up that cut and dry.
Geoffrey Rush and Famke Janssen star as Steven Price, a theme park mogul, and his wife, Evelyn Stockard-Price. The original movie found the couple inviting folks to their would-be haunted mansion to take on the dare; this movie ups the ante and puts them all in an abandoned asylum with a sinister past.
Genre fave Jeffrey Combs appears sporadically throughout the movie as the evil Dr. Vannacutt, the leader of the once thriving Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane. According to legend, the patients rioted against the staff in the 1930s, leaving a tainted (potentially haunted) energy permeating within the building’s walls.
Jeffrey Combs stars in House on Haunted Hill.
From the outset, you can sense House on Haunted Hill’s sly intentions through its extravagant, Gothic set design and stylized directorial style. Director William Malone leaned into this aesthetic, which cultivated a sly sense of humor that fueled the movie and infused it with elements of psychological terror and surprising bits of gore.
It was jarring when you consider the fact that we were still a couple of years away from the grizzly torture trend that overtook the genre in the early ’00s. However, as disruptive as these brutal sequences felt, Malone’s direction keeps them believable within the movie’s peculiar narrative reality.
Famke Janssen and Geoffrey Rush star in House on Haunted Hill.
The dynamic between Rush and Janssen is utterly delicious and their dysfunction forms the emotional foundation of this story. Rush’s take on Steven Price feels like a tribute to the likes of Vincent Price and John Waters, and he brings a Snidely Whiplash, scenery-eating panache to the role. His joyful energy is infectious, and it’s hard not to root for him. But, trust me, you shouldn’t root for him.
Janssen is calculated and formidable as Evelyn, and provides a worthy adversary to her trickster husband. As the group explores deeper into the bowels of the building, you can find her both relishing in Steven’s pranks and silently planning his demise. It’s a love-hate thing reminiscent of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in 1989’s dark comedy, War of the Roses.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the slate of talent carrying the movie along with the duo above. You have a roster of up-and-coming talent from the era, including Taye Diggs, Ali Larter and SNL alum Chris Kattan, along with Peter Gallagher, a recognizable name that already brought a certain level of clout to the project.
Chris Kattan stars in House on Haunted Hill.
Larter’s Sara (the final girl of the movie) and Diggs’s ex-baseball player Eddie carry much of these sequences, and their star quality definitely shines through. But a highlight for me is Kattan, who ditches the comedic stylings of his known sketch work to bring a bit of cynical logic to the mix as Pritchett, the building’s caretaker.
If you go looking for critic reviews of 1999’s House on Haunted Hill, you’ll find a lot of negative reactions to the movie. Perhaps it’s because it embraces the classic ghost story narrative of the original, rather than conforming to the money-making mold of whatever horror trend was bankable at that time.
House on Haunted Hill is not a serious movie, and it should not be taken seriously. It’s a stylish, heightened, sometimes-silly horror tale about greed, gluttony and the ghosts of the past meeting the uncertainty of the future. It’s a link between decades and can be viewed as a sign of things to come in the genre. But through all that mumbo jumbo I just spouted, it’s just one heck of a fun movie. Like I said earlier: Required Halloween viewing.
