House on Haunted Hill is a 1999 horror film, directed by William Malone and starring Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter and Jeffrey Combs. It also includes a cameo appearance by Peter Graves. Produced by Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver, it is a remake of the 1959 film of the same name directed by William Castle, borrowing elements from the 1973 classic Don’t Look in the Basement. House on Haunted Hill marks the producing debut of Dark Castle Entertainment, a production company that went on to produce Thir13en Ghosts and House of Wax, two films which were also remakes of William Castle’s films.
The film is often compared with The Haunting, another 1999 remake of a similar film from 1963, based on the novel The Haunting of Hill House. Also worth noting, in comparison to the original, while William Castle’s version leaves a degree of ambiguity as to the presence of ghosts in the building, the remake leaves no doubt whatsoever.
Plot
The film sets the action in an abandoned asylum, The Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane, where mass-murders were committed in the past. The head of the facility, Dr Richard B. Vannacutt (Jeffrey Combs), performed grotesque experiments and medical procedures on the patients, killing many of them in the process. The hospital was shut down when many of the so-called “patients” escaped, killing almost the entire staff and burning the hospital. Vannacutt had rigged the building with numerous iron gates activated by cranks and levers to serve as barriers to keep patients from leaving the building, should they escape. Some of these barriers are subject to huge clock-like timers that would not open for twelve hours. During the fire, he released these gates keeping the inmates, employees and the fire itself contained. After several unexplained deaths during reconstruction on the house, it was dubbed The House on Haunted Hill.
The story revolves around the disintegrating marriage of Evelyn (Famke Janssen), a spoiled trophy wife who epitomizes high-maintenance and Steven Price (Geoffrey Rush), an amusement park mogul with a wicked sense of humor, each of whom would cheerfully kill the other. Evelyn fancies spectacular parties, so Steven leases the house from the owner, Watson Pritchett (Chris Kattan), for his Halloween birthday bash. Steven was supposed to send out the invitations from the two-page list of names given him by Evelyn. However, invitations were sent to only five people – Jennifer Jenzen (aka Sara Wolfe) (Ali Larter), Eddie Baker (Taye Diggs), Melissa Margaret Marr (Bridgette Wilson), Dr. Donald Blackburn (Peter Gallagher), and finally Pritchet. When the guests arrive, neither Evelyn nor Steven (seemingly) know who they are. Despite this, Price continues the party’s theme, offering a million dollars to anyone who stays in the house and survives until morning, with any person not making it having his money added to the winners’ pot.
Shortly after, the security gates are tripped, locking everyone inside, forcing them to remain there until the gates reopen in the morning. Initially this is a gimmick orchestrated by Carl Schecter (Max Perlich), a company employee who develops a series of harmless traps meant to scare the guests. Things swiftly become much worse than a few harmless scares. What follows is the slow, and often bloody, demise of several of the guests and hosts in various ways, courtesy of the evil spirits of the house. It is discovered that the spirits in the house created the party list to include the descendants of the five members of Vannacutt’s staff that didn’t die at the hospital when it burned. After a deranged Steven attempts to kill his wife Evelyn for orchestrating his murder plot, the two accidentally unleash the darkness of the house when he throws her through an ancient and decayed door. The Darkness is a dark shape shifting creature comprised of all the spirits in the house, lead by Dr. Vannacutt. This force comes after and tries to kill all the surviving guests to trap them in a permanent purgatory within the house.
It starts by assimilating Evelyn into itself (killing her) while Price watches in horror. The Darkness reveals how the evil souls that comprise the Darkness wants to feed on all those “who are responsible.” Upstairs, Pritchet, Eddie, and Sara are trying to open one of the iron gates on the window when they hear Price’s screams at the door down the hall. Pritchet proceeds to go get it, while on the other side of the door, the Darkness catches up with Price. Price jumps out of the way at the same time as when Pritchet opens the door and the Darkness assimilate him and flows away. Price runs through the hall while Sara and Eddie follow him, trying to figure out how he is alive when Sara supposedly shot him (he wore a bullet-proof vest). Price tells them that what Pritchet had been saying all along was true: the house was alive and had killed everyone (except Dr. Blackburn, who was murdered by Evelyn and had his head cut off to frame Price). He figures that the only way to get out is to go to the attic and activate the pulleys that sealed off escape from the house. Price runs ahead of them to activate them while Sara and Eddie stay behind. The Darkness seeps through the house and tries to use it to kill them. As they are running up the stairs to the attic Sara trips, and the Darkness uses Melissa’s form to try to lure her to it. Price by then has activated a pulley that reveals an opening in the window of the attic. Eddie and Sara get there, while the Darkness seeps up the cracks of the wooden floor, and Sara lingers while Eddie goes to the opening. Eddie looks back from the window to find that the Darkness had arrived and is attempting to sever the rope that keeps the iron gate open. While Eddie rushes back to get Sara, the Darkness tries to assimilate her but instead assimilates Price, who had sacrificed his life to get Sara out of the way. Sara escapes just as the iron gate comes crashing down, trapping Eddie with the Darkness. The Darkness then confronts Eddie and brings up charges against his ancestor’s actions. Eddie then screams that he was actually adopted. At the sound of this, Pritchet’s ghost appears (separate from the Darkness) and frees Eddie by pulling the rope needed to open the iron gate, at which Sara pulls Eddie through as the Darkness is about to assimilate him. After he is pulled through, the gate shuts, Pritchet’s ghost disappears and the Darkness disappears into nothingness. As Sara and Eddie sit in exhaustion over the night’s events, they notice that an envelope has been pushed through the gate, containing five checks for $1 million each. After the credits, a film is shown with the patients operating on Evelyn and Price’s dead body.
