PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Friday: House On Haunted Hill (1959) & We Are Still Here (2015)
My friends, we’re kicking off the weekend with a banger. The ghosts are coming out in this flawless then-and-now double feature. First, we’re paying a visit to William Castle’s austere gimmicky spookshow, House on Haunted Hill, then we’re driving upstate into the cold, sparse, ass-kicker We Are Still Here. House on Haunted Hill stars Vincent Price (I know, this is his third appearance in this week-long watch-a-thon, but, credit where credit is due, he’s the king of horror cinema as far as I’m concerned) as an eccentric millionaire who invites a host of people to a supposedly haunted house to spend the night for money. What follows is vintage William Castle: endless spooks, misdirects, red herrings, and dancing skeletons. It’s goofy and pure cinematic magic.
We Are Still Here, on the other hand, uses sparse sound design, static cinematography, and naturalistic acting to make a contained, tense ghost story – that is, until something happens that breaks the whole movie wide open into one of the most exciting horror movie experiences I’ve had in years. This is the spectrum on how we entertain people. This is the campfire, and two kids are telling scary stories. One of them is a theater kid; he’s a natural entertainer who does voices and act-outs and puts on a show that delights but doesn’t terrify. The other kid is quiet, dry, and measured, but there’s something about his story that raises the hair on the back of your neck.
