|
Out of the darkness come a few of William Castle's favorite things, shrieks, cackles, chain-rattling, Vincent Price's disembodied, soliloquizing head. The maison is played by Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House on the Hollywood Hills, the guests arrive on hearses for "food and drinks and ghosts." Price as the moneyed host has a theory to prove on greed and infidelity, each visitor is given a pistol out of a miniature coffin and promised ten thousand dollars if they're still alive by dawn. Jet pilot (Richard Long) and typist (Carolyn Craig) are the juveniles, doctor (Alan Marshal) and columnist (Julie Mitchum) provide the contrasting poles of pragmatism, as the owner Elisha Cook Jr. is a small tour de force of fear and trembling. "The only really haunted house in the world," an architectural marvel, in every room a memory of murder: crashing chandeliers, severed faces in suitcases, vats of acid in cellars, pools of dried blood that drip still, blank-eyed crones that jangle the camera and skate away. Overseeing the shenanigans are millionaire and scheming wife (Carol Ohmart), sharpshooters of contempt in need of a Strindberg play. "Don't stay up thinking of ways to get rid of me, it makes wrinkles." The Cat and the Canary, Wise's The Haunting around the corner, a certain kinship with Clouzot. No camp or malice, just the carny's pleasure in the well-timed shock of a spook ride and the awareness of human venality trumping the supernatural. "Don't you approve of our little party favors?" The self-reflexive climax dispenses with plastic skeleton, pulleys and strings—the essence of spectacles of fright, Castle's tools of the trade. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |