House On Haunted Hill

A millionaire offers five strangers $10,000 each to spend the night in a house that has already killed seven people — and locks the doors. William Castle’s 1959 gimmick horror is the party that invented the haunted-house dare: Vincent Price as Frederick Loren, dripping irony and poison, his wife plotting in the shadows, a vat of acid in the cellar, and a skeleton that (in original engagements) flew over the audience on a wire. Castle, the showman of The Tingler and 13 Ghosts, treats fear as a carnival ride; Price, mid-career between costume villains and full Corman Poe, makes every line a toast. Cheap, witty, and endlessly reissued, it is the public-domain blueprint for every later night in a house that hates you.