Horrorshow: Finale

What better way to end the Halloween season than with a horror movie double-feature?

Before this, I don't think I'd ever seen an actual Vincent Price film. Now my life will never be the same...

The House of Haunted Hill is a great suspense story - full of tense, genuinely frightening moments. It's a fairly dated film, of course, by today's standards. I found the lack of gore to be refreshing, especially after some of my bloodier forays into horror filmdom.

Now, the whole film, you KNOW some evil scheming is going on besides the supernatural, and that tends to blur the line between what is real and what isn't. Even at the end, I wasn't quite sure what was going on for CERTAIN - but SOMETHING was definitely up.

The atmosphere is tense, the chemistry between actors believable, and Vincent Price is a genuinely creepy presence at all times.

And speaking of "blurring the lines of reality"...

My dad touted The Haunting as one of his favorite horror movies - mainly because there is no way to determine if anything supernatural actually is going on. The tenants of Hill House experience many supernatural phenomena, but there's nothing that can't be SOMEHOW explained away by natural events.

If there's one storytelling device I would LOVE to get rid of, it's the internal monologue. Watching a person's face fill up a screen, hearing them talk in an echoing voice WITHOUT their mouth moving... nothing throws me out of a movie faster. Luckily, it's a trend that seems to have all but died off in most forms of storytelling (even comics are getting rid of thought balloons). Still, in older films, it's a bit jarring - and The Haunting RELIES on the internal monologue device.

Since The Haunting is all about the gradual disintegration of a human psyche, most of the film is spent building the atmosphere slowly and subtly. There aren't a lot of jump-out-of-your-seat scares, but the ones that ARE there will get you good.

And I think that's it for horror movies this year. I'm starting to jump at shadows - and, with as early as it gets dark nowadays, there are a LOT of shadows out there. I'll probably pick some more up next Halloween, but... geez.