Welcome to autopsy of a horror movie where I like to sit down with a glass of bourbon and take a closer look at horror films. My name is Bruckner's and today I'll be looking into the 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill and what I believe to be the best scare the movie. Pour yourself something smooth. Get comfortable as I get into my crazy theories interpretations. This is autopsy of a horror movie.

And thank you so much for coming by and checking out this episode of Autopsy of a Horror Movie, as I said at the top. My name is Breker. And today I'll be going over house on Haunted Hill from 1999, which was directed by William Malone. This movie stars Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher, Chris Kattan, Ali Larter Bridget Wilson and Geoffrey Combs. Now, this movie, as some of you probably know, is a remake of a classic horror movie by the same title House on Haunted Hill from 1959, directed by William Castle, starring Vincent Price.

In case you're wondering, I will not be discussing the original movie today because frankly, I haven't seen it and I do plan on covering it at some point in the future and also perhaps doing a comparison episode between the remake and the original. So I abstained from viewing the 1959 movie in order to avoid any sort of repeating points or it allowed me to bleed into my conversation here today. But if you haven't seen this movie before or you've seen it before but it's been a while, you just need to, you know, shake off the cobwebs, need a little refresher.

I'm about to go over a spoiler free, but kind of detailed plot summary. After I get down the summary, the rest of the episode will have spoilers. So you have been warned.

House on Haunted Hill was once an asylum for the criminally insane in the 1920s and 30s to doctor who ran the joint doctor Bandicoot was an evil man and he would perform cruel and deadly experimental procedures on the patients of the asylum. In 1930, when the asylum burned down with Dr. Barnicoat, his staff, a sadist and his patients trapped inside the house remains still empty and rumored to be haunted to this very day. Fast forward to present day 1999, where an amusement park tycoon, Steven Price, is throwing a birthday party for his wife, Evelyn, at, you guessed it, house on Haunted Hill.

And yes, they actually call it House on Haunted Hill in the movie. Steven and Evelyn have this weird toxic hate marriage thing going on. And so Stephen goes against Evelyn's wishes and he throws out her guests, invite lists and invites people of his own choosing. However, when the guests do arrive to the house, turns out those weren't the people he invited either. Nevertheless, Stephen Price does not let this spoil his evening, it being the thrill seeker and clever engineer that he is.

He has booby trapped at the house with kind of jump scares and things like that. I don't think anything that would legitimately kill you and tells the guests that if they can't survive the night or, you know, lasta scares, that they will each win a million dollars. But they're free to leave whenever if they get too scared. And if they do leave, their million dollars will be divvied up among the rest of the people that are still there.

However, things don't go according to plan. And outside of Mr. Price's control, all of them become trapped inside the house and they must find a way out before they are all killed and added to the body count this hellish establishment as the party goes later into the night, guests go missing, are killed off. And there are some crazy, unexpected twists and turns in this movie. Who, if any, will be left by mourning to walk away with Mr.

Price's million dollar checks in their pockets. So besides the fact that I just legitimately enjoy this movie and I think it's a lot of fun and kind of campy at times, I picked this as episode one of this show because it was actually the first horror movie I watched by myself and I was like 12 or 13 years old.

So I figured, why not start off the podcast with where I started my own personal journey in horror movies?

So I hope that you can appreciate that this movie absolutely slides into the haunted house ghost story, paranormal subgenre of the umbrella of horror, which I really like. I think that's a very fine subgenre to be in with the haunted houses and everything. And it just forces the creators to make the house super scary. And like, they have to be kind of creative about it because there are so many different haunted houses you get to make it your own. And they absolutely did that here.

The director, William Malone, actually wanted this to be a haunted house paranormal story because he felt like at the time there weren't too many ghost stories out. So he'd kind of want to go against the grain and do that if you have access to his commentary or any of his interviews. Thankfully, I have the Blu ray to this movie, so I was able to watch that. I highly recommend or suggest just listening to him talk about this movie because he seems like such a warm person and listening to him talk about the filmmaking process for House on Haunted Hill, you could just tell that he really enjoyed this and he put a lot of care into it.

And it kind of adds to my own personal enjoyment that I get out of this. I always like saying that people enjoyed making something. So the plot of this movie is simple enough. There are some twists. You know, it's basically how I just said a group of strangers are invited to a birthday party at a haunted asylum. Doesn't it sound kind of stupid, but awesome at the same time? That sounds so intriguing to me. It almost kind of reads like an Agatha Christie novel, you know, just a guest of strangers being invited to a party or whatever.

But the movie isn't as elegant, I guess I'll say, as an Agatha Christie novel, but it's still a lot of fun. And Geoffrey Rush and Farm Kid Jensen, as Stephen Price and Evelyn Price were just great. And they're probably the best actors in this. And I think Geoffrey Rush is just coming off an Oscar win as well. So I was actually kind of funny that he was in this, but you can just tell that they're having so much fun.

They are just chewing on the scenery in this movie. And something that really sticks out to me is their dynamic, their relationship. While they are husband and wife, they hate each other so much. And you could just really feel just the venom that's coursing through the veins of this corrupted marriage. And it's it's uncomfortable, really, because they are like they're they're abusive to each other. And it's just so hard for you to see a marriage filled with hate.

But it really sticks out in a good way, I think, in and that it makes this movie less forgettable. That's something that you definitely think about when you think about this movie. You think about that weird, hateful dynamic between Stephen and Evelyn in this movie.

The rest of the characters are pretty good. I mean, I don't want to get it. I don't want to spend the whole time going like character by character. What I like to watch, not Taye Diggs and Ali Larter We're good in this Taye Diggs. I thought I did a better job. I really liked him in this. But I do want to point out the character of Pritchett played by Chris Kattan. He was I it was a funny I mean, he had some good jokes in this.

But what I really liked about him and where I thought he was useful in this movie is that he convinced me that I should be scared of the house because when the guests arrive, he is so nervous, he's waiting at the bottom of the driveway and he just does not want to be there. He refuses to go a couple of feet beyond the threshold of the front door and his anxiousness and just fear and dread of this house really just bled into me like I was feeling that the first time I watched this AMSO like this dude knows what this house is and he doesn't even want to step more than two feet beyond the front door.

I, I don't want these characters to be here like they need to get out.

So as much as like Bridget was annoying at times of this movie, I will say his use was effective in that. It made me scared. It scared the house the first time I watched this. Something that I did want to point out is that this movie has two montages and it's kind of odd for a horror film, especially one where people are trapped in a house to have two montages, let alone one. I will say, though, that one of them is good.

It's the the first one where the guests are arriving in their cars and they're driving up to the house. This was an effective montage. I like this a lot. And what a big plus to this is that they used Marilyn Manson's cover of Sweet Dreams during this montage and it kind as this sense of edginess and creepy and. The movie, because, you know, Sweet Dreams, it's a song we've all heard from, you know, from the 80s.

And to hear Marilyn Manson do it is kind of it's backwards, but I love it. And they just let that song rip. They just let it play for it feels like two minutes. I don't know if it actually is two minutes, but it feels like a while and they just let it play. And I also appreciate that this montage definitely helped cut down on the run time because we didn't have to go through each individual character getting their invitation going.

Who is this price character? Why they wanted me to you a million dollars? Well, I got to figure out why I'm going to wear. And so I'm glad that we kind of cut through that. And we got this nice song. It was really great. Nice job, Malone. However, the second montage comes out of fucking nowhere and has no business being in this movie. And it really makes me mad because it comes right after probably one of the most memorable scares of the movie.

So Stephen Price has just found his handy man, his security guard, to be murdered in this little security room that they have. And this was a sick kill, even though it happened off screen. The makeup department did a great job with this because we see that his face and skull has just been hollowed out and it was just really great effects. So he finds this body and he, you know, is a big shock and scare. And the scares continue because he looks up to the security monitors and he sees on one of the monitors, Dr.

Van Ticket is walking around with a bone saw and he stops and he stares directly at the camera to look at Stephen Price. And they kind of lock eyes during this. And then a kid, he does this really creepy, slow, twitchy walk thing with the bonsall, and it just really sticks with you. And the thing about this is that the way that the director pans the camera over the rest of the security monitors is that we land on Evelynn by herself in her bedroom.

And so it's very easy to connect the dots that Venkat is exiting the room that he's in to go after Evelyn in, you know, murder her. And then this stupid montage hits. And it's so just bad. It is like, I don't know, it was supposed to be like a comedic relief, but it really wasn't funny.

The music sucked. It just really throws you out of it. And the thing that I hated the most was that price is like just so so he. So we know that vindicates going after Evelyn, who's by herself in her bed. So just and but Steven Price doesn't just run straight to that bedroom. He's like we see him running throughout the rest of the house, kind of Scooby Doo style going in and out of rooms looking for kids. It was really weird.

I guess we're left to assume that he went to her bedroom as she was missing. So that's why he's going through the rest of the house. I don't know. Maybe I missed that part. I don't know. But whatever this montage sucks anyways.

What I find incredibly interesting about horror films is that they are able to tap into like what scares you personally and we all react differently to different movies and the same goes for horror. We all react to different fears or different scares differently. And if you think about it, this movie has a handful of different antagonists that are each kind of tapping into something different. So you might be more fearful of one of the more than the other, depending on your you know what?

You personally are scared of something that I will be talking about in future episodes in this episode, including are the types of fears that the movies really tap into. I'll be talking about these five basic fears, according to psychologist Dr. Carl Alberich, that he states that there are five basic fears that all humans share, which are extinction or fear of death, mutilation, body invasion, loss of autonomy, separation, abandonment or rejection. And then lastly, humiliation, shame or worthlessness, i.e. death of ego.

And I say that a large majority of horror films hit definitely hit on the fear of death or extinction. Everybody is, you know, fearful that the characters in the movie will be killed, especially watching a slasher. But as I said, that there are this, if you think about this movie, has a couple of different villains or antagonist in it, and they're kind of are all tapping into something different. So let's start with Dr. Vanegas. He is obviously tapping to the fear of extinction because he is killing lots of people in this movie, lots of patients.

But he also presses on the mutilation button. I mean, we see him do the surgeries. We see all these weird morbid model displays in the hallway that Melissa Moore passes by. And in fact, Melissa Moore herself becomes one of his mutilated victims and that when she disappears in the movie, we don't know what happened to her, but only when she reappears at the end, we see that her body has literally been chopped into pieces and is left on display, which I guess maybe being left on display is also a sense of shame and humiliation as well.

Kind of displaying this. You don't want to be that open or that vulnerable.

So kind of hitting that as well. Now, I think one of the biggest fears that this movie taps into, or at least the things that scared me the most and the greatest elements of this movie, and I'm going to go ahead and call it an antagonist on its own. Is the house itself as most haunted house movies should be? The House needs to be one of the scariest parts of the movie in this house or the asylum, however you want to call it it.

It's terrifying. It's dreadful, is devoid of all hope. And I am anxious every time we go down to the basement of this house. But I think that the fear that this plays off of is the fear of separation because people go missing down here, they get confused where they are and they get separated from the rest of the group. And you definitely feel completely cut off when you're down here because it's hard to get a layout. Like we see the characters walk through this for a while, especially Sarah and Eddie, but I still don't have a sense of how to navigate through the hallways down there.

It's so confusing. It's really a true labyrinth. And as I said, I feel like that each movie taps into some sort of personal fear that you have as a kid when I watch this. My biggest fear was being lost and not be able to find my way back home. And this fear of separation, getting lost down there really hit home for me on that. You never know. Was hiding or lurking behind a corner or in one of those side rooms is just so scary.

I love it. This house is just terrifying. And I need to get some more praise to William Malone for this, the director, because he said that the key to this movie for him, it needed to have atmosphere. He thought that was so important and key and he felt that most movies at the time were lacking that are kind of glazing over atmosphere. And so he kind of gave the house this art deco style that I really appreciated. And Malone went on to share it.

Kind of a funny story about his 18 year old daughter, who asked if she could spend the night or stay the night on the basement stage, the asylum stage of the of the movie. And he was like, I don't know if you want to do that, because we have to for security reasons, we have to lock the stage at night. So you'll be stuck in here in this hellish basement all night by yourself. She goes, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could do that.

So he said he locked the doors counting the ten. And before I even got the ten, she was banging on the banging on the door to be let out, which I kind of find really funny.

And also kind of like that. He brought his kids on set to look at it.

I think that's great. Another antagonist of this movie is absolutely. He also throwing Dr Blackburn in there with her. The twist of this movie is that she is trying to sort of trick one of the guests to murder her husband, Stephen Price, for her. And so that really definitely taps into, of course, that fear of extinction. Besides this murderous plot she has she does stabbed to death her accomplice, Dr. Blackburn, in which I actually really appreciate it because the dude was scum put in.

And this twisted marriage between Evelyn and Stephen, I think also represents a totally different type of fear. And that is kind of a lack of trust. And I'm not really sure where Dr. Abridges list that I mentioned that will tap into. If you have an idea, please feel free to email me. The email is in the show, notes what your thoughts are or tweet at me again, Twitters in the show notes. But I, I feel like that this kind of this lack of trust between those two is something scary because it's scary not knowing if you could trust someone.

It's even scarier knowing that you can't trust someone. And I really think that this plays into what I think that the message or main takeaway of this movie, this movie is making you question who can you trust? And it's showing that through a relationship built on trust is how you can become successful here. Here's my argument for this. There are three different types of relationships presented in this movie, including the relationship between a husband and wife, doctor and patient in the relationship among strangers.

Typically out of these, you're supposed to have a sense of trust and comfort between your spouse and your doctor. But this movie takes those relationships and completely flips them. And it makes you, the audience sort of fear them and makes you it just makes you feel so unsettled. So you're supposed to be able to trust your spouse or significant other. But Stephen and Evelyn are stuck in this hate marriage thing and they verbally and physically abuse each other and they drive each other to, you know, wanting to literally kill each other in this movie.

This movie also violates the trust between a doctor and their patient. You're supposed to be able to trust that your doctor has their best interests for you. But both Doctor Bandicoot and Doctor Blackburn are bad, bad men. It obviously killed and mutilated his patients in Blackburn is possibly a necrophiliac and he sexually harasses Evelin while she's dead. It was it was bizarre. And that's why they discovered I was so happy that Evelyn stabbed him to death. And plus, he's also totally OK with Evelyn trying to get Stephen killed.

So this movie is also kind of like, hey, don't trust doctors. And in general, it's kind of weird. However, looking at the third relationship presented in this movie is the relationship among strangers, which is, you know, the one you're more typically kind of supposed to be more skeptical of and suspicious of. You know, can you trust people you don't know? And they show the bond formed between Eddie and Sarah in this. They started out as complete strangers, but yet they worked together to find a way out of the house and are very supportive of each other in their efforts.

Sarah opens up to Edie and admits that she was lying about her identity. It kind of goes over her motivations for that in her aspirations. So she, you know, gets vulnerable and admits to her own wrongdoing in her lying. And that's kind of a big step, especially to do especially something to admit to a stranger and any kind of trust is her a little bit more because of this. And we see by them working together that they are able to get out of the house and survive the night.

While the movie doesn't exactly explore their dynamic in depth, it is a clear contrast to the relationship between Steve and Evelyn and how theirs is so toxic, filled with hate and distrust and well, Eddie and Sarah, while strangers don't have any of that and they are proven successful at the end of the movie. I also want to give kudos to the filmmakers for having a person of color survive a horror movie and for being a pretty cool character. Taye Diggs or Taye Diggs did a great job as Eddie.

I loved him. It was a lot of fun to watch this.

It is time for me to get into what I think is the best scare and frankly, the best scene of this movie, I will be examining to death a scene of Melissa Moore played by Bridget Wilson and providing some wacky interpretations. And I hope you at least find it interesting. It is a sequence in this movie that stands out, scare the shit out of me the first time I watched it and is probably one of the first things most people think of when they think of this movie.

I have provided a YouTube link in the show notes. If you need a refresher or just want to watch the scene again and if you need further convincing that this scene has really stuck out to people, just read the comments of that video. It's great. So what do we know about Melissa Moore? Well, we know that she is a former TV personality that's looking to get back into the spotlight. So she walks down to the asylum part of this house with her video camera, hoping to capture something interesting that will go viral and kind of give her some fame.

I guess she shows a lack of respect for the corpses that are morbidly displayed in the hallway. She captures them on her camera and she is giddy about it. She is laughing and smiling in the faces of these victims that were tormented by Dr. Bandicoot. She, ironically, does find a spotlight in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. And light is normally a symbol of hope or salvation or even relief. And we see Melissa goes in stands in the center of the spotlight to me, conveying how she is hopeful that her going down here and exploring the assailant will lead her back to fame.

However, as she stands in the spotlight, we get this POV shot of a ghost rushing towards her. And when she steps out, we see that this is a false spotlight. There are these horizontal, dark shadows going across the spotlight. It is not holds, not complete. This represents false hope of false light. She's not going to be finding what she's hoping for down here because the asylum represents hell. I think it is devoid of all hope, of all light in her arrogance will be her demise.

Down here, she travels further into the labyrinth of the house, traveling deeper into hell. And we are getting this fear separation really tapping in in the fear of the unknown. She is so far away from the rest of the group. We don't even know where she is at this point. We kind of cut to her in a different hallway. So we, the audience don't even have a layout. We don't know what to tell her, which way.

The run also find it interesting that in a way, she's kind of using her camera as a compass while walking through the halls. She passes by empty rooms, cobwebs, and they get wheelchairs, which is very ominous and dark. And then she comes across this vacant operating room while looking at it with her own eyes. The room is unoccupied, but viewing through her camera shows something way more sinister. There is a poor patient, really a victim of Dr.

Bandicoot is being operated on and filmed by a nurse. I like to think that this patient is one of the people that she laughed at on the way down one of those corpses, but is unlikely because this looks like the scene from the opening of the movie. I also think that it's an interesting parallel between the nurse filming the operation and Melissa filming them. It's kind of drawing this comparison of Melissa's morbid curiosity and amusement for this sinister act and her lack of respect for this place.

And it's kind of comparing it to Dr. Vannak, its staff of sadism, his nurses, and how they all share this sense of morbid curiosity and sick amusement by these gross surgeries that he was doing. And it's kind of it's kind of showing how she also doesn't care. She's kind of doing something that they were doing as well. Maybe she belongs down here. The creepiest part of the sequence is when the doctor and nurses stop what they're doing, they look up towards Melissa and acknowledge that they know that she's there.

It is so dreadful and creepy. I fucking love it. And my heart was pounding the first time I saw it. It's so great. And we see behind her is down the hallway, off to the side, not in the center of the hallway, but off to the side, which I think is creepier is this zombie like creature is just standing there watching her. As I said, I like that it's kind of just off to the side because it's almost like it's a lurking it's been following her, but it acknowledges that it's been made.

It knows and Melissa knows that it's there, but it doesn't care to move. It doesn't care to get out of the way or anything. It has this kind of like sinister confidence as like. Yep, I don't care that you failed me. And now it makes its approach and it rushes towards Melissa. And we see that this creature doesn't have eyes. I'm kind of using this plane back to my theory about how light represents hope and that this place is hell.

So there is no light here is only false light, false hope. And why would he even need eyes? Kind of like making a parallel to how cave salamanders and other cave fish don't develop eyes because there's no natural light in caves. Why do they need them? There's no light. There's no hope in this hell. Why does he even need eyes? I love that little detail, definitely my own interpretation not I doubt that was something else on purpose, but I just love it.

So we see that he rushes her. We get this weird montage, all sorts of creepy things that we see later. Again, in the movie, her screams echo up to the top where everybody else hears her and she goes missing. We don't know what happens to her until almost the very end of the movie. And it's it's just so good. It's so effective. It stands out so much to me.

So that was my interpretation is that this place represents a hill and the light is false, like false hope because it is hell. And that's why the zombie like creature doesn't have eyes, because why would I need eyes if there's no light and or no hope down here? Also, I really kind of feels like that her ignorance and her lack of respect really kind of was her undoing in this as well. Going back to the commentary that I watched from William Malone, this scene is are so good and scary.

He actually scared himself while writing this scene. He was writing it and he got to the part, what he wrote about how she looks at the camera. She sees no, she looks beyond the camera and they're not there. It was like very scary. And his phone rang and he said he jumped. Also, when he did a screener with the producers, the producers jumped at this scene and he just knew he had some gold here. And it's one of my favorite parts of the movie, one of the best scares.

I love it. Again, please watch a YouTube clip. If you haven't seen in a while, it's so worth it.

In summary, I really like this movie. It's a lot of fun. It's cheesy. It's kind of campy at times. And I still think that the scares are effective and the house itself is so great. I just think it's a lot of fun. Geoffrey Rush and Frank Jensen were just eating the scenery. They were so much fun to watch. I really like this movie. I think that this movie is about trust relationships and how the asylum can really be seen as a hell itself.

And Dr Van Ticket is a Beelzebub torturing his souls down there, even in death. If you like the show, I hope that you return next week. Each episode would kind of be rotating between a movie review and analysis like this and something a little bit more light and find, such as like a special topics or just kind of like a kill reinking. Thank you again for coming by. You could follow me on Twitter and Instagram at your bureau using KSR and feel free to reach out with your own interpretations and thoughts and let me know what you thought of this episode.

You can also email me at Brookport at Gitmo dot com dotcom. Hope to see you next week and follow me on my social's, though. You know what episodes coming up. All right, guys, take it easy. Enjoy some good movies.