It will be no spoiler to reveal that there’s nothing truly supernatural going on—House on Haunted Hill follows the venerable formula of “old dark house” mystery stories in which spooky goings-on are inevitably revealed to be costumed criminal conspiracies. But the reveal here asks you to ignore a number of elephant-sized issues. To produce all the effects we have seen, this hundred-year-old house would have needed an infrastructure and behind-the-scenes personnel on the scale of a major theme park.

The gimmick in House on Haunted Hill was a new film process called Emergo, in which, the trailers and ads breathlessly promised, a ghost would actually emerge from the screen and soar over the audience. It all transpires in the final reel, for less than a half minute. After Price appears with the puppeteer controls by which he has just manipulated a weaponized skeleton, a life-sized duplicate of the same would suddenly drop from the side of the screen and jiggle its way over the audience. Later that year, for The Tingler, Price and Castle teamed up with an even more ambitious gimmick, Percepto, which involved individual theater seats being equipped with electrical buzzers meant to be the noise of a centipede-like creature that feeds on fear, set loose in the darkened theater and very, very hungry.

Annabelle Loren (Carol Ohmart) wonders if the scares may have gone too far.

Nora has a close encounter with a silent, gliding specter.

The caretakers: Jonas Slydes and Mrs. Slydes (Howard Hoffman and Leona Anderson)

Carol Ohmart as Annabelle Loren

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THE OLD DARK HOUSE

UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 1932

Five travelers caught in a storm seek shelter for the night at a spooky mansion in Wales, a horror movie cliché that’s been lampooned to death. There’s no deception or conspiracy going on; the Femm family is just as crazy as it seems. Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger, one of director James Whale’s theatrical friends and mentors, in a role that anticipates his pièce de résistance performance as Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein) is a prissy eccentric. His formidably malevolent sister Rebecca (Eva Moore) warns their guests that their hulking, disfigured butler, Morgan (Boris Karloff), can be quite dangerous when drunk. He more than lives up to the warning.

Whale recruited Gloria Stuart (Old Rose in Titanic) from the Pasadena Playhouse for one of her early Hollywood films. Charles Laughton (along with his wife, Elsa Lanchester), another of Whale’s friends from the British theater, also appeared in the film. Whale would soon engage his West End acquaintance Claude Rains for the title role in Universal’s The Invisible Man (1933), another film flavored and informed by the director’s darkly humorous sensibility.

Boris Karloff and Gloria Stuart in The Old Dark House