HOW NOT TO WRITE: The House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Five people overlook a coffin filled with dry ice and tiny coffin party favors.

House on Haunted Hill (1999) is like being at a dinner party with friends, and the hosts hate each other’s guts. It’s that awkward and unpleasant, and not in an enjoyable horror movie kind of way. Part of the brilliant turn of the 21^st century horror remake offerings (and the second that year, released in October), HOHH ends up trailing the pack for a number of reasons: trying too hard to be SPOOKY-EDGY, poor characterization, overreliance on dating CGI, and shitty pacing and plot development. IT Chapter Two can get away with having a series of unfortunate events happening to its protagonists because the evil clown/spider/ancient evil is pointedly targeting each of them personally. That’s not the case with the haunted asylum. It just wants them DEAD.

Since there are so many issues with the dramaturgy of the piece, you can’t fix all of the issues with this movie just from writing, but you could do things to make it more of a guilty pleasure movie. For me, it always comes down to characterization, but it isn’t the easiest fix. Editing could’ve helped a lot with making the movie better. No editing tweak could really make this movie really great. Unlike Thirteen Ghosts or The Haunting (1999), the fear isn’t related to anything that might truly unnerve or touch you. Just… flashing images and characters the audience has no connection to running around a haunted house. Granted, there are enough twists to make it somewhat interesting post the 52 minute mark, but the movie is pretty boring before that. And the twists are basically the same as the ones in the original, apart for the third act CGI Darkness Blob.

Short Summary: A bunch of people are invited to spend the night in a haunted asylum. If they make it through the night, they get a million dollars each. Ghostly shenanigans, booga booga.

Unfortunately, along with this, we have Mr. and Mrs. Price sniping at each other over who is trying to kill who, Chris Kattan playing the Drunk Expositionist, Taye Diggs getting stereotyped by the others as the only black character, and Ali Larter as the final girl. HOHH leans too heavily on jerky jump scares and overblown musical cues and doesn’t connect enough to its setting or characters.

TL;DR—How Not to Write

Given what a cash grab this movie was, it isn’t really worth the effort to totally rewrite it, but there are a few edits that would help. I’ll throw out three.

• Don’t blow your wad.

I don’t know what it is about movies at this particular point in time, but it’s never a good idea to lay out all the twists at the beginning of a story. Your viewers/readers aren’t stupid. You can keep them guessing a bit. My suggestion would be to simply do a little more hide/reveal with the plot, allowing the viewers to think that Price is behind most everything at first before things start to ramp up. This would be a perfect addition, since in the 1959 version, you can never really tell if there was anything supernatural happening, or if it was just the couple trying to get at each other.

52 minutes in, Stephen Price rushes into the room where his imagineer is watching all the guests on monitors, and when Price turns him around, HIS ENTIRE FACE IS GONE. It’s literally a gaping hole, with blood oozing out the sides and a row of bottom teeth. THIS IS GLORIOUS, and it should be the turning point in the movie when we finally realize for certain that Price isn’t behind things.

Honestly, by having the viewer know definitively that something spooky is happening right from the beginning ruins things. Yes, we suspect that it would be ghosts because of the history of the house. But you shouldn’t know all the things right away. That kills all the tension. Letting us know that Price doesn’t know who locked down the house was a big mistake.

My edit: Instead of rolling the opening credits over random edgelord creepiness, roll it over pictures and news reports of things happening in the house. The cut to Price at his “amusement” park, where we set up the themes of misdirection. Over the background of terrorizing Lisa Loeb and James Marsters on the rollercoaster, do the conversation with his wife in the bathtub, talking about her party. Cut the scene with her just watching the show about it. Use the saved time to give the characters time to talk at the beginning of the party so we get to know them a bit before we shake things up. Hence, actually caring about them when they die and when they reach out as ghosts to get Ali Larter’s character to come to them. For the first half of the movie, keep us wondering if we’re really seeing something happening or if Price is setting it up for his amusement and to terrify the wife he hates. Then, turn it around and terrify the man with the missing face of his employee and proceed with the rest of the twists.

This is literally the fastest way to make this movie better.

• Don’t be haphazard with your exposition.

This is literally the entire purpose of Chris Kattan’s characters Pritchard, and all he does is drink and blurt out nonsensical bits and pieces, like “THE HOUSE IS ALIVE” and “IT’S THE DARKNESS.” What darkness? “THE DARKNESS! THE DARKNESS IN THIS HOUSE!” Okay, thanks for that.

In the end, it looks like the darkness is essentially a CGI blob of ghosts trapped in the house. Pritchard’s rantings don’t help us understand this, if you haven’t encountered this concept before. It would be better to lay out the exposition in pieces. Why would Pritchard even know about the Darkness? He could know part of it, about the fire, the people who died. That’s enough for one character to know. Let the protagonists find the rest. One of the characters is a journalist after all. Make them work!

There’s also a scene earlier on that would’ve been perfect for the Blake Snyder technique “Pope in the Pool,” as I mentioned before. The idea is essentially that something wild is happening in the background (killer rollercoaster), and meanwhile, you drop exposition on the viewer. But they don’t do that. Price has a fairly bland phone call with his wife while this is happening. Missed opportunity. They could’ve laid some groundwork here for Kattan’s character to build on.

Balancing exposition (meant to pique our interest) and action (to keep our hearts racing) would do this movie a lot of good.

• Don’t treat your setting as a cardboard backdrop.

HOHH completely fails to use its setting in a significant way. That’s disappointing because people really enjoy the asylum as a site of terror, largely because asylums were places where people were terrorized. Experimented on, electrocuted “for their own good,” and the like. And nothing was done about it for a long time. That welling rage on the part of the undead would be perfect as motivation for the spirits in the house.

(If Ryan Murphy does a better job of this in the Asylum season of American Horror Story, you are failing. Murph is a mess.)

Eventually, after things get really going, you have some flashes of the evil asylum staff, but it isn’t as connected to the plot as it ought to be. The setting really feels incidental, in spite of the magical crazy room or ghosts wandering around with surgical saws. It could’ve been any house that happens to have a locking mechanism and former inhabitants that tortured each other. (The original had someone throw their spouse in a pit of acid.) A lot of stories center on an evil house. If you’re going to go with the evil house trope, you need to make the setting a character in itself, and I would argue, there just isn’t enough menace because the true horror of what happened isn’t ever fully realized.

It would be best to either LEAN IN to the asylum setting or set it in some other house and focus on the back and forth between the feuding spouses.

The House on Haunted Hill has a lot of work to do. It’s somewhat acceptable to be a bad horror movie, but less acceptable to be flat out boring. The most engaging part of this movie is honestly Famke Janssen chewing the scenery. Maybe I’m asking too much of them, but they did make money off of this. They could put in the effort to make it genuinely scary.