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.

How Not to Write: Thirteen Ghosts

Several Pissed off Ghosts Reaching for You

At the turn of the millennium, moviemakers had a thirst that could only be quenched by remakes of 60ish horror movies. The House on Haunted Hill gave it a shot, with a decent cast and questionable pacing (and a truly heinous sequel), but Thirteen Ghosts had so much potential that its flaws ended up so much more disappointing.

Essentially, this movie, and the 1960 original, is about a house full of ghosts, and the family that inherits it from the father’s eccentric uncle. The 2001 version adds a psychic, PETA for ghosts, and a few plot twists. Interestingly, the remake begins some interesting world-building and smartly uses the house as a villainous character, perhaps more so than the actual antagonist or the ghosts themselves. However, with twelve ghosts, the psychic (Dennis), the father (Arthur), the nanny (Maggie) and his two children, and Kalina the Ghost Activist, there is no time to reveal all of the backstory and lore planned for the film, let alone develop full character arcs for the father or his children.

Furthermore, the movie is so determined to have its “twists” that there are a couple of logical problems that are never resolved. While Thirteen Ghosts is a cult favorite and very entertaining and rewatchable for what it is, with some edits, this movie could be elevated to a staple of the horror genre rather than just a guilty pleasure flick.

TL;DR—How Not to Write

Although I doubt that anyone is going to remake this movie again, even with every franchise ever being remade, I think there are some improvements to the writing that would really make this story shine. Ideally, the format would change from a 91 minute movie to a 13 episode limited series on a streaming television show, not unlike The Haunting of Hill House. There are so many ghosts, and so much backstory, that unfolding the tale over a single season would allow for a stronger, scarier, and more satisfying story.

In some order, here are my recommendations:

•    Don’t center static characters.

Problematically, Dennis is the only dynamic character in this story. And he isn’t even supposed to be the lead. This happened because his is the only character we have clear goals and motivation for and because his character is introduced first and thus can be identified with first. His beginning (working with Cyrus and trapping the ghosts for money), his motivation (crippled by his power and feeling like an outcast), his middle (helping Arthur on the promise of getting the money he’s owed), and ending (sacrificing himself so Arthur can live to save his kids)—We know Dennis.

Arthur meanwhile is pretty one note as a protagonist, despite ostensibly being the lead. Even if we kept 13G in movie format, there would need to be some change for the main character from beginning to end. Arthur has no real motivation in this movie other than needing money, and then later, wanting to save his kids. We’re missing that crucial element of how this incident changes him and them. In the movie, he is grieving, but it seems like it’s been years— not six months— since his house burned down and he lost his wife. However, since his wife dying is what prompted the change in him and their circumstances, it would be reasonable for Arthur to begin the story as more emotionally shut off and distant from his kids. This would make the closure of the ending, as they survive, get closer, and see the spirit of his wife again, much more emotionally impactful.

We need both of these men to be dynamic and fully interacting with the other characters, and if the kids, Maggie, and Kalina are going to be centered in any way, they need to have worthwhile character arcs.

•  Don’t treat your audience as stupid.

Thirteen Ghosts repeats the rules of the story multiple times from various characters. This isn’t necessary. Lay the pipe you go and make it possible for the audience to figure points out themselves. There are so many details, but having a character run in with a book to tell you things you is lazy and inefficient. If there is to be any element of mystery, your main characters should be figuring things out as the audience does. If people don’t get it, and you need to repeat it, you didn’t show it well enough.

•  Don’t Treat Twists as a Substitute for Good Plotting

Thirteen Ghosts really loves its twists, but with a little thought, the logical problems created by these twists shouldn’t really exist. Maggie is the nanny who doesn’t clean or cook, but apparently looks after the younger brother (badly). Since the family is having trouble with bills, it doesn’t make any sense how they’d justify paying for her when the older sister Kathy could look after her brother. Secondly, Kalina has a complete and abrupt character turn in the final act that means, upon rewatching, her behavior doesn’t foreshadow properly or line up with her final character actions. Moreover, the family never finds out that she betrayed them or that she died, so what did it matter in the long run?

Basically, the creators of 13G wanted Maggie to be their sassy black character, and they needed a traitor to facilitate other plot elements, even if it meant her character makes no damn sense. A simple flip would solve this and allow 13G to keep its major twists intact. My suggestion would be to make Kalina the black character (May I suggest Aleyse Shannon?), keep her focused on her purpose, her smarts, and her rage. Give her motivation for her activism. Have her fight with Dennis over what he’s been doing. But then, the nanny, Maggie, can be the white woman who betrays them and was working with Cyrus all along.

It would make more sense if a despondent Arthur didn’t look too closely when his uncle sent a clever, Latin reading grad student to be their nanny for cheap. It would answer why she doesn’t look after the children much, and she could still “find” letters in Cyrus’s study to encourage Arthur to sacrifice himself. Finally, it would give Maggie’s character a purpose to even be there.

A betrayal from Maggie would mean so much more than a betrayal from a character the family doesn’t even know. A last minute save from a smart Kalina would do more service to her character than it ever did for Maggie, who apparently just touches some knobs at random and wrecks the infernal machine.

Ideally, I’d also like for this version of Kalina to team up with Dennis’s spirit to finish dispersing the spirits that escaped from the house at the end. Ideally, I would take the time to introduce each ghost with pieces of their backstory as the drama with the family, Dennis, and Kalina unfolds and each character gets their due. But the bullets above are a few quick fixes that would help the next version of Thirteen Ghosts tap into that deep place horror can go: A mix between human drama and fear that creeps under your skin.

If you have movies or shows you'd like for me to try to dissect and correct, leave me a comment and I'll see what I can do. (Not everythig can be fixed.)