The House on Haunted Hill 1959 - VINCENT PRICE

First Film With the Amazing New Wonder EMERGO: The Thrills Fly Right Into The Audience!

Frederick ...First Film With the Amazing New Wonder EMERGO: The Thrills Fly Right Into The Audience!

Frederick Loren has invited five strangers to a party of a lifetime. He is offering each of them $10,000 if they can stay the night in a house. But the house is no ordinary house. This house has reputation for murder. Frederick offers them each a gun for protection. They all arrived in a hearse and will either leave in it $10,000 richer or leave in it dead!

Used a gimmick called "Emergo" in theaters. When the skeleton rises from the acid vat in the film, a lighted plastic skeleton on a wire appeared from a black box next to the screen to swoop over the heads of the audience. The skeleton would then be pulled back into the box as Vincent Price reels in the skeleton in the film. Many theaters soon stopped using this "effect" because when the local boys heard about it, they would bring slingshots to the theater; when the skeleton started its journey, they would pull out their slingshots and fire at it with stones, BBs, ball bearings and whatever else they could find.

The 13 greatest shocks of all time!

The large grosses for this film were noticed by Alfred Hitchcock. This led him to create his own low-budget horror film--Psycho (1960).

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