House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Interesting facts

• Budget: $37M
• Based on: House on Haunted Hill
• Filmed in: Los Angeles

House on Haunted Hill is a 1999 American supernatural horror film directed by William Malone and starring Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, Bridgette Wilson, Peter Gallagher, and Chris Kattan. The plot follows a group of strangers who are invited to a party at an abandoned psychiatric hospital, where they are offered $1 million each by an amusement park mogul if they are able to survive the night. Produced by Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver, it is a remake of the 1958 film directed by William Castle. The film marked the producing debut of Dark Castle Entertainment, a production company that went on to produce numerous other horror films, including additional remakes.

Production

House on Haunted Hill was the first film produced by American production company Dark Castle Entertainment, formed in 1998 by producers Joel Silver and Gilbert Adler, and filmmaker Robert Zemeckis. Silver and Zemeckis, collaborators on the Tales from the Crypt television series, had discussed remaking William Castle's 1958 film as early as 1997, with Zemeckis citing it among his favorite films.

Zemeckis proposed a remake of the film to Castle's daughter, Terry, who herself had already considered shopping a remake to film studios. However, her father had sold the rights to the film years prior in order to pay for her college tuition. In the intervening decades since the film's release, the rights had passed from Allied Artists to Lorimar before the latter's catalogue was absorbed by Warner Bros.

Director William Malone was also a fan of the original film, which he had seen as a child. He was hired by Silver and Zemeckis, after having directed episodes of Tales from the Crypt and its spinoff Perversions of Science. Malone and screenwriter Dick Beebe developed a screenplay over a period of a year and a half, based on the original by Robb White.

According to Malone, he wrote approximately twenty percent of the screenplay, though he did not take a writing credit on it. Co-producer Adler noted that he felt the film was "totally different" from the original, but retained its spirit in terms of "how we're telling the story, and the basic tenets of the story itself.

Unlike in the 1958 film, in which a supernatural element was only hinted at (and ultimately revealed to be a ruse), the reality of paranormal forces attacking the party attendees was made explicit in Beebe's screenplay.

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