HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL with ‘Emergo’ Sunday Night at the Tivoli – SLIFF Preview

Vincentennial Lives! This year’s St. Louis International Film Festival will be capped with a screening of the 1959 shocker HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL starring St. Louis native Vincent Price. The screening will be this Sunady, November 20th at 8:30 pm at the Tivoli Theater and yes, it it will be in………..Emergo !!! Eccentric millionaire Fredrick Loren (Price) and his fourth wife (Carol Ohmart), Annabelle, have invited five people to their house on Haunted Hill for a “haunted house” party. Whoever will stay in the house for one night will earn $10,000 (a whopping sum in 1959!). As the night progresses, all the greedy participants are trapped inside the house with ghosts, murderers, skeletal apparitions, blood dripping from the ceiling, a severed head, and a vat of acid in the cellar.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is the renowned work of producer and director William Castle, beloved for his signature-style fright-filled films and delivering ‘the gimmick’ to the horror genre. The gimmick in HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL was of course the appearance of ‘Emergo’, the scary but benign plastic skeleton who loves to sail over audience’s heads on a guidewire at an appropriate moment in the film. Emergo will indeed make an appearance at this Sunday’s screening. This is Emergo’s third trip to St. Louis in the past 18 months. In May of 2010, Emergo appeared at the Way Out Club in South St. Louis for my Super-8 Movie Madness in 3-D and Emergo show, I did not have a super-8 print of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL but Pete Smith’s 1941 short MURDER IN 3D ends with a skeleton yanking off his own head and tossing it at the camera so Emergo thought that would be a good moment to mark his first ‘coming out’ in St. Louis since HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL played here some 50 years earlier. Emergo made a second appearance a bit later in the evening during a condensed screening of the 1958 shocker THE SCREAMING SKULL. Though extremely hungover (he’d been partying with some burlesque girls at the rehearsal at the Way Out the night before), Emergo had a great time, loved St. Louis, and said he’d be glad to return any time.

This past May I teamed up with Cinema St. Louis for Vincentennial, the Vincent Price 100th Birthday Celebration. When we were programming the Vincentennial Vincent Price Film Festival we decided to show of double feature of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and THE TINGLER, another Price/Castle collaboration, also from 1959 and we invited Emergo to swing by for an appearance. As we got closer to the fest’s date, we ran into some exhibition rights issues with HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (hey, we assumed it was in the public domain – it just shows up in every cheap horror DVD comp set!) and had to pull that title from our schedule. Emergo was devastated! He got drunk and called me, crying that he had already made travel plans to St. Louis. Since we were still showing THE TINGLER, we devised a way to have him make an appearance in that film instead. Emergo was a total pro, showing up sober for rehearsal and sailing proudly over the audience’s heads right on cue. Finally, this Sunday November 20th at 8:30 at the Tivoli, St. Louisans will have your opportunity to see Emergo during the film he was always intended to make his appearance for with HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. Emergo was the first gimmick for William Castle, who would eventually come to be almost synonymous with the art of carnival-like promotion for his films. THE TINGLER had Percepto, where the seats were wired with an electric shock. MR. SARDONICUS had The Punishment Poll – a card featuring a hand with the thumb out so the audience could help decide the villain’s fate (up or down). 13 GHOSTS had Illusion-O, a handheld ghost viewer/remover with strips of red and blue cellophane was given out to use during certain segments of the film. By looking through either the red or blue cellophane the audience was able to either see or remove the ghosts if they were too frightening. HOMICIDAL had a fright break, an intermission in the film where an audience member too frightened to see the rest of the film could walk across some glow in the dark footprints and spend the rest of the film in a large black box known as The Coward’s Corner.

I will be introducing HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL this Sunday and I hope to see a big turnout. Cinema St. Louis’ annual post-fest Awards party will be afterwards at the Ballpark Hilton in downtown St. Louis. I’ll be there……and so will Emergo!