Fright Night: Night of the Living Dead/House on Haunted Hill 2005 Horror Movie Review

Two classic horror movies combine on this collection. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is a low-budget, homegrown classic that had great difficulty finding a distributor at the time of its 1968 release, but has since become one of the most influential horror films of all time. Aside from its visceral impact years before realistic gore became the fashion, the film is also important for its portrayal of a black man as the protagonist during a time when race relations were an extremely sensitive issue in the United States. Seven people secluded in a Pennsylvania farmhouse face relentless attacks by reanimated corpses seeking to eat their flesh. The group, which includes a married couple and their daughter, a pair of young lovers, and an African-American man, try to keep their sanity as the living dead try endlessly to enter the house. The only way to stop the zombies is to burn them or issue a severe blow to their heads. Radio news reports tell of the plague taking over the eastern United States, while the ever-decreasing band of survivors rapidly loses ground in the battle to both keep peace with one another and stay alive.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL: Vincent Price has one of his juiciest roles in this haunted-house thriller as millionaire playboy Frederick Loren, who invites five guests out to a genuine haunted house, offering them each $10,000 if they spend the night. Elisha Cook, Jr. plays one of the guests, a nervous alcoholic who has been in this house before and witnessed some terrible things. Mr. Loren’s beautiful but treacherous wife (Carol Ohmart) is also present—and might be out to kill Frederick during the course of the evening; then again, he might be out to kill her. Severed heads, a skeleton, an acid vat, ghostly screams, and a noose that creeps around on its own and strangles unsuspecting victims are just some of the treats in a film that has been spooking delighted audiences on late-night TV for decades. Producer-director William Castle (THE TINGLER) claimed this was filmed in a process called Emergo, which meant that at a key moment a glow-in-the-dark skeleton on a wire was rigged to sail over the audience’s heads. The skeleton is long since gone, but the goofy thrills remain in this classic tale, made from a script by Robb White.