The uncertain boundary between reality and illusion is a theme found in many horror movies. William Malone’s House on Haunted Hill manages to take this idea a step further, predicting the rise of reality television and the aesthetics of modern shows.
The concept of capturing events on camera is found throughout House on Haunted Hill. The film’s opening features medical staff at a psychiatric hospital performing a brutal operation on a patient while a nurse records it on a vintage movie camera. This same camera inadvertently records footage of the disaster that befalls the hospital moments later. Flashing forward, this footage appears in a television show that inspires Evelyn Price (Famke Janssen) to throw a party at the long-abandoned hospital. This perfectly plays into the reality show atmosphere; what better way to describe the goal of reality television than to capture and display the insanity of life for anyone watching? But this is just the start: House on Haunted Hill also accurately captures the mood, atmosphere, and dynamics that would become well-known staples of reality television.
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Much like the cast of any reality television show, the guests of the party are not selected at random. The people invited are chosen for a very specific reason, often because of expected personality clashes that will make for good television. Like in any reality show, the guests invited to the party being thrown by her husband, Steven Price (Geoffrey Rush), come from very different walks of life. When assembled along with the Prices and Watson Pritchett (Chris Kattan), the guy in charge of the abandoned hospital, it doesn’t take long for there to be the desired effect.
Melissa Marr (Bridgette Wilson), a former television personality, is openly trying to get footage of any potentially frightening incidents to reboot her career and become famous again. Like numerous real-life reality TV personalities, Melissa is trying to use her experience to jump-start an entertainment career.
Also, in the tradition of reality TV, there is the grand reveal that one of the guests is a complete fraud: Jennifer Jenzen (Ali Larter) is not really Jennifer Jenzen. Her real name is Sara, and she is merely a former assistant to the real Jennifer Jenzen. She is pretending to be her merely for a shot at the prize; this is money promised to them by a host who is watching their every move through cameras placed throughout the house. Even the one million dollars the host promises each of them if they last the night is straight out of reality television, as it’s a perfect grand prize amount for anyone in a competition.
No one knows this better than the guests because they aren’t sure what is real and what is just a trick. Sara herself openly questions if the so-called scary encounters aren’t just a way to scare them out of a lot of money. But things get kicked up a notch when it’s revealed there is a loaded gun available for every guest to protect themselves.
A staple of numerous reality shows is how contestants form alliances with others to eliminate the competition and have a better chance at winning. While Time magazine points out that the defining clichéd reality TV quote is “I’m not here to make friends,” making alliances in the film is allowed and even encouraged among contestants. This happens in House on Haunted Hill, as Sara and Eddie (Taye Diggs) wind up forming a partnership while trying to figure out a way out of the old hospital. Later, it comes out that Dr. Blackbird (Peter Gallagher) and Evelyn Price have formed a secret alliance – also a staple of reality shows – to manipulate events. In another twist, Blackbird is revealed as Evelyn’s secret lover, whom she then kills for the advantage of having another body to frighten people.
By betraying her partner, Evelyn cuts to the heart of so many reality shows: presenting a narrative to cause a conflict and achieve a desired result. She wants her husband dead but doesn’t want to do it herself, so she wants to terrify the other guests into doing it out of fear that Price is out to get them. Like many reality show contestants, she wants to use someone else to get rid of someone she despises for personal gain. Evelyn exploits an accomplice to help set the stage for her grand plan and discards them when he is no longer useful to her. This plan seems to work when Sara finds a blood-covered Price and shoots him. But Price was ready for something like this, as he was wearing a bulletproof vest that he gleefully reveals to Evelyn before getting his revenge on her.
All of this is preceded by the situation set up by Evelyn and Blackbird, where Evelyn appears to have been electrocuted to death via an electroshock machine. When Blackbird pronounces Evelyn dead, Price immediately pulls his gun on the guests and demands to know who killed his wife. Considering what comes out later, it’s hard to know exactly how much of this is just a spectacle and what is genuine emotion. But there is no doubting Price’s angry confrontation with the guests, which ends in a made-for-television, one-versus-many fight. It all happens because they find the abandoned camera of Melissa Marr; while the footage it contains doesn’t reveal exactly what happened to her, it reveals enough to stir up tension and unsettle the others.
In many ways, the two Prices are the real stars of the night, and the other guests are merely the audience. The entire reason they are there in the first place is because it was Evelyn’s birthday, and she wanted her party at the abandoned hospital – but Price wanted to put a twist on the idea. When the guests arrive, the Prices constantly fight back and forth and use various methods to try to gain a leg up on the other while each constantly suspects the other of being up to things in the house, whether it’s truly their doing or not.
To put it in reality television terms, these are the two biggest opponents and are constantly scheming for how to beat each other. Unsurprisingly, neither of them comes out the winner in the end. The two of them get the nasty fight they’ve always wanted to have and that everything has slowly been leading up to, but it does neither of them any good. They both wind up dead in the end, while Sara and Eddie manage to escape and get all the prize money because they are the only two left alive.
The twisted competitive atmosphere of House on Haunted Hill – one that encourages alliances over genuine connections and fosters mistrust between everyone – tapped into the new upcoming era in American entertainment. Only seven months after House on Haunted Hill was released, the American competition series Survivor debuted. But where the survivor aspect of House on Haunted Hill was terrifyingly literal, reality television would offer audiences a simpler version of these life-and-death themes. The success of shows like Survivor would forever change ideas about how people behaved on television – and, like the Prices, the purpose of them being recorded in the first place.