A Nightmare to Remember

Every Friday night when I was a kid, channel 4 played Nightmare Theater. The best and scariest part was the introduction where the scariest voice you ever heard introduced It's niiiightmaaaar. we later found out that the voice of nightmare theater was that of
Fireman Frank the host of the daily kids TV show.
We watched several different versions of Frankenstein, the Wolf man, The Mummy the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula and other vampire movies, The Crawling Eye, 13 Ghosts and others but the scariest of all for me was House On Haunted Hill. I saw it when I was 6 yeas old in the first grade. I thought I was tuff, I had seen so many of these horror movies and had no problems, but this one scared me half to death. In fact I couldn't sleep for several nights and it made me sick. It scared me so bad that my parents wouldn't let me watch Nightmare for several weeks.

There were so many things about House On Haunted Hill that got to me. I have posted pictures from the movie that were the scenes that scared me the most minus on the scene where Vincent Prices Dead Wife was floating outside the window of the young woman's room holding a rope that came through the bars on the window and coiled around her ankles then backed off and went away. Vincent Price was so sinister in this movie every time he was on screen it scared me. There was the vat of acid in the wine cellar that they showed several times and we all knew something bad was going to happen there. There was the dripping blood from the ceiling that always dripped on the older lady's hand, there was the severed head, but the scene that almost did me in was when Lance and the young girl were in the cellar he in one room and she in the other and the creepy old woman appeared above the young girl and floated out of the room.

That movie like most of the old horror movies of the 40's and 50's played over and over on Nightmare Theater but I never watched it again until I was grown and had kids of my own. I now own a DVD copy of it and pull it out every year around Halloween and watch it. In fact when I first got it I played it for my kids and my nephews. Of course to them it was kind of lame, after all it was black and white and after all the new movies and special affects they have seen, it just wasn't that scary to them. A few years ago they made a remake of it that someone let me borrow, I only watched about 15 minutes of it and turned it off disgusted. The new movie was all about how vulgar they could talk and how much sex they could throw in. The old movie has class and style and is one of the best horror movies ever made the new one was a disgrace.

So after all these years I have gotten over how scared I was and would have to say that House on Haunted Hill is my favorite horror movie and my close second is Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.