The 1959 low-budget horror classic “House on Haunted Hill” will be screened at 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at the IU Cinema.
The screening is in honor of the film’s 60th anniversary. The film follows five strangers who have all been invited to a dinner party at the supposedly haunted home of eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren, played by horror movie icon Vincent Price.
Loren promises that each guest who survives the night inside the house will be given $10,000, but things quickly take a turn for the worse with a potential murderer on the loose.
The film was made on a low budget of around $200,000, and its success despite those financial constraints inspired famed director Alfred Hitchcock to try making his own low-budget horror movie. That movie ended up being 1960’s “Psycho,” now regarded as one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
The screening of “House on Haunted Hill” is also part of IU Cinema’s Dastardly Dinners film series, a collection of movies centered on dinner parties gone bad.
Other films to be shown in the series include Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 “Rope,” where two murderers host a dinner party for their victim’s family and friends, and the 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s story of a tense marriage “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
