My Favorite Shot in the Opening Credits Sequence of "House on Haunted Hill"

Before the story proper begins, we get the atmospheric opening credits sequence to House on Haunted Hill 1959,

The various limousines curve up the road in the Hollywood Hills at night, dispersing the guests at the REAL and rather famous exterior house --(called The Ennis House and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.)

The Ennis House --officially located in Los Feliz where many Hollywood where many movie and TV people live -- was a fascinating mix of Aztec temple and prison structure. This real structure for exteriors had "standard Gothic interiors" on the inside --rather Psycho-house like, and soundstage sets no doubt.) When he set screenwriter Joe Stefano on the job of writing Psycho, Hitchcock claimed to Stefano that he wanted to emulate SOME of House on Haunted Hill in type of atmosphere and movie; Psycho came out a year after House on Haunted Hill.)

But back to the opening credits shots of "the Hollywood Hills at night at the top of the crest." The music by Von Dexter, while rather sparse and "low rent" in some ways, is actually quite effective in creating the requisite creepy atmosphere for the film (Dexter was no Bernard Herrmann -- the guy who did Psycho -- and yet -- THIS score WORKS.) The next year Herrmann was not nominated for an Oscar for Psycho and one critic who dismissed the score(one of the few critics who NOTICED the Psycho score in a review) called HERRMANN"s work "routine scary movie stuff." Like Von Dexter's work, I guess. But Herrmann found more specific orchestral notes to play and invented the "screaming violins" that are the most famous horror movie music motif in film history -- Jaws comes next.

The shot I love -- a mix of Von Dexter's score, the sense of "a haunted house movie in the Hollywood Hills" -- AND a shot of actor Alan Marshal (the film's shady psychiatrist with, notes narrator Vincent Price -- "something greedy around the mouth and eyes") -- taking a last long lingering look at the glittering expanse of the lights of...Ventura Boulevard, maybe? Magnolia? ...stetching in a long pulsating line across the San Fernando Valley into the darkness north and beyond.

Its a great shot -- easy enough to get given the headlights and street lights ALWAYS visible from the Hollywood Hills and here's the thing: usually movies that show off those lights show off the lights to the SOUTH of the Hollywood Hills...Hollywood itself, and Los Angeles beyond. In this case, the psychiatrist is looking NORTH to the somewhat more suburban, somewhat more tawdry San Fernando Valley -- in a few decades to be the home of a number of Paul Thomas Anderson films about things like the porn industry nestled in that valley and the more neurotic denizens in "regular life."

Moving backwards in time, that black-and-white sense of the "city streets filled with a river of headlights at night" -- one gets a reminder backwards of FORTIES noirs that happened in those city streets. Movies with Dan Dureya, Steve Cochran, Edmond O'Brian and the like.

This "favorite shot" early on in House on Haunted Hill also makes the great point that once these "guests" are locked in until daylight -- they are imprisoned in a haunted house not too many miles from THOUSANDS of people in a big city. They just cant get to them for help.

It makes House on Haunted Hill a "Hollywood Gothic Film Noir Horror Murder Picture." Too bad the script isn't up to the set-up.

Great shot, though.