Friday, October 2, 2009

Can You Survive The Nightmare - Challenge #1

I love Horror movies.....one of the movies I like to watch is House on Haunted Hill. 'A millionaire offers a group of diverse people $1,000,000 to spend the night in a haunted house with a horrifying past.' Starring, Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssens, Ali Larter, Taye Diggs and Peter Gallagher.

So My challenge to you is to use a haunted house on your project or alter something into a haunted house (ie bird house)

here is some trivia about this movie: (according to www.imdb.com)

  • Geoffrey Rush's character's last name is Price. This is a reference to the original House on Haunted Hill (1959) in which Vincent Price played the main character.

  • The rollercoaster in the beginning of the movie is The Incredible Hulk at Universal's Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida.

  • The directors of both the original version and the remake are named William: William Castle and William Malone.

  • The only character in both the original and the remake of this film is the owner of the house, Watson Pritchet. However all the other characters are loosely based on characters from the original.

  • The names William Malone, Gilbert Adler and Vlademar Tymrak appear on Price's guest list before it is deleted. William Malone and Gilbert Adler are respectively the director and producer of the film. Vlademar Tymrak was a serial-killer and evil spirit in "Tales from the Crypt: Report from the Grave (#7.8)" (1996), which was also directed by Malone.

  • The first person to be killed in the movie is screenplay writer Dick Beebe.

  • The inscriptions on the walls and doors in the hospital are all in German, but do not make any particular sense when translated. The inscription "Gehirn Hygiene" for example is a rough translation of the English "brain sanitation" into German. Maybe the German inscriptions were just supposed to add a more gothic atmosphere to the movie, but quite certainly they are also a reference to an old German Horror movie Schloß Vogeloed (1921) directed by F.W. Murnau, which also deals with a haunted manor.

  • Cindy Crawford was considered for the role of Melissa Margaret Marr.

  • Famke Janssen performed her own stunt when the glass ceiling breaks. It was extremely important for Janssen to remain where she was and very still, yet even with her basically glued to the spot, the shard hit with so much impact that it bounced her head off the table as you can see on close inspection of the scene.

  • William Malone got the idea to set the movie in a former insane asylum when he was filming an episode of "Tales from the Crypt" (1989) in a former asylum and noticed that crew members were running scared out of the basement, not wanting to film there.

  • Co-producer Terry Castle is the daughter of William Castle, who directed the 1959 version of the film.

  • Geoffrey Rush was never meant to look like Vincent Price (star of the original film House on Haunted Hill (1959)). The original screenplay described Stephen Price as a regular looking businessman. Rush didn't care for this, so he suggested that his character look like the film director John Waters. The director agreed to test this look out. After his transformation, he ended up looking so much like Vincent Price the director decided to keep the look.

  • Marc Blucas and Ivana Milicevic filmed a short "movie in a movie" sequence which was cut from the theatrical release, but appears in the deleted scenes section of the DVD release.

  • Elizabeth Hurley was considered for the role of Evelyn Stockard-Price.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

WOW! Sounds like an awesome movie! But horror movies SCARE me!!!! LOVE the challenge!!!

Tink said...

Great Challenge! I LOVE horror!!

Unknown said...

Looks like a FUN way to start Challenge 1.

Nikki Love said...

sounds easy enough ;)

Happay Mommay aka Happay Scrappay said...

got it all done! it's in the gallery! thanks for the challenge!

Nikki Love said...

Mine's ready too and in the gallery:

http://www.scrapbookdreamer.com/photos/showphoto.php?photo=25953

Melanie H said...

Wonderful challenge Laura and thanks for the trivia.