Editorials
25 Years Later: Why Geoffrey Rush’s Performance in ‘House on Haunted Hill’ Is an All-Timer
Twenty five years ago, on October 29, 1999, Dark Castle Entertainment launched with a remake of William Castle’s The House on Haunted Hill. Penned by Dick Beebe from Robb White’s original 1959 story and directed by William Malone, the 1999 remake relocated to a foreboding psychiatric hospital for its haunted setting. This time the ghosts were very real and very vengeful. At the center of it all, though, was a very inspired performance by Geoffrey Rush. One that deserves a space in horror’s hall of fame.
Rush played amusement park mogul Steven Price, the rich host to his wife’s birthday party that offers up $1,000,000 to anyone who can endure a night-long stay in the haunted hospital. This was the precise same role Vincent Price played in the 1959 original film, and the character was renamed in reference. The irony, though, is that Steven Price wasn’t initially meant to look like Vincent Price; the script originally just described him as an average businessman. Rush wasn’t into the bland description and approached Malone with a concept more befitting of an eccentric amusement park mogul; what if Steven Price looked like director John Waters?
Malone agreed Rush could try out the look, but when Rush transformed himself to look like Waters, he instead wound up looking somewhere closer to Vincent Price. It stuck. But the look is only a small half of Rush’s masterful approach to the character. The other, bigger half is his scene-stealing portrayal.
In his first scene, Steven Price is introduced as a fast-paced businessman with a sardonic wit. In the middle of a press interview for the opening of his latest gimmick-filled theme park ride, he takes a phone call. After hanging up, the journalist asks if it was business or pleasure. He answers with a wry smirk, “Neither; my wife.” He answers more questions about the new ride before ushering the journalist and her cameraman into an elevator that appears to head straight up to the adjacent roller coaster. With swagger, he brushes off their safety concerns but then clutches to the elevator wall screaming when it appears to break down and drop suddenly. Just when the elevator is about to crash into the ground and death seems imminent, the gimmick reveals itself. It was part of the show, and Price is the showman. One that derives clear pleasure from scaring the piss out of people.
That showman persona is important to the plot because he’s the essential catalyst for getting the group of people to the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute in the first place. That persona is also interesting on a character level, too. Price is a character used to exerting control, to being the one pulling all of the strings behind the scenes. When things start to go awry, he’s perplexed. The tables are turned and he’s the one experiencing fear for once. Watching Geoffrey Rush take Price from a controlled puppeteer to scared puppet is fascinating.
While the restless spirits are waging war on the human guests, there’s a smaller scaled but equally vicious war taking place between Steven and his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen). It’s clear from the outset that the husband and wife duo have nothing but icy venom between them, and it escalates from traded barbs to flat out murder plots as the narrative progresses. The chemistry between Rush and Janssen as their characters opt for murder over a divorce is the most interesting dynamic in the entire movie.
Throughout, Rush toggles seamlessly from ruthless businessman to the sympathetic victim of an evil spouse that never loved him. By the third act, though, he’s firmly taken a turn toward the villainous again, with Evelyn pushing him to the brink of homicidal madness. Even then, there are glimmers of humanity. Steven Price is a perpetually fluid character that keeps you guessing. Evelyn is stone-cold from beginning to end, but Steven is so complex that your allegiance is consistently shifting. No other character in the film has as large or as complicated an emotional journey as Steven. Much of that is owed to Rush’s masterful performance.
Twenty five years later, House on Haunted Hill holds up well – even when that goofy CGI ghost cloud undermines it – thanks to elaborate set pieces, great scare moments, and gruesome deaths. Yet the biggest reason this remake endures the test of time is the captivating and lively portrayal of Steven Price by the always great Geoffrey Rush.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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