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.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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