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The Haunted Institute: Nazi Medicine, Movie Magic, and a Plastic Skull · Healthcare Scandal Investigations

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Inside a styrofoam skull, someone packed cotton candy. Then they
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: poured acetone over it and filmed what happened next. What
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: dissolved on camera looked exactly like a human brain. That
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: was the job. That was the solution. And it made
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: it into the final cut of a film that opened
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: number one at the American box office on Halloween weekend, 1999.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: The film was House on Haunted Hill. And almost nothing
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: about how it got made was straightforward. Start with the rights.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: The man who created the original 1959 film had sold
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: them decades earlier, not to a studio, not for a
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: sequel deal, but to pay his daughter's college tuition. By
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: the time anyone thought to remake the picture, those rights
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: had passed through three different companies and landed at Warner Bros.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: When the daughter finally went looking for them herself, she
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: discovered that two of the most powerful producers in Hollywood
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: were already in the room. She ended up co-producing the
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: film her father had once sold, To keep her in school,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: that detail alone could carry an episode. But it is
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: not even the strangest part of this story. There is
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: a creature at the heart of this film assembled from
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: more than 100 physical elements. There is a final effects
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: credit belonging to a legend who had already retired attached
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: to a prop he had originally built for a different
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: movie in 1981, and simply handed over. There is a
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: design philosophy rooted in Albert Speer's architecture and Nazi medical
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: experiments folded into a mainstream studio horror release without most
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: audiences ever registering it. And there is a sound mix
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: so technologically ahead of its moment that it borrowed techniques
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: from a film called The Matrix. Critics hated it. The
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: audience gave it a C. It still ran in theaters
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: for 61 weeks. To understand how House on Haunted Hill
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: arrived in 1999, you have to go back 40 years
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: and meet the man who invented it. William Castle built
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: his career on spectacle. He was not primarily a stylist
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: or an actor's director. He was a showman in the
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: tradition of carnival barkers and medicine men, someone who understood
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: that the experience of watching a film could be engineered
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: from the outside in. His 1959 house on Haunted Hill
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: starred Vincent Price and came packaged with a gimmick called Emmerbo,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: a plastic skeleton that flew over the audience on a
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: wire at a key moment in the film. Critics found
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: it cheap. Audiences lined up anyway. Castle's ghost story worked
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: as a ghost story, precisely because it was not one.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: The supernatural in that film was a hoax. The horror
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: was human. A murderous husband. A cynical party. A swimming
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: pool full of acid. All of it was explicable. Solvable. Earthly.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: The skeleton on the wire was part of the joke
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Castle was sharing with his crowd. He sold the rights
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: before anyone fully understood what he had. The money went
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: to his daughter Terry's college tuition. The rights went to
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Allied Artists, then to Lorimar, then to Warner Bros., moving
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: through the industry like a slow tide over three decades.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: William Castle died in 1977. He never saw what his
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: film would become. Terry Castle grew up in that industry.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: She knew the original. She knew its value. At some point,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: she began considering whether a remake was possible and went
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: to inquire at Warner Bros. about the rights her father
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: had once held. What she found waiting for her was
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: a conversation already in progress. Robert Zemeckis had mentioned to
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: producer Joel Silver that Castle's film was among his personal favorites.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Silver had acted on it. By the time Terry arrived,
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Silver and Zemeckis were already forming a production company around
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: the idea. The company was called Dark Castle Entertainment. The
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: name was a deliberate tribute. Terry Castle did not walk away.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: She co-produced the film. That convergence, daughter, rights, tribute... Remake
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: set the terms for everything that followed, and the first
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: major creative decision the new company made was one that
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: changed the entire logic of the original story. In 1999,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: the ghosts would not be a hoax. They would be real.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Whatever William Castle had built on the foundation of human villainy,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Dark Castle was going to rebuild on something that could
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: not be explained away. The question was what kind of
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: horror they were building it inside. The building they chose
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: did not exist. That was the first decision. and it
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: told you everything about what followed. Production designer David Klassen
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: did not go looking for a gothic mansion. He went
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: looking for something colder. He modeled the Vanekut Psychiatric Institute
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: for the Criminally Insane on the architectural language of Albert Speer, monumental, rational,
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: engineered to make the individual feel erased. The fictional institute's
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: unethical medical procedures were drawn loosely from Nazi experimentation. Scholar
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Sharon Packer acknowledged the historical grounding. but raised a pointed concern.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: When you embed atrocity inside a ghost story, you risk
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: making the atrocity decorative. The horror absorbs the history and
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: softens it. That tension between using darkness and being used
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: by it lived inside the production from the start. The
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: fictional backstory placed the Institute in 1931 Los Angeles. A
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: patient revolt. A fire. The doctor died. The inmates died.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: All but five staff members survived. What was left was
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: a building that had consumed everyone inside it, and that
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: backstory was not incidental set dressing. It was the engine
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: of the entire film. Director William Malone spent roughly a
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: year and a half developing the screenplay with writer Dick Beebe.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Working from Rob White's original script, Malone wrote approximately 20%
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: of the final draft. He took no writing credit. The
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: exterior of that impossible building was seven feet tall, a miniature.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: Seven feet of meticulously constructed model matted with location footage
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: to become a cliffside mansion. The driveway scenes used Griffith Park.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: What appeared on screen as a single cohesive architectural presence
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: was assembled from fragments. A miniature, a park, and Klassen's
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: spear-influenced interiors, stitched together by cinematographer Rick Bota on 35mm film.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: Malone asked Bota to flash the negatives, deliberately overexpose them
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: before processing. to compress the contrast range and push the
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: image toward the aesthetic of 1930s horror. Every frame was
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: engineered to feel like a memory of something older. Principal
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: photography began January 28, 1999, in Los Angeles. The cast
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: assembled around that engineered world. With its own internal logic,
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Geoffrey Rush was cast as Stephen Price, and the name
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: was not accidental. Vincent Price had starred in the original.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Rush's character carried the surname as a deliberate echo. and
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: modeled the character's look and mannerisms on filmmaker John Waters.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: He deliberately chose not to watch the original film before shooting.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Famke Janssen played his wife, Evelyn. Elizabeth Hurley had been
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: considered for the role before Janssen was cast. Ty A.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Diggs joined after Rush signed. Chris Kattan provided comic relief
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: as Watson Pritchett. Jeffrey Combs played Dr. Vanacut. Marilyn Manson
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: had been considered for the role, but was never cast.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: Peter Graves appeared as himself. hosting a fictional television segment
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: on the Institute's history. It was a clean piece of
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: architectural casting, a real person playing himself, delivering fictional history
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: inside a film that was itself a fiction built around
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: a real film. Then there was the rollercoaster footage, the
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: sequence identified in the film as the Terror Incognita ride
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: was shot at the incredible Hulk Coaster at Universal's Islands
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: of Adventure in Florida, a Florida theme park ride embedded
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: inside a Los Angeles ghost story. inside a fictional psychiatric
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: institute modeled on Nazi architecture. Each layer was real. None
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: of them were where the film placed them. The effects
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: work is where the production's ambitions became most visible and
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: most strange. Gregory Nicotero and Robert Kurtzman, working through KNABFX,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: handled the special effects. Makeup legend Dick Smith contributed additional
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: design work. Smith was in his 70s by then. His
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: contribution to this film would be his final screen credit.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: What he gave Malone was not new work. It was
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: something old, an eyeless, noseless head with an enlarged mouth
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: that Smith had originally built for the 1981 film Ghost Story.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: The head had never been used. Smith granted it to
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Malone for House on Haunted Hill. A creature built for
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: one film, unused for nearly two decades, found its purpose
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: inside a different haunted house. Eighteen years later, That is
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: the kind of object that accumulates meaning simply by existing
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: long enough. The film's climactic entity, referred to in production
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: as the Mass, was the most ambitious practical effect in
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: the film. Robert Skotak supervised its construction. The finished creature
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: was assembled from more than 100 individual elements. Human models,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: twisted fabric, wire armature, photographs and footage. The Mass drew
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: inspiration from Lovecraft and from Rorschach imagery. Something that looked
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: different depending on what you brought to it. It was
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: not a monster with a fixed shape. It was an accumulation.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: There was also cotton candy inside a styrofoam skull. The
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: Evelyn decomposition sequence required the production to simulate brain tissue
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: dissolving on camera. The solution. A styrofoam dummy head. Warped
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: footage of Jansen projected onto its surface. The interior packed
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: with painted foam and cotton candy. Acetone was applied on camera.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: The cotton candy dissolved. The effect worked. It was improvised
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: from the materials at hand, which is a different kind
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: of horror craft than digital compositing. Immediate, chemical, irreversible once
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the acetone touched the sugar. Robert Zemeckis made a late
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: addition to the mass sequence. He wanted the faces of
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: the Institute's victims embedded inside the creature's form. Rush had
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: already completed his Los Angeles work and left the country.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: The faces in the mass footage required Rush to be
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: filmed again. A separate crew flew to London. Rush shot
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: the additional footage in London. That material was then integrated
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: into the mass sequence in post-production. Another fragment from another location,
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: assembled into the creature that was already assembled from a
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: hundred other fragments. The mass was the film in miniature.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: There is a continuity error in the finished film. Sarah's
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: overcoat disappears between shots. It is the kind of mistake
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: that editors notice and audiences feel without being able to name,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: a small wrongness that registers just below conscious attention. The
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: error exists because of a scene that was cut. The
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: original script included a subterranean crematorium sequence, complete with reanimated
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: patient corpses. It was shot, then it was removed. When
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: the crematorium scene left the film, Sarah's overcoat went with
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: it logically. She would have lost it in that sequence,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: but no one caught that the coat was already gone
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: in shots that preceded the cut. The absence of the
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: scene made the absence of the coat impossible to explain.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: That deleted scene, along with two others, exists on the
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: 2000 Warner Bros. DVD. One of the other cut scenes
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: established how Sarah received her invitation to the party. D.B.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Mazur appeared in it as a character named Jennifer Jensen.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: The third deleted scene was an epilogue. Jennifer and a
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: realtor arrive at the Institute. After the main events of
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: the film, and the realtor is revealed to be Vanekat,
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: all three scenes extend the film's logic in different directions.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: All three were left out. The sound work was handled
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: by Dane Davis, who had just finished post-production on The Matrix.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Davis used a completely virtual mix on House on Haunted Hill,
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: one of the earliest films to use that approach. The
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: process that would go on to reshape how studio films
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: were sonically constructed was applied here in a Halloween Haunted
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: House remake. before most of the industry had noticed it
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: was possible. Picture that for a moment. The film that
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: critics would score at 31% on Rotten Tomatoes and 28
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: out of 100, on Metacritic that audiences would give a
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: C-grade on CinemaScore, was also a quiet technical landmark in
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: how sound was built for cinema. The film opened on
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: October 29th, 1999, across 2,710 screens. It was Halloween weekend.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: It opened number one at the box office, By the
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: end of its theatrical run, 61 weeks, House on Haunted
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Hill had earned $ 65, 090, 541 worldwide. William Castle used to hand
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: out life insurance policies at the door. Dark Castle handed
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: out scratch-off tickets, a promotional campaign with $ 1 million in
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: total prizes, echoing Castle's carnival instinct across 40 years. They
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: planned to continue the gimmick tradition with future films. They
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: never did. House on Haunted Hill was the only Dark
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: Castle release to carry that kind of theatrical stunt. The
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: company kept making horror remakes. The gimmick died with the debut.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: The cotton candy skull dissolved on camera. The faces of
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: the dead were assembled from over 100 separate physical elements.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: A father sold a film's rights to send his daughter
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: to college and 40 years later his daughter sat in
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: the producer's chair watching it get remade. These are not
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: the kinds of details that end up in a 31%
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: film by accident. They are the residue of genuine obsession,
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: the kind that produces something stranger and more durable than
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: its reviews suggest. After the theatrical run ended, Dark Castle
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Entertainment moved forward. The company continued producing horror remakes, just
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: as Silver and Zemeckis had planned. But the scratch-off tickets
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: did not return. The gimmick that had echoed William Castle's
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: carnival showmanship across four decades was quietly retired. House on
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Haunted Hill remained the only Dark Castle release to carry it.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Whatever instinct drove that promotional choice, the belief that an
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: audience needed to be lured into a ghost story, the
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: way Castle had once lured audiences with plastic skeletons on wires,
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: that instinct did not survive the first film's success. The
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: film had proved it could earn $ 65 million without the trick.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: The trick was never used again. In 2007, a direct-to-DVD
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: sequel arrived. Return to House on Haunted Hill brought Jeffrey
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: Combs back as Fanucut. William Malone had no involvement. The
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: sequel exists at the margins of the franchise's history, a
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: continuation that carries the name without the machinery that built
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: the original. There is something worth sitting with in that
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: gap between the numbers and the reception. Critics scored the
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: film a 28 out of 100. On Metacritic, audiences gave
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: it a C on CinemaScore. and yet it ran for
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: 61 weeks and earned the kind of worldwide gross that
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: most horror films do not reach. That contradiction does not
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: resolve cleanly into a lesson about quality versus commerce. It
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: resolves into something more specific. An audience found something in
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: that building that the critics did not. Whether it was
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: the cotton candy brain matter, or the creature assembled from
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: photographs and twisted wire, or simply the fact that the
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: film committed fully to its own supernatural logic rather than
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: pulling the hoax ending of the original, Something held. Dick
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: Smith's final screen credit was this film. The man who
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: had shaped the look of The Godfather and The Exorcist
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: in Taxi Driver contributed one last artifact to cinema. An eyeless,
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: noseless head built for a 1981 film. Never used, donated
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: to a Halloween remake, dissolved in acid on screen. That
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: is where his filmography ends. Not with a prestige production.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: With a haunted house and a prop he had kept
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: in storage for nearly two decades. Malone wrote approximately 20%
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: of the screenplay and took no writing credit. The building
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: designed to recall Albert Speer's architecture never existed. The Vanacut
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: Institute was a set, a miniature, a matte painting. The
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: incredible Hulk coaster in Florida stood in for a roller
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: coaster called Terror Incognita. Nothing in that film was quite
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: what it appeared to be, which, considered from a certain angle,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: is precisely what William Castle would have wanted. Here is
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: what remains of House on Haunted Hill when you strip
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: away the box office figures and the critical scores and
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: the production trivia. A man named William Castle believed that
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: an audience needed to feel something physical when they came
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: to the movies. He handed out life insurance policies. He
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: wired seats. He built a skeleton that flew over the crowd.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: He sold the rights to his haunted house film to
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: pay for his daughter's education. And the rights changed hands.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: And the studios changed hands. and decades passed. His daughter
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Terry eventually tried to find those rights. She discovered that
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: three different men were already in a conference room discussing
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: what to do with them. She sat down with them.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: She made the film. That chain of events, a father's
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: practical decision becoming his daughter's inheritance becoming a Hollywood production,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: is not in the film itself. It lives behind it,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: and it is the most human thing about the entire Enterprise.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Jeffrey Rush walked onto a set designed after the architecture
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: of a regime that built structures meant to project the
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: permanence of atrocity, and he played a man throwing a
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: party where his guests might die. The production designer drew
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: from Albert Speer. The academic Sharon Packer warned that embedding
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: historical atrocity inside a ghost story risks making it easier
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: to forget. That warning is still live. The film did
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: not answer it. It raised the question in the architecture.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: and left it standing. The cotton candy dissolved. The mass
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: of 100 elements moved across the screen. The scratch-off tickets
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: were never printed again. There is a version of this
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: story where a cheap Halloween remake is just a cheap
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: Halloween remake, but the record is more complicated than that.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: A last credit for a master craftsman. A daughter finishing
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: what her father started. A sound technique that would reshape
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: how studios built films. Applied first to a ghost story,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: The audience is great at sea. The house is still standing.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: It was never real. And somehow that is exactly the point.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Oba Media.