10 Memorable Vincent Price Characters

It began when William Castle, drinking coffee in a shop near the Samuel Goldwyn studio, saw Price at a nearby table and offered him the lead role in House On Haunted Hill, sealing the deal with his description of the film’s climax: “Your skeleton scares the s**t out of your wife and she loses her balance and falls into the vat of acid!”

Price plays Frederick Loren, a millionaire who comes up with the most audacious (and contrived) scheme possible for disposing of his cheating wife – he offers 5 strangers $10,0000 each to spend the night in his “haunted” mansion. When they’re good and scared, he plans to unleash the puppet skeleton that will send his other half to her doom.

Tom Weaver calls Haunted Hill “the Citizen Kane of low-budget haunted house movies”, which must make Price the picture’s Orson Welles, the charismatic lead that holds the picture together. He makes such an impression, in fact, that when the picture was remade in 1999, Geoffrey Rush played a character named “Steven Price” – moustache and all.