But the movie does get points for making avarice, not vengeance, the villains’ motivation. Their questionable thinking is that she’ll be able to find a valuable idol in a mansion she’s never visited. Soon she is kidnapped by art thieves and forced to enter the titular house. Return to House on Haunted Hill follows the sister of one of House’s original - now deceased - survivors. If you want everyone to die, you can do that!” He was right: you can let everyone in Return die, and it’s one of the movie’s more memorable scenes. “You become a filmmaker, where you are part of the process of making the movie. It’s a whole new age, and people are going to love it,” he claimed. They even enlisted the help of Joel Silver, one of the founders of Dark Castle Entertainment, who co-produced the original House on Haunted Hill. Warner went so far as to promote it as the next big thing at 2007’s Las Vegas Home Media Expo. So when the straight-to-video sequel Return was in the cards, they saw an opportunity to deliver a truly interactive cinema experience. Attempting to innovate in this manner seems entirely appropriate. On top of that, Dark Castle Entertainment was also named after director William Castle, whose movies (the original 1959 House on Haunted Hill included) featured such oddball, ground-breaking gimmicks as a skeleton that flew through the audience mid-movie.

Warner seemed intent on using these new higher capacity formats to kickstart an interactive cinema revolution, with Return to House on Haunted Hill as their vanguard. Why that particular movie? It probably helped that, at the time, they were affiliated with Dark Castle Entertainment, the studio behind 1999’s horror remake House on Haunted Hill. one where a character is present and another where, having met a gruesome end, they’re entirely absent. Why is capacity important? Because the more choices interactive cinema offers, the more alternative scenes you need stored on the disc, e.g. To be fair, they had a point - double-layer Blu-Rays can hold ten times as much as a standard DVD. saw Blu-Rays and HD-DVD as the future of interactive cinema. And the DVD of Final Destination 3, which was released a year before Return, sported a “Choose the Fate” feature which let you decide how a character died. Let the Blood Run Free, for example, an early 90s spoof of Australian soaps, ended each episode on a cliffhanger and let audiences vote to determine how it was resolved.

Interactive cinema - where a viewer can alter the course of a film or show - isn’t a particularly new concept. But as a rare example of interactive cinema, it’s an appealing curio and a reminder of what might have been. If you’ve only ever seen the DVD version of the 2007 release, you’re probably scratching your head at that statement - it’s true that, viewed in a linear manner, it’s not going to win any Oscars. Return to House on Haunted Hill is quite a film.

House on haunted hill blu ray