TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Horror (House of Wax 1953 / The Haunting 1963 / Freaks / Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1941)

Description

HOUSE OF WAX (1953) In the wicked performance that crowned him the movies’ master of the macabre, Vincent Price plays a wax sculptor plunged into madness when an arsonist destroys his life’s work. Unable to use his flame-scarred hands, he devises a murderous way of restocking his museum. Phyllis Kirk, Carolyn Jones and Charles Bronson co-star. THE HAUNTING (1963) Robert Wise directed this first screen version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson and Russ Tamblyn come to the house to study its supernatural phenomena. Or has the house drawn at least one of them to it? “Guaranteed to chill you” (John Stanley, Creature Features). FREAKS Tod Browning (1931’s Dracula) directs this landmark movie – long banned, now highly lauded – in which the true freaks are not the story’s real-life sideshow performers, but “normals” who mock and abuse them. This unique ensemble play big-top troupers who inflict a terrible revenge on a trapeze artist who treats them as subhumans. DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941) One man is a paragon of virtue. The other is a murderous creature of the London night. They are the same person. Spencer Tracy headlines this version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale whose visual flourishes include a dreamscape in which carriage horses whipped by Hyde transform into the women in his life (Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner).