"She's so amusing", says Price twice during his opening narration, in a rancid & ironic tone of voice that makes it clear that Frederick does not regard Annabelle as amusing, or anything else that's terribly affectionate. The particular role that Price plays in this film is Frederick Loren, a wealthy industrialist hosting a "haunted house party" at the suggestion of his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart). Price, more than anything else, is what gives this film and The Tingler their sense of heightened fun, for even when he's playing a sour, miserable shit (as he is in House on Haunted Hill, more than just about any of his other roles), he's doing it from a place of warped, spiky fun. Which wouldn't be a terribly unreasonable argument to make, given the nature of his roiling, campy, hambone performances in movies of this sort.
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Of all these, House on Haunted Hill is perhaps the best, and one of the most entertaining for reasons that have nothing to do with its gimmick, unless you consider the casting of Vincent Price in a movie like this to be a gimmick. Namely, exaggeratedly unserious horror films finely tuned to appeal to a matinee audience of kids looking to be entertained more than spooked. And yet Castle's best work, which I'd consider at a minimum to include The Tingler (Percepto, the aforementioned buzzing seats), 13 Ghosts ("Illusion-O", polarised lenses revealing hidden spectres), and our present subject, House on Haunted Hill, are all very close to perfect versions of what they are. There is, for example, the career of director & producer William Castle, whose film career could not be reasonably summarized without heavy reliance on the word gimmick, for nearly all of his best films are noteworthy not just for having gimmicks, but for how those gimmicks are in many cases the most defining element of the whole: entire movies where you get the feeling that an entire plot was built around finding a way to justify putting electric buzzers in the theater seats.
This is not a hard-and-true relationship. The word "gimmick" almost always comes with a certain sneering tone of superiority attached: the suggestion is inherent that a thing was less gimmicky, it would be improved as a result.