
House on Haunted Hill
FADE IN:
BLACK SCREEN:
And in the darkness, a TICKING sound is heard. Soft and
steady -- soothing -- and then a BANG!
SMASH UP ON:
INT. HOSPITAL - BASEMENT NURSE'S STATION - NIGHT
A HAND punching a CARD into the huge, ticking TIME CLOCK on
the wall:
7:00 a.m.PULL BACK TO REVEAL - A bleary-eyed MALE NURSE beginning
his day. Alone inside a small wood and glass cubicle, he
rips off yesterday's day-at-a-time calendar page, revealing
today's date:
October 11, 1931.Goes to the Victrola inside the cubicle. Cranks the turntable
up to speed. Puts the huge needle down on a spinning 78: we
hear the song crackling through the empty halls of the
hospital -- depression-era Muzak: Horace Heidt & His Musical
Knight's "Keep Your Sunny Side Up"
The Nurse sharpens the last of a half-dozen pencils to needle-
points, sits down at his desk, and begins the tedium of
jotting entries into a tall stack of Patient Records.
Beat. And then he hears a soft, almost paw-like tapping on
the glass. He looks up: a PATIENT with a heavily bandaged
head is standing there, his eyes as dull and lifeless as
marbles.
The Nurse waves the Patient away. Goes back to his work.
Beat. And then the tapping is heard again. The Nurse snaps
his head up, about to bark at the man -- but the words stop
dead on his tongue:
Standing on the other side of the glass are now two dozen
patients. Likewise bandaged, staring silent and dead-eyed at
him.
Unnerved, the Nurse's finger slowly stretches towards a
buzzer-button just below the desk-top. It never makes it.
Because --
A HAND - lashes into frame and grabs the Nurse's fingers. The
Nurse looks up.
In addition to the mass of Patients outside the cubicle,
there are now six of them inside it, surrounding him. The
Nurse's eyes shoot to the still-locked doors of the cubicle,
and he utters one confused word --
MALE NURSE:
-- how -- ?
-- and then someone rams all six of his needle-sharp pencils
eraser-deep into his throat.
The Nurse gurgles and staggers -- falls back against the
Victrola, hitting the turntable crank as he goes down,
causing it to start spinning like a pinwheel.
"Keep Your Sunny Side Up" now blares through the halls triple-
time, sounding like a thousand manic chipmunks. And to the
beat of that tune, the Patients smash the CONTROL PANEL
inside the cubicle until it shorts-out and explodes! Which
pops open
- and sends dozens more wild, raving Humans rampaging through
the hospital, while EVERY ELECTRIC LIGHT in the place strobes
maniacally, and ORDERLIES & OTHER NURSES are chased down like
rabbits by Patients and beaten to pulp, and
INT. "THERAPY" ROOMS -
- filled with devices that look straight out of the Spanish
Inquisition are trashed to toothpicks, and some of the STAFF
are forced into devices and tortured as PATIENT RECORDS are
spindled and ignited -- flaming torches used to set
everything in the place ablaze, and A WOLFPACK OF PATIENTS
kamikaze down-
INT. CORRIDOR - CONTINUOUS
-- fling open a set of double doors marked "Cerebral
Hygiene," shouting: "Vannacutt!" And we see --
INT. CEREBRAL HYGIENE ROOM - CONTINUOUS
-- two people in surgical scrubs: the moustached Doctor
named VANNACUTT and a FEMALE NURSE wielding a 16mm camera. As
the two whip around, startled by the shouts, we see the
object of their ministrations: A PATIENT on a gurney being
Translation
Translate and read this script in other languages:
Select another language:
- - Select -
- 简体中文 (Chinese - Simplified)
- 繁體中文 (Chinese - Traditional)
- Español (Spanish)
- Esperanto (Esperanto)
- 日本語 (Japanese)
- Português (Portuguese)
- Deutsch (German)
- العربية (Arabic)
- Français (French)
- Русский (Russian)
- ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)
- 한국어 (Korean)
- עברית (Hebrew)
- Gaeilge (Irish)
- Українська (Ukrainian)
- اردو (Urdu)
- Magyar (Hungarian)
- मानक हिन्दी (Hindi)
- Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Italiano (Italian)
- தமிழ் (Tamil)
- Türkçe (Turkish)
- తెలుగు (Telugu)
- ภาษาไทย (Thai)
- Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
- Čeština (Czech)
- Polski (Polish)
- Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
- Românește (Romanian)
- Nederlands (Dutch)
- Ελληνικά (Greek)
- Latinum (Latin)
- Svenska (Swedish)
- Dansk (Danish)
- Suomi (Finnish)
- فارسی (Persian)
- ייִדיש (Yiddish)
- հայերեն (Armenian)
- Norsk (Norwegian)
- English (English)
Citation
Use the citation below to add this screenplay to your bibliography:
"House on Haunted Hill" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 2 Mar. 2021. <https://www.scripts.com/script/house_on_haunted_hill_476>.