William Castle (April 24, 1914 – May 31, 1977) was one of those Renaissance men from the studio system that doesn’t really exist anymore. He’s known for writing, directing, and producing a string of B-pictures, and his storied career in Hollywood takes on a Forrest Gump-like tone, as he lucked into job after job on nothing more than gumption and bullshit. And yet, his legacy is felt throughout the 20th century.
Castle worked with Bela Lugosi and Orson Welles (he shot second unit footage for The Lady From Shanghai), and he got a reputation for bringing in films on time and under budget. He was a big fan of Hitchcock and even appeared in trailers and in framing sequences of his films to address the crowd directly. Hitchcock, in turn, noticed the success of Castle’s shock-thrillers and apocryphally decided to do one of his own—a project which became the movie Psycho.
Castle is best known for his outrageous and inventive
promotional stunts; he dreamed up a number of gimmicks to help bolster the
movies he financed, and it’s fair to say his gimmicks (and the mythology
surrounding them) are better remembered than the movies he made.
He never quite cracked the big time, but his penchant for theatricality and the people he inspired, and the projects that got made because of him, have earned him a seat at the table of great horror personalities, and, I think, transcending the genre completely. Joe Dante’s film Matinee (1993) is based entirely on the legacy of William Castle and his movies, and is worth seeing for John Goodman’s inspired performance as “Lawrence Woolsey, the Master of Movie Horror!”
The films below have been graded somewhat on a curve. While
it’s true that their appearance on the list is in deference to the inventiveness
of the gimmick, it must be the movie itself that determines whether or not they
make the grade. These lists are for horror movies first and foremost. Therefore,
the rankings below reflect the movies’ stature with regards to thrills and
chills.
A small-town doctor that no one seems to like is victimized when his three year old daughter goes missing. While he and his nurse run around trying to find her, the back story of what happened to the young girl’s mother, and her blind, hell-raising sister, unspools, and we get two sets of flashbacks before the mystery is fully revealed and the would-be murderer apprehended.
Grave-digging, one good jump scare, and a dash of film noir aren’t quite enough to elevate the script, but it moves at a brisk enough pace and would be a good, light warm-up for a double feature (which was exactly what it was supposed to be in the first place). Jim Backus (Thurston Howell) plays the sheriff entangled in this neo-gothic-to-the-point-of-being-Byzantine story with a kind of menacing swagger that’s a lot of fun to watch.
Castle had his own money on the line, and so he took to the road on a barnstorming tour, visiting theaters with actresses in nurses outfits, popping out of coffins (which figure in the movie—see? It’s a tie-in!) and working the patrons up in person and on the radio. The gambit paid off, and Castle was officially in business.
At the end of the 19th century, a London-based doctor visits Baron Sardonicus at the behest of the baroness. The doctor shows up, having once been in love with her, and Sardonicus begs him for a cure for his face, paralyzed from fright upon seeing the corpse of his father, whose body he himself exhumed. The doctor tries to cure Sardonicus, to no avail, and Sardonicus threatens his own wife in order to get the doctor to cooperate. He’s tortured everyone else for disappointing him in one way or another, so what’s the baroness, more or less? Here’s hoping the doc can find a cure and escape the clutches of Mr. Sardonicus!
In late 1961, Roger Corman had completed two of the movies
in his legendary “Poe Cycle”: The House of Usher (1960) and the Pit
and the Pendulum (1961) and they were critical and financial successes. I’m
not suggesting the Castle went looking for a gothic grotesquerie that he could
capitalize on, but more than one reviewer and critic sure thought so. Again,
putting this movie in the warm-up spot for a double feature that includes any
of Corman’s Poe movies would be a right smart pairing.
The movie was based on a short story that ran in Playboy magazine, “Sardonicus,”
by horror writer Ray Russell, who also wrote the screenplay. He would go on to
write other screenplays for Castle, and even a couple for Roger Corman
(including one of the Poe movies, The Premature Burial). The last movie
he worked on was 1982’s The Incubus, a minor drive-in cult classic,
based on his novel.
A down-on-their-luck family inherits a house, free and clear, just when they need it the most. The only stipulation is, they can never sell it, or leave. Oh, and also, it’s just a little bit haunted. The dead relative was a noted occultist, and these ghosts were part of his ongoing experiments. Why, he even developed a special set of kooky spectacles with which to view the ghosts. The young boy in the family, Buck, is fascinated by these apparitions. When he finds out there is a fortune hidden in the house somewhere, he and the estate’s lawyer make a pact to look for it together. It’s pretty clear, however, that the lawyer has no intention of sharing the fortune when he finds it. Meanwhile, the ghosts are ramping up their haunting, and the family is getting appropriately spooked.
This film is almost more of an urban fantasy film, in the same magical realism vein as Topper and Night Life of the Gods. There’s a lot of magic and super science, and some interesting poltergeist activity that is both seen and unseen. Aside from the modern-day setting, the movie is structurally very similar to a lot of by-the-numbers gothic haunted house flicks. Young Buck spends the whole movie calling the creepy live-in housekeeper a witch, and this is funny in that she is played by none other than Margaret Hamilton herself (and if I need to tell you she portrayed the most famous movie witch of all time, the Wicked Witch of the West, in The Wizard of Oz, then we can no longer be friends). Martin Milner takes a turn as the opportunistic lawyer, and even though he’s both charming and despicable, I kept expecting him to radio in a domestic disturbance using the Adam-12 call sign.
*Note: Anchor Bay currently has a blu ray double feature available
with 13 Ghosts and 13 Frightened Girls and, while the package
does not contain a ghost viewer, the anaglyphic overlay process was digitally duplicated!
For the first time since the movie appeared in theaters, if you have any cheap
pair of red and blue 3-D glasses, you can experience Illusiono! for yourself!
A brilliant scientist, played by Vincent Price, discovers a parasite that lives inside the human body and feeds on fear, enlarging, or, growing bigger, as it does (sorry: Matinee reference). Price manages to extract this “tingler” from the spinal cord of a woman, but it gets loose before he can do the scientific thing and cut it up and study it, you know, for science. And wouldn’t you know it, somehow or another, the tingler gets loose...in a movie theater...and the audience’s only defense against it...is to SCREAM! SCREAM FOR THEIR LIVES!
Vincent Price’s performance saves The Tingler, because he makes everything better. The premise is, well, kinda silly, and were it not for his sincerity, the movie would fall apart. He’s convincing as the doctor studying the effects of fear, right up to and including dosing himself with LSD—the first on-screen trip of its kind, and freaking out in his lab while his sidekicks watch from behind a closed door. That’s good news for us who are watching it from the comfort of our own home, but in 1959, Price wasn’t the draw. He was handily upstaged by Percepto!
This is it: the apex, the acme, the ultimate William Castle gimmick. Storied, legendary, even, with people swearing to this very day that they were electrocuted in their chairs. Percepto! was the perfect encapsulation of what Castle was shooting for; a way to create an interactive experience on the big screen. Here’s how it worked:
At a certain point in the movie, the audience in the theater would see a shadow of the tingler scootch across the screen (over the print of The Tingler, that they were all watching, see), and then the film would stop and melt and break (the best metaphor ever for “the projectionist buys the farm”) and then the screen would go black, as if the projector had stopped. That’s when Vincent Price would announce that the tingler was actually loose in the theater and their only chance of surviving was to scream as loud as they can.
There were actual screams on the soundtrack, but that was a moot point because by that time, the projectionist (very much alive, thanks ever so much) had pushed the button in the booth that set all of the de-icers to vibrating, sending many unsuspecting patrons straight up out of their chair, yelling bloody murder. After about 15 seconds of bedlam, Price would announce that the tingler had been dealt with, and then the movie would resume.
Not content to merely “shock” the audience, Castle planted
stooges in the crowd to start screaming, and even had someone “faint” and have
to be carried out of the theater on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance
while everyone watched. Whoever fainted would, of course, make a miraculous
recovery just in time for the next show.
Vincent Price plays an eccentric millionaire who has rented an infamously haunted house and invited five people to spend the night there. After giving them a tour of the place, showing off various murder sites, he offers each of them $10,000 to spend the night. Before anyone can seal the deal, strange things start happening, and coincidentally, the caretaker has locked them all in, preventing any chance of an early release.
What happens next is more akin to a Scooby Doo episode as the people are scared, and killed off, and attempt to do one another in while avoiding getting done in themselves. Everyone has a gun, and no one trusts anyone. It’s a chilling and surprisingly effective movie, with good twists and turns and a nice, tight little murder mystery in its midst. In fact, I’d argue that the gimmick, Emergo!, actually gets in the way of the film.
Emergo! billed itself as a means for the action on the screen to come right out into the theater. I mean, who wouldn’t want that? Hold your answer until I explain it to you fully: there’s a scene wherein an, um, animated skeleton is moving closer on the screen, menacing a character. Emergo! happens as the projectionist starts furiously working the pulley he’d installed earlier in the week, dragging a plastic skeleton, previously hidden in the wings, across and over the heads of the audience.
I don’t know if you have ever been inside an old movie theater, but they are basically cathedrals, okay? Giant, cavernous spaces, some with balconies, and others capable of seating hundreds more patrons than the multiplex closets of today. This skeleton, then, which I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and call “life sized,” seen from the audience, some fifteen or more feet high in the air, would have looked nothing like the twenty-foot tall image playing onscreen as it inches, limited by the reach of the frantic projectionist, across the auditorium in fits and starts.
Repeat customers, and likely many first-timers, would use
the prop for target practice, hurling popcorn, soda cups, and whatever else
they could throw. If the pulley got jammed up, the skeleton would hang,
twisting idly in the air conditioning, as the movie played on. And lest you
think I’m overstating it, I’ve actually seen this film in a theater that did
the whole Emergo! shtick, and can attest first-hand to its underwhelming impact.
The good news is this: House on Haunted Hill doesn’t need Emergo! or any
other gimmick, to be an engaging and fun murder-filled romp.
