‘The disquieting advertisements appeared in magazines like Time and Billboard: “The producers of the film MACABRE undertake to pay the sum of ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS in the event of the death by fright of any member of the audience during the performance.”
‘A ploy to lure viewers to movie theaters, the ads were also 100 percent genuine: movie-goers around the country were required to sign life insurance policies from Lloyd’s of London upon entering the theater. Nurses stood by in case of death by fright, and hearses lined the streets outside. As for the director who orchestrated the entire hoopla (and underwrote the insurance policies), he made spectacular entrances of his own as Macabre premiered in cities like Milwaukee, Chicago and New York, either in a hearse or in a coffin. It was 1958, and William Castle was determined to “scare the pants off” his audience.
‘“Reportedly he was pissed no one bothered to die, because it would’ve been great press,” says film historian Catherine Clepper. “He was kind of a genius when it came to promotion, anticipating what would delight audiences or differentiate his product, which in many ways was an average, low budget horror-family film of that period.”
‘Castle’s trajectory to Hollywood began with a stunt of a very different nature. While working at a playhouse in Connecticut in the late 1930s, a coworker received notice that she should return to Germany for a Nazi drama festival, which she had no intention of attending. “So Mr. Castle fired off a cable to Hitler telling him, in effect, to go climb a tree,” reported the New York Times. That stunt caught the attention of Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, and soon enough Castle was producing and directing movies.
‘But it wasn’t until he departed from Columbia and formed his own film company with writer Robb White that Castle solidified his reputation for zany gimmicks, earning the reputation for being the “Abominable Showman”. The first three films the company produced were especially popular: Macabre, House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler.
‘The first, of course, came with the life insurance policies against dying of fright—a tie in with the actual plot of the movie, which features an insurance scam and death by fear. The 1959 cult classic House on Haunted Hill featured an in-theater gimmick called “Emergo.” At the end of the movie, in another plot tie-in, as a skeleton rises out of a vat of acid, another skeleton hidden in a box above the screen dropped down on a zip line and glided above the audience. At one showing the skeleton broke free of its moorings and landed on an audience member, causing more fear than intended, and a slight injury.
‘“There’s this amazing text—it’s not even subtext—that you’re coming to the theater, [Castle’s film] is going to kill you [from fear], and then the villain of [his] movies is fear,” Clepper says. “It’s really clever and suggests [the promotional stunts] weren’t just random, crass commercialism.”
‘And finally, with The Tingler—a movie about a lobster-like creature that causes death by fear and can only be banished by screaming—Castle had theater owners rig several chairs with electric buzzers. He placed a female “plant” in the audience to collapse into hysterics at the climax of the film, just as audiences were told by the on-screen narrator, breaking the fourth wall, that the tingler had escaped into their theater. The movie also used “the ingenious but simply executed mixture of color and black and white” in a final scene, where everything was colorless except the bath tub filled with bright red blood, writes Kevin Heffernan in Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business.
‘While Castle’s work was unique for the way his gimmicks tied in with the narrative plot of his films—and for their enormous financial success—he was only one in a long line of directors trying to manipulate senses beyond sight and sound.
‘“You see a much more expanded version of experimentation and willingness to play with form around 1950 when television really begins to crack the film market,” Clepper says. “[Castle] is such a fun person to study and write about because he is inadvertently touching on longstanding utopian visions of what cinema can be, that it can touch you, both emotionally and physically.”
‘Castle wasn’t the only one experimenting with gimmicks and different ways of affecting audiences. Screenings of the classic 1931 version of Dracula included nurses in the theater and a dose of ‘nerve tonic’ (sugar pills) before the film, Clepper writes in a paper for Film History. Promotional events for 1958’s The Fly included an enormous plastic fly bathed in green light, and the 1965 film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies included a spinning hypnotic wheel and men in masks running down the aisles.
‘But Castle’s forays into horror seemed to secure a special place in the pantheon of cult classics. As Mikita Brottman writes in Film Quarterly, “A whole spectrum of established film critics have recalled a childhood experience of The Tingler as their archetypal horror movie-going experience.”
‘Kids were especially drawn to the silliness of the stunts, Clepper says. “The kids were the ones who brought repeated tickets [to House on Haunted Hill]. It was more of a carnivalesque atmosphere than a spooky, goosebumps atmosphere. You buy your ticket, you wait for that moment [when the skeleton appears], then everybody pulls out their slingshots”—and tries to shoot the ghoul.
‘Castle’s career continued beyond his “shock” productions, with perhaps his most famous producer credit coming from Rosemary’s Baby, which Castle purchased the rights to after reading the story upon which it was based. But today most remember him for the enjoyable spoofs he incorporated into his shows. Director John Waters is one particularly vocal fan: “William Castle is my idol,” Waters once said. “His films made me want to make films. I’m even jealous of his work.”
‘“Castle has had legs that he never anticipated having,” Clepper says. The director normally moved quickly from one movie to the next, discarding old gimmicks to come up with new ones. But even today, people want to remember them as they were seen originally: complete with dangling skeletons and buzzing chairs—an experience that an audience viewer, as Castle said, just couldn’t have at home in front of the television.’ — Lorraine Boissoneault
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Stills
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Further
The William Castle Blog
William Castle @ IMDb
Where to begin with William Castle
The Hair-Raising Gimmicks of the Abominable Showman
ReFocus: The Films of William Castle
Spine tingling came of age with William Castle
In praise of William Castle – undisputed king of cinema gimmickry
William Castle @ Letterboxd
WILLIAM CASTLE: MASTER SHOWMAN OF THE MACABRE
Showmanship: The Cinema of William Castle
William Castle: Grandmaster of Exploitation Cinema
William Castle, creep show king and Hollywood’s last great promoter
THE SEATS ARE BUZZING: THE FILMS OF WILLIAM CASTLE
The Horror World of William Castle
WILLIAM CASTLE – Mad As Hell Movie Showman
Emergo! Percepto! Illusion-o! The William Castle Circus Comes to Town
Collective Screams: William Castle and the Gimmick Film
The Branding of an Author: William Castle and the Auteur Theory
The Social Relevance of William Castle
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Extras
William Castle Gimmicks
William Castle, Hollywood Barnum
William Castle Discussion
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John Waters on Becoming William Castle and His Love of Great Gimmicks
by Liz Shannon Miller
A dream came true for John Waters in “Hagsploitation,” Episode 6 of FX’s “Feud: Bette and Joan.” For decades, the iconic director has been a vocal fan of William Castle, the B-movie king of showmanship whose promotional stunts remain legendary. In fact, “I wish I were William Castle,” Waters wrote in the 1986 collection “Crackpot.”
And thus, Ryan Murphy asked Waters to appear in “Hagsploitation,” which opens with Waters as Castle, introducing an axe-wielding Joan Crawford (played by Jessica Lange) during a promotional tour for the 1964 film “Straight-Jacket.”
“It was an honor to be asked to do it, because I’m such a fan of William Castle,” Waters said about the unannounced cameo. “I had to keep the secret for so long because we shot it a long time ago. And the secret kept. I was surprised, because there were 100 extras there.”
While playing Castle on screen, Waters is still very recognizably Waters, which was by design. “When they asked me to do it, I was like, ‘Well, I’m not fat, should I wear a fat suit?’ and they were like, no, we just like the conceptual idea of you playing him,” he said.
But the reverse was true when it came to his co-star. Waters hadn’t met Lange before, but said he thoroughly enjoyed spending the day with her, “because she was dressed like Joan Crawford and so we’d be having a normal conversation — but she’d look like Joan Crawford.”
This wasn’t the first time Waters was approached to be in a Ryan Murphy series — according to the director, he was asked to appear in “American Horror Story,” but the schedule didn’t work out.
Waters doesn’t necessarily plan to do more acting work in the future. “Every once in a while when they ask me, I just do it because I like the whole project. I was in the ‘Alvin and the Chipmunk’ movie, which was a real bucket list item.”
The one acting job he really wants? “I want to be in a ‘Final Destination’ movie.” (He’s a fan of the franchise.)
He’s also a fan of what Murphy’s been doing lately on television: “The O.J. thing [‘The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story’] was great. I mean, he’s the hardest working man. I don’t understand how he doesn’t just drop dead.”
Beyond working with Murphy, playing Castle was also an opportunity to celebrate the classic theater gimmicks that Waters loved as a kid. “When I first saw ‘House on Haunted Hill’ as a kid in Baltimore and the skeleton went out on the wire and the thousand kids in the audience went crazy … My whole life, I’ve tried to at least equal that cinema anarchy,” he said. “I came close with the end of ‘Pink Flamingos,’ but I didn’t tie with it. He still beat me.”
Waters likes to incorporate gimmicks into his performances, remembering how “Divine and I used to go around to the theaters — we used to come out and Divine would rip a phone book in half.” In fact, at his recent Christmas show, he distributed eyebrow pencils and little packets of anal bleach.
To Waters, “there’s always gimmicks and I’ll go to every one of them. I was the last person watching ‘Piranha 3-D’ in 3-D glasses by myself, the last time it played in a suburban theater in Baltimore. I still will go for the gimmick.”
There’s one gimmick that doesn’t work for Waters — the way some theaters have begun to upgrade to luxury seating. “They have seats now that are like first class airline seats, which make you go to sleep,” he said. “If I’m seeing a three-hour foreign film, I don’t want to watch it in a bed.”
Waters’ favorite gimmick remains Castle’s invention of the Percepto, which attached buzzers to theater seats during screenings of 1959’s “The Tingler.” (The instructions for how to wire the seats for the Percepto is just one item in Waters’ collection of Castle memorabilia.)
But he also fondly remembers the distribution of vomit bags for certain films, a trend which remains common. “I read that ‘Raw’ is giving out vomit bags — which is hardly an original idea and ‘Raw’ is a good movie. So I don’t even think it needed that. But the vomit bag gets revived every decade at least.”
After all, a good gimmick can often enhance a film or TV show. A gimmick, for example, like making sure that an iconic director gets played on screen by his biggest fan.
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Macabre (1958)
‘William Castle was just figuring out his gimmicky horror-suspense style when he made the boring “Macabre”. He’d get it right next time, with “The Tingler”–a person couldn’t GET more right than “The Tingler,” in fact. But “Macabre” is kind of a swing-and-miss, with its story of a missing little girl, possibly buried alive, and silly cemetery hijinks.’ — Mark Rinker
Trailer
the entirety
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House on Haunted Hill (1959)
‘Frederick Loren has invited five strangers to a party of a lifetime. He is offering each of them $10,000 if they can stay the night in a house. But the house is no ordinary house. This house has a reputation for murder. Frederick offers them each a gun for protection. They all arrived in a hearse and will either leave in it $10,000 richer or leave in it dead!’ — Letterboxd
Trailer
the entirety
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The Tingler (1959)
‘A cultish chiller that acquired some fame on its original US release when Castle wired up the cinema seats with electrical buzzers to give his audiences a little extra shock value. The plot is ingeniously ludicrous: a doctor (Price) discovers that fear breeds a centipede-like organism in the base of the spine. The organism can kill if its grip is not released, and only a scream can do that. So the good doctor experiments on a deaf-mute, the wife of a cinema-owner who only shows silent movies. Castle was a real Hollywood showman, a downmarket Hitchcock whose work shows considerable flair. The scenes in the movie theatre are very striking, and the way the doctor torments his victim – by providing her with visual shocks (a kind of acid trip) and by causing running water from a tap to turn into blood (black-and-white gave way to colour here) – is clearly the work of a sick mind. Castle recalled, ‘I was asked by somebody at Yale whether The Tingler was my statement against the establishment and whether it was my plea against war and poverty. I said, Who knows?” — Time Out (London)
Introduction to “The Tingler”
the entirety
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13 Ghosts (1960)
‘William Castle’s masterpiece – a gimmick (illusion-o, in which red and blue filters were placed separately and on a horizontal axis to either emphasize or hide the spooky haunts, otherwise known as Ghost-Viewers) that actively yearns for participation within the exhibition space, constantly switching back and forth from different combinations of viewing, resulting in a varied experience of individualized image making. You make your own movie! Proto-Scooby-Doo in that it utilizes ghosts as a cover-up for earthly criminality. Even ends with the young boy putting on the villain’s dollar-store Halloween mask to scare the family as they chuckle heartily! I love this movie as much as I love cobwebs and secret passages…so a whole fucking lot!’ — Silent Dawn
Trailer
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Homicidal (1961)
‘Needless to say, the film has a somewhat campy feel to it now. No more so than when Emily goes on the rampage in the wedding shop, snapping the head off a nearby statue of a groom. However, at least the film does achieve one unexpected chill, when Emily describes to Helga how the justice of the peace suffered with surprising ferocity. Typical of the showman that Castle was, the film came complete with a couple of gimmicks. The first was a ‘fright break’ a 45 second timer ahead of the film’s climax as the ‘final girl’ approaches the house where the killer lurks. If movie-going patrons couldn’t stand the suspense, then Castle had fashioned a ‘coward’s corner’ in the lobby! Whilst certainly entertaining, HOMICIDAL is, despite the gimmicks, more restrained than some of Castle’s more celebrated movies.’ — Justin Kerswell
Trailer
the entirety
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Mr Sardonicus (1961)
‘Mr. Sardonicus is a 1961 melodrama directed by William Castle. When it was originally released to cinemas, it was allegedly distributed with two alternate endings. Which ending was shown at any given screening supposedly depended upon the results of an instant poll of audience members. Only one ending is available in existing versions, however, and the existence of the second is unconfirmed.’ — Lost Media Archive
Trailer
the entirety
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13 Frightened Girls (1963)
‘While attending a Swiss school for diplomats’ daughters, the teenage daughter of the American ambassador uses her access to various embassies to engage in espionage.’ — Letterboxd
Trailer #1
Trailer #2
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The Old Dark House (1963)
‘This film originally came about due to the fact that both Hammer and Castle were in pre-production on their own separate versions of The Old Dark House, and thought it would be silly to release them at the same time. Why not produce one together? So Hammer convinced William Castle to venture out to England and work on their film as a co-production, and Castle agreed.
‘The film itself had some censorship problems in the UK. The BBFC (British Board of Film Certification) did not release it in England until 1966 and it was significantly cut down. While the US got the film at 86 minutes in 1963, the UK had to remove all close-ups of corpses in order to achieve an “A” rating, leaving the film at a total running time of 77 minutes. Additionally, while the film was shot in Eastman Color, due to financial restraints, the original US distribution of the film was all black and white prints. It was much cheaper to print black and white 35mm prints from a color negative than to release the film in color.’ — New Beverly
Trailer
the entirety
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Strait-Jacket (1964)
‘In 1964, William Castle would employ the biggest gimmick of his moviemaking career – Joan Crawford as an ax murderer in Strait-Jacket. Working at Columbia Pictures, Strait-Jacket would turn out to be William Castle’s most respectable movie to date, with a screen legend front and center and Psycho author Robert Bloch penning the screenplay. Of course, Strait-Jacket is now hailed as a camp classic, which it is no doubt, but it’s also a throwback melodrama that is punctuated by its moments of violent ax murders.’ — Fan Boy Nation
Trailer
Joan Crawford Wardrobe/Makeup Test for Strait-Jacket
Excerpt
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The Night Walker (1964)
‘Don’t watch The Night Walker at night, or you will run to hide beneath your covers with all the lights on! Solid Castle flick with an abundance of spooks, ghouls, and frights! Barbara Stanwyck has to put up with a bunch of old dudes fucking around with trying to get their hands on some money, that’s the only bad part. How William Castle continued to nab famous Hollywood women for shit like this is beyond me. As far as I know, this film didn’t have a gimmick… but it didn’t need one! That wedding scene plus some of the stuff at the end was enough to make me want to poop my pants!’ — Scare-ik
Trailer
the entirety
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I Saw What You Did (1965)
‘Following Joan’s termination from the film “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte” in August 1964, “I Saw What You Did” was her first appearance in a film. Upon signing her contract for the film on September 29th, 1964, Joan supplied producer William Castle with paperwork from her doctors documenting her complete recovery from her ailment. For her services, Joan received $50,000.00 and top billing on promotional material. Grayson Hall was reportedly promised the role of “Amy Nelson” before Joan accepted it. The film’s original title was “In Case Of Murder.” “I Saw What You Did” was the first of a new five-film contract William Castle made with Universal. Pre-production arraignments began in July 1964 upon Castle’s completion of “The Night Walker.”‘ — The Concluding Chapter
Trailer
Excerpt
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Let’s Kill Uncle (1966)
‘The great Nigel Green brings a delicious patina of sardonic menace to one of his few lead roles as the cheerful would-be assassin of his newly rich nephew. One of William Castle’s later efforts, it’s gimmick-less and shot pretty much like a tv show, but its uneasy mix of fun and child murder has a pleasingly unwholesome tone.’ — Trailers from Hell
Trailer
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Shanks (1974)
‘Malcolm Shanks is a sad and lonely man, deaf, mute and living with his cruel sister and her husband, who delight in making him miserable. His only pleasure, it seems, is in making and controlling puppets. Thanks to his skill, he is offered a job as a lab assistant to Dr. Walker, who is working on ways to re-animate dead bodies by inserting electrodes at key nerve points and manipulating the bodies as if they were on strings. When the professor suddenly dies one night, Shanks gets the idea to apply their experimental results to a human body, and then to start exacting some revenge.’ — Letterboxd
Trailer
Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It looks like next week for Parc Asterix at this point, but, yes, I’ll report back. Thank you so much again re: the gift from your mom. That is so cool! We go to London on Friday and come back to Paris on Monday. I never watched ‘Skins’. I was always curious about it. Nice, so far, about her book. Thanks to love for watching out for me. If there are French ghosts, I probably don’t want to cross them or even cross their paths unknowingly. Love proposing a return to movies with in-theater gimmicks, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Doesn’t northern Scotland have forests? Never ventured up there, but I somehow imagined there would be. I saw ‘Blair Witch’ when it was freshly out, and I’ve said this before, but it’s the only horror movie I’ve seen as adult that actually scared me. Which sounds strange now that fake real footage horrors are so commonplace, but, at the time, eek! ** Carsten, Assuming you mean Lula and the successful Serbian students’ outcome, yes, very good news. Gus used to be an auteur who occasionally made mainstream-ish films for whatever reason, money, I assume, but since a couple of decades ago or longer, he just makes standard fare films with some attempted style. I haven’t talked to him in ages, but I wonder what happened. Well, yeah, when you finish the script, the very unfun part starts. That Eggers did a remake of ‘Nosferatu’, a film where there was absolutely no need for it be remade, that kind of said it all. ** Adem Berbic, Amusements parks in that vicinity … Six Flags Great Adventure is the biggest Six Flags park in the US, so probably that. Dorney Park in Pennsylvania. Hershey Park, but that’s about a 3 hour drive from NYC. There’s good old Coney Island. I hear very good things about Kings Dominion, sort of nearish Baltimore. There’s some. I don’t know the details on Zac’s pluses and minuses on the Autechre gig, but I’ll ask him for more precision. Inhale a tree? Excuse me? Sadly I would imagine that explosion predates ‘PGL’, but I can dream. ** scunnard, Okey doke, my pleasure. ** laura w., Hi. There are a whole bunch of soulless, overblown filmmakers these days. Worst culprits to me off the top of my head: Denis Villeneuve, Nicolas Refn, Christopher Nolan, Eggers, and, gosh, so many. Yeah, the lack of chemistry in ‘Lighthouse’ was fatal. I remember when Willem Dafoe was surprising and fun, and now he just does his usual schtick to excess repeatedly. I would love an apple cider donut. I don’t think I’ve ever had one. Ooh. ‘Coraline’ is really good. I really want to see ‘Wildwood’. I’m off to London on Friday morning. ** kenley, Hi, kenley!!! I kind of figured you were busy settling in and adjusting and all that stuff. My summer was okay apart from the regular and quite horrible heatwaves. No, no haunted houses over here, but the amusement park Parc Asterix does very solid, American style Halloween makeover thing, and I think there are a handful there. God, I hope so. I know, I had a fair number of friends who were ‘blown away’ by ‘The Lighthouse’ and really didn’t like it when I verbally tore it to pieces. A lot of shocked, uncomprehending faces. I’ll be in London hosting a screening of ‘Room Temperature’ on Halloween. Nothing to put on a costume on and do around here. But I’m not a costume guy anyway since I have my stupid clothing/dye allergy. People in France increasingly care about Halloween, but France is not putting out the effort to satisfy and exploit that interest. Sort of an in-between situation. So cool to see you! What is your Halloween going to be like? ** Bobby Boy, Hi there! Bernhard has a way of nailing almost everything. Obviously I live quite a bit in the internet world given this blog and the hours and hours it takes to make the posts and all of that. But I think have a decent analogue life, or so I seem to be able to tell myself. But maybe living in Paris helps. Paris is a pretty physically seductive place. Maybe people want to kill themselves in Aokigahara because they think it’ll make their deaths seem classical? Why do I dream of being buried in Pere Lachaise? I don’t know, but I do. Strange. You know, being the age I am, it was hard to find people my age when I was young who were into adventurous, experimental films or books or music even back then. But when Zac and I show our films, the audiences are often mostly young people who are really into it and seem hungry for more strange stuff. So I do have hope while at the same time agreeing with you. Hey, really nice talking with you. ** Right. Today you get some old fashioned and maybe slightly predictable Halloween-related entertainment, but why not, right? See you tomorrow.
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