Movies: William Castle

O'C mentioned The Tingler yesterday in a comment on the 4-D posting, calling it "worthy 4D schlock." Worthy or not, and for that matter, 4-D or not, it recalls the late, great William Castle, who was the god of the movie gimmick.

Movie gimmicks go back to practically the first movies. After all, the original gimmick was that a collection of still photographs "moved" in the first place. Whether we believe the stories of people running from the theater in fear when the Lumiere brothers' filmed train pulled into the station, audiences were certainly excited by it. Movies were made in color as early as 1895, with each individual frame hand-painted. Color was still a gimmick in 1939 when it came in the Oz scenes after the bleak sepia world of Kansas. It was the French who first used sound in movies, in 1900. 3-D? 1915, although it was the 50s, when Hollywood saw the direct competition of television, that it became commercial. In fact, that box in the home set off a wave of gimmicks, like wide screens and then really really wide screens, high fidelity sound, and generally anything that you couldn't get watching Milton Berle.

But there were gimmicks, and there were gimmicks. A true gimmick is something that has virtually no value whatsoever except as a promotional tool. And that's where William Castle comes in. He didn't push the envelope of the technical scope of film per se; he pushed the envelope of the advertising.

Macabre, in 1958, was his first horror film; he had done a whole bunch of B movies before that, mostly westerns and crime stories. Macabre, which he also produced, had a gimmick: Castle offered a $1000 life insurance policy for anyone who died of fright during the movie. To aid with the presumed flood of invalids and corpses, there were nurses in the lobby and hearses in the parking lot. This gimmick was a real hit, and in his way, Alfred Hitchcock parodied it in the Psycho ads in 1960, where he ruled that no one would be admitted after the movie started, and he further admonished audiences not to reveal the ending to their friends, because your friends would kill you. And if they didn't, Hitch would!

Castle's movies were the cream of adolescent goofiness because of the gimmicks. For House on Haunted Hill, a skeleton popped out of the screen. I saw that one in a late night screening; the only scary thing was that the wire might break and this stupid thing might fall on your head. For Tingler, buzzers encouraged you to scream (which kept you safe from the yucky Tingler); legend has it that these were actually rigged to give you a jolt in your seat, but that may be urban legend. Thirteen Ghosts started out with Castle on the screen, explaining how to use your ghost viewer that you received when you bought your ticket; it looked something like a strip of the paper used in 3-D glasses, to heighten the color of the ghosts on the screen. I saw it when it came out; why didn't I keep that ghost viewer? I also saw Mr. Sardonicus, in which Castle stopped the movie near the end for the audience to give thumbs up or down on the villain's comeuppance; the gimmick was like the one for 13 Ghosts, but this time we have a glow-in-the-dark thumb. As far as I know, poor Mr. Sardonicus never got of scott free, but I have to admit wondering at the time, what if audiences voted the other way? How would they work that? (I was young back then.)

And there were others in the Castle ouevre. William Castle may not have moved the needle on the art of film, but he sure as hell movied the needle on the art of fun. It's the sort of nutty business that you never see in theaters anymore.

By the way, Joe Dante's Matinee, if you haven't seen it, is a loving tribute to Castle, revolving around the movie Mant! ("Half man, half ant, all terror!"), filmed in Atomo-Vision and Rumble-Rama. Castle would have loved it. And he probably would have outdone it in his next picture.
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