WILLIAM CASTLE: GODFATHER OF SCHLOCK : KATE VOSS REVISITS

William Castle is not regarded as a technically superb filmmaker by any measure. The gentlest thing you might hear from his most ardent critics is that he was a “poor man’s Alfred Hitchcock.” The pinnacle of his creativity, and the thing that has always made his work endearing to fans, is the special emphasis Castle placed on gimmicks to promote his films.

Well before he moved from his native New York City to Hollywood, Castle already had deep roots in the entertainment industry. Castle wrote in his memoir, Step Right Up!, that he was entranced by a production of the touring Dracula stage show that he saw in New York as a child. After the show, he went backstage to meet the star of the production: Bela Lugosi. The young Castle apparently made an impression on the actor, and he subsequently dropped out of high school at the age of 15 when, at the invitation of Lugosi himself, he was asked to join the touring production of the show as a stage hand.

Castle (born William Schloss, Jr.) became familiar with various aspects of production —set-building, writing, and eventually acting and directing— all skills which would enrich his practice as a filmmaker later on. Where Castle excelled the most, however, was in marketing. He had a knack for finding highly sensational gimmicks to promote productions, and this is what ultimately attracted the attention of Hollywood producers.

Castle cut his teeth in the big studios working under the tyranny of the infamous former president of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn. Castle got to work with some of the industry’s biggest stars, including Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, and Orson Welles.

He was used primarily to produce and direct B-list films. He built a reputation as someone who was able to finish projects on time and on budget, which was of the utmost importance in the B-lots of Hollywood. Eventually, he ventured out on his own, and started to self-finance projects.

He had a major breakthrough with his film Macabre (1958), which was inspired largely by the French film Diabolique (1955). To promote the film, Castle conceived a gimmick wherein theater goers would be issued a life insurance contract, which stipulated that if anyone were to die of fright, their beneficiaries would be remunerated. What’s more remarkable than the fact that he would employ such a gimmick was the fact that he actually got the Lloyds of London to back the project! Castle wrote in his memoir that after puzzling executives with his peculiar idea, the Lloyds of London executives set a contract wherein William Castle was insured for $5,000, enough to cover five individuals. If anyone in the audience were to indeed die of fright, Castle would receive the money from the Lloyds of London, and Castle himself would then be liable for paying the beneficiary of the deceased party.

Not surprisingly, no one ever died of fright at a screening, and thus, no one ever attempted to collect insurance money.

Castle would gain even greater notoriety with his films that starred Vincent Price. The first was The Tingler (1959), about an insect which burrows in the human spine and thrives on fear. The only way to keep the creature at bay is to scream. The gimmick was called “Percepto” and it was one of Castle’s most elaborate and expensive marketing maneuvers ever. Seats in the theaters would be equipped with low voltage shocking devices that would zap audience members during a scene from the film where the entire theater would go dark, and a voice-over would caution audiences that the Tingler was loose in the theater.

Price also starred in Castle’s The House on Haunted Hill (1959), which employed the “Emergo,” a gimmick which used a pulley system to suspend a plastic skeleton over the viewing audience —in other words, it appeared to emerge from the screen.

Castle’s greatest film was potentially 13 Ghosts (1960), which made use of his “Illusion-O” trick, which used red and blue cellophane lensed “ghost viewers.” In segments of the film where ghosts appear, the screen takes on a blue tint. The film was shot using two separate color filters, one blue and one red. If the viewer were to look through the blue lens, the ghosts would disappear. If the viewer were to look through the red lens, the ghosts would become more vivid. Would anyone in their right mind go to a movie called 13 Ghosts to not look at ghosts? Presumably not, but the marketing genius is in the fact that the viewer had an option.

Even though he achieved success in his own right, Castle always dreamed of crossing over and directing an A-list feature film with A-list stars. A major turning point in Castle’s career came when he was given the manuscript of a yet-to-be published book by Ira Levin entitled Rosemary’s Baby. Castle claimed in his autobiography Step Right Up! that he was the second director to be shown the book, the first having reportedly been Alfred Hitchcock.

Ultimately, Paramount studios insisted that a director with a stronger reputation was merited by the job, and thus, Castle signed on to produce, and Roman Polanski was recruited to direct. The meticulous Polanski crafted one of the finest horror films of the sixties, and it’s one which all horror enthusiasts must see —and thankfully, sites like sites netflix and direct-ticket.net allow you to stream it in its entirety.

Upon its release in 1968, the film was met with tremendous resistance from religious communities, but also with tremendous excitement and intrigue by the general public. Castle became gravely ill after the film’s release due to kidney failure, and his career never entirely bounced back. He found himself producing B-pictures once again, such as Bug (1975). Castle exploited the film by insuring Bug’s star, a gigantic cockroach named Hercules, for $1,000.

Although he lamented not establishing himself as a first-rate director of major commercial films which were taken seriously by critics, he continues to serve as a source of inspiration for many filmmakers who came later, perhaps most notably John Waters, who had scratch and sniff cards issued at screenings of his film Polyester (1981) as part of his “Odorama” marketing gimmick.

Castle may not be remembered as the most deft filmmaker of his generation, but he will most certainly be remembered.

Feature: Kate Voss

Gallery: Marcus Brooks

VINCENT PRICE 'HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL' LOBBY CARDS GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Vincent Price (Frederick Loren), Carol Ohmart (Annabelle Loren), Carolyn Craig (Nora Manning), Elisha Cook Jr (Watson Pritchard), Richard Long (Lance Schroeder), Alan Marshal (Dr David Trent), Julie Mitchum (Ruth Bridges)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – William Castle, Screenplay – Robb White, Photography (b&w) – Carl E. Guthrie, Music – Von Dexter, Special Effects – Herman Townsley, Makeup – Jack Dusick, Art Direction – David Milton. Production Company – Allied Artists. USA. 1959.

SYNOPSIS:

Millionaire Frederick Loren throws a haunted house party for his wife Annabelle. He invites five people from all walks of life – a test pilot, a secretary, an alcoholic, a sceptical psychologist and a newspaper columnist – to the notorious House on Haunted Hill, offering each $10,000 if they can survive the night. As they settle in for the night, all of them see ghostly apparitions. Loren’s much-despised wife is then found having hung herself in a suspicious manner. The guests begin to suspect that one of their number might be a murderer.

COMMENTARY:

House on Haunted Hill is one of the films of the great William Castle. William Castle was a filmmaker who conceived his films in a spirit of entrepreneurial hucksterism not unakin to that of a P.T. Barnum. Castle conducted stunts like taking out insurance policies in case audiences died of fright – Macabre (1958), or wiring theatre seats up with electric shock buzzers to jolt audiences at appropriate moments – The Tingler (1959). The great gimmick in House on Haunted Hill was having a skeleton winched across the theatre on a wire at the point in the film when a skeleton appears to rise from an acid pool and pursue the heroine.

In House on Haunted Hill, Castle does not just stop at theatrical gimmickry – the entire film has been constructed as the cinematic equivalent of a fairground haunted house show with heads popping up out of boxes, ghosts out of closets, hanging bodies and acid pools. The plot involves a group being offered $10,000 each if they can survive a night in the titular house and Castle even uses star Vincent Price as the equivalent of a carnival barker at the start of the film, having him turn to the screen to offer the same challenge directly to the audience.

Dramatically, House on Haunted Hill is talk heavy. William Castle lacked any style as a director and his pace is slow and pedestrian – his films invariably belied the threat of scaring people to death that he constantly promised to do. Nevertheless, the luridness of Castle’s pop-up effects and some effective plot twists on behalf of frequent Castle collaborator Robb White make the film an undeniably entertaining carnival show. Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart play off one another with a marvellously glacial dislike.

The film was given a worthwhile big-budget remake as House on Haunted Hill (1999). This in turn produced a direct-to-dvd sequel with Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007). 

William Castle’s other films of genre note as producer-director are:– as director of Crime Doctor’s Manhunt (1945), the sixth in a series of Columbia crime thrillers, of which Castle directed several, featuring a forensicologist against a split-personalitied killer; the psycho-thriller Macabre (1958); the classic The Tingler (1959), probably Castle’s best film; the haunted house film 13 Ghosts (1960); the psycho-thriller Homicidal (1961); Mr. Sardonicus (1961) about a man with his face caught in a grotesque frozen smile; the juvenile comedy Zotz! (1962) about a magical coin; the remake of The Old Dark House (1963) for Hammer; the Grand Guignol psycho-thriller Strait-Jacket (1964) with Joan Crawford; The Night Walker (1965), a psycho-thriller about a dream lover; the psycho-thriller I Saw What You Did (1965); the psycho-thriller Let’s Kill Uncle (1965); the ghost comedy The Spirit is Willing (1967); the reality-bending sf film Project X (1968); as producer of the classic occult film Rosemary’s Baby (1968); as producer of the anthology series Ghost Story (1972-3); Shanks (1974) with Marcel Marceau as a puppeteer who can resurrect the dead; and as producer of the firestarting insect film Bug! (1975). 

     

Review: HERE 
Images: Marcus Brooks 

MIA FARROW: ROSEMARY'S BABY: WILLIAM CASTLE AT THEBLACKBOXCLUB

CAST:

Mia Farrow (Rosemary Woodhouse), John Cassavetes (Guy Woodhouse), Ruth Gordon (Minnie Castevet), Sidney Blackmer (Roman Castevet), Ralph Bellamy (Dr Abraham Sapirstein), Maurice Evans (Edward ‘Hutch’ Hutchins)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Screenplay – Roman Polanski, Based on the Novel by Ira Levin, Producer – William Castle, Photography – William A. Fraker, Music – Krzysztof Komeda, Makeup – Allan Snyder, Production Design – Richard Sylbert. Production Company – William Castle Enterprises USA. 1968. 

SYNOPSYS:

Actor Guy Woodhouse and his wife Rosemary move into a new apartment. In no time, they befriend their neighbours, the aging Castevets. Rosemary soon becomes pregnant. However, when her obstetrician prescribes herbal medicines, which the Castevets provide, Rosemary becomes increasingly sicker. She becomes suspicious of the strange coincidences that start to occur around her and comes to believe that the Castevets, her obstetrician and even Guy are a conspiring coven of Satanists and that the child she is carrying may have been fathered by the Devil.

COMMENTARY:

Coming out around the same time that Time Magazine printed its famous ‘Is God Dead?’ cover in April 1966, this witty and highly enjoyable adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel was an opportune success that spawned the entire occult cycle of the 1970s. Rosemary's Baby gave birth to The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976) and a vast body of imitators of all three films, concerning themselves with either the practice of Satanism, Satanic or malevolent children and pregnancies, possession and the Anti-Christ. Up to the point that Rosemary's Baby came out, themes of Satanism and the occult had almost entirely been considered taboo topics on American screens. The English and continental horror film had broached the subject several times before with the likes of Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon (1957), Night of the Eagle/Burn, Witch, Burn (1961), Eye of the Devil (1966) and the same year’s The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968). The only major American film to do venture onto the topic was Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim (1943), which has many similarities to Rosemary's Baby with its theme of a girl in New York City uncertain whether there is a conspiring cabal of Satanists around her – but that experienced censorship problems.

  

Rosemary's Baby was based on a 1967 novel by Ira Levin. Ira Levin was a popular novelist who had written the thriller A Kiss Before Dying (1953) and would go onto create the best-selling works that became the basis of films such as The Stepford Wives (1975), The Boys from Brazil (1978), Deathtrap (1982), Sliver (1993) and The Stepford Wives (2004). The film rights to the book was purchased by William Castle, the producer/director who became famous in the 1950s for gimmick films such as Macabre (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959), The Tingler (1959) (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960) and Homicidal (1961). William Castle had originally intended to film Rosemary's Baby himself. In perhaps the most astute artistic choice he ever made, Castle recognised his limitations as director and handed the reins over to a young Roman Polanski. Although from all accounts the concord between William Castle and Roman Polanski was not always a smooth one, it was a wise decision – one shudders to think what would have happened had William Castle brought his crude and pedestrian directorial style to bear on the story. [Castle can be spotted in the film as the man smoking a cigar waiting outside the phone box where Mia Farrow is calling her gynaecologist]

The name of Roman Polanski is one that always comes underscored by phrases like ‘dark –’ or ‘flawed genius’. Born in France in 1933 of Jewish parents, Polanski grew up in the ghettos of Krakow and saw his family go to the Auschwitz concentration camp under the Nazis, while he himself survived. In the 1960s, Polanski began to develop a name for himself as director first with his surreal shorts and then the acclaimed Polish-made feature Knife in the Water (1962). His artistic breakthrough was the astounding Repulsion (1965), a subjective film set inside the paranoid fantasy of a woman whose sanity was crumbling. Polanski then made the black comedy Cul-de-Sac (1966) and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), which spoofed the Hammer horror film, before he was recruited by William Castle. Ahead for Polanski would be his artistic peak during the 1970s where he made works such as MacBeth (1971), Chinatown (1974) and the surreal identity exchange film The Tenant (1976). Into the 1980s and beyond, Polanski has made variable works such as Tess (1980), Pirates (1986), Frantic (1988), Bitter Moon (1992), Death and the Maiden (1996), The Ninth Gate (1999), The Ghost Writer (2010) and Carnage (2012), and gaining great kudos with the Holocaust film The Pianist (2002)

Almost invariably, any discussion of Roman Polanski is one that is undercut with stories of his personal life – such as how in 1969 the Manson Family murdered his American wife Sharon Tate. Most famouly, there was his flight from justice when he was brought up on charges of unlawful consent after having sex with 13 year-old Samantha Geimer in 1978 – although Polanski was prepared to plea bargain, he then learned of the possibility of a prison sentence from a hardline judge and fled the US on bail and has since remained resident in Europe fearing arrest should he ever return to the US, which flared up again in 2009. Even the film of Rosemary's Baby is overshadowed by real-life tragedy – the Dakota apartment block that served as the location for the Woodhouse/Castevet apartment was the location outside where Mark Chapman shot John Lennon in 1980.

Roman Polanski’s horror films (Repulsion, The Tenant) establish him as a master of internal horrors. They start at a point of normalcy and accumulate detail, building to a point that almost indistinguishably crosses the threshold of normality into out-and-out psychosis. It is an approach precisely suited to Ira Levin’s book. In fact, the film is an adaptation of astounding faithfulness – Ira Levin himself has called it “the single most faithful adaptation of a novel to ever come out of Hollywood”. (In an interview, William Castle amusingly speculated that the reason for this was that Polanski, in conducting his first ever adaptation of another writer’s work, was simply unaware that he had the freedom to improvise on the written text). 

Here Roman Polanski is having much more fun than he did in his abovementioned self-scripted horrors – Rosemary's Baby is a wonderfully jolly film that at the same time as it is hinting at creepy goings on around Mia Farrow also sits aside and invites one to laugh at the basic silliness of Satanists in present-day New York. Polanski manages the giggly, hysterical balance just right. Indeed, Rosemary's Baby is what one might call the first post-Val Lewtonian horror film. In producer Lewton’s films, the central menace hovers perpetually in a state of ambiguity about whether it is real or being imagined by the protagonists and audience. (See Cat People (1942) for discussion of Val Lewton’s films). Although, Rosemary's Baby is a film where you are not so much hovering between belief and doubt, as in a Lewton film, but between belief and laughing at the paranoid absurdity of the situation. A second viewing of Rosemary's Baby reveals some of the extraordinary subtlety that Polanski places into the characterisations – the inconsequential details that slyly creep in in the way that John Cassavetes gets Mia Farrow to eat the mousse, the reverse psychology he plays in getting her to go to dinner with the Castevets, Maurice Evans’s seemingly innocent complaint about his missing glove. By the time that Polanski arrives at the Scrabble game scene, the effect is one of extraordinary eerieness. 

In a film filled to a person with excellent performances, Mia Farrow is standout. Farrow gives a superb performance of frailty and vulnerability – indeed, Rosemary's Baby is possibly the best piece of screen acting that Farrow has ever done. You can almost see her nervous spirit valiantly trying to assert itself. About the time she begs into a coin-phone, “You’re thinking “My God, this poor girl has completely flipped, but ...”,” and “He sleeps in pyjamas now – he never used to before. He’s probably hiding a mark,” the whole audience is in love with her vulnerability. Both Sidney Blackmer and the great Ruth Gordon give warm, witty performances as the eccentric Castevets – Polanski seems to take a leaf from Night of the Demon in portraying the Satanists not as Mephistophelean and sinister, but as jolly and eccentrically likeable ordinary folk.

Rosemary's Baby is really a film that embodies the dark converse side of the American dream. John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow’s domestic rhapsodies over finding the perfect apartment, his job aspirations and rising success, the news of the arrival of the baby could be the sort of soap opera froth in favour of the American nuclear family ideal that had stepped out of Good Housekeeping in the previous decade. Of course, this is sardonically overturned. Indeed, the perfectly droll ending the film arrives at with motherhood triumphant uber alles is one that signals that the world has indeed been completely overturned, that God is finally dead and that Satan is now at home in the bosom of ordinary Family Values. It is as dark and twisted, if not even more subtle, in its vision of the world turned upside down as Night of the Living Dead (1968), which came out the same year and showed America literally being devoured. 

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976) was an unnecessary tv movie sequel. Ira Levin later wrote a sequel Son of Rosemary (1997), although this has yet to be filmed. More recently, Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production company, which has been behind a number of horror remakes in the 00s, attempted a Rosemary's Baby remake but gave up, saying they could not think of any new twists to add to the story.  

Review: Richard Scheib 

Images: Marcus Brooks      

WILLIAM CASTLE: VINCENT PRICE 'THE TINGLER' GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Vincent Price (Dr Warren Chapin), Philip Coolidge (Ollie Higgins), Patricia Cutts (Isabel Chapin), Judith Evelyn (Martha Higgins), Pamela Lincoln (Lucy Stevens), Darryl Hickman (David Morris)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – William Castle, Screenplay – Robb White, Photography (b&w + one sequence colour) – Wilfrid M. Cline, Music – Von Dexter, Art Direction – Phil Bennett. Production Company – Columbia. USA. 1959.  

SYNOPSIS:

Ollie Higgins visits coroner Dr Warren Chapin to claim the body of his wife’s brother, following his execution by electric chair. Chapin notes how the body died in a state of great fear and the spine has been snapped by an incredible force. He believes that this was caused by a living creature that he has named The Tingler. Chapin believes that a Tingler is a parasite that lives inside every human’s body and feeds on fear but can be destroyed by screaming. Chapin wants to capture a living Tingler. He locks himself in his lab and takes some LSD but is unable to prevent himself from screaming and thus killing his Tingler. Chapin then decides to use Higgins’s deaf-mute wife Martha as a subject in an experiment. He wants to scare her and because she cannot scream, she will be unable destroy her Tingler, meaning that he will be able to capture it. He sets about scaring Martha with various staged phenomena but instead this kills her. Chapin succeeds in extracting a live Tingler from her dead body. Meanwhile, Chapin and his unfaithful wife Isabel have been blackmailing one another. She now seeks to dispose of him by unleashing the captured Tingler.

COMMENTARY:

William Castle was one of the great genre producers and directors of the 1950s/60s. Castle was not a terribly great filmmaker but what he specialised in was promotional gimmicks. With Macabre (1958), he issued an insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London against audience members dying of fright; in House on Haunted Hill (1959), cinemas were equipped with a skeleton that was winched across the theatre at an appropriate point; in 13 Ghosts (1960), audiences were given ghost viewers – glasses with pieces of coloured cellophane over them that allowed them to see the ghosts; in Homicidal (1961) there was a Fright Break where the faint of heart could leave the theatre; while Mr. Sardonicus (1961) had the opportunity for audiences to vote on an ending where the title character would either be saved or doomed. (See bottom of the page for a full listing of William Castle’s genre films).

The Tingler was William Castle’s greatest moment of triumph (unless you count Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – but he was only producer on that). The Tingler has become a cult classic. Watching it you can see why – it has everything including an outrageously entertaining premise, Vincent Price, William Castle at the height of his gimmick-based ingenuity, wonderfully torrid scenes of marital in-battling between Price and his calculating tramp of a wife Patricia Cutts, even LSD trips (The Tingler was the first film to ever depict an acid trip). It is a wonderful little B film that lives up to its cult reputation in every way.

The concept of The Tingler and its being defeated by the “release of fear tensions” (ie. screaming) is positively ingenious (although the idea that something the size of what the Tingler is finally revealed to be could hide inside the human body undetected is preposterous). Frequent Castle collaborator Robb White turns in a tautly effective screenplay – there is a fine twist that reveals Philip Coolidge as having deliberately murdered his wife. Although the final seemingly tacked-on twist ending with her returning to life and coming after him makes no sense.

As a director, William Castle seemed driven by the crude sensationalistic approach of a P.T. Barnum more than anything. His actual direction was always flat and pedestrian. That said, some of the time here Castle’s brute force shock theatrics could prove effective. The scenes trying to scare deaf-mute Judith Evelyn – where she is pursued by a man in a mask waving a knife, hatchets being thrown and death certificates placed on bathroom mirrors – have a mechanical pedestrianness, but these are transcended by one wonderful scene where the water in a bath turns blood red (in a film that is otherwise shot in black-and-white) as a hand reaches up out of it. Where William Castle always succeeded was when it came to his gimmicks – not through any necessary imagination but more through his brazen hucksterism. With The Tingler, he was at the height of ingenuity after which he never achieved the same again. Castle’s inspired scheme here was the wiring up of theatres with electroshock buzzers beneath the seats, which would zap people at selected intervals (although the extent to which this was done and the number of theatres that were wired up was not as widespread as B movie myth would have it).

There is a marvellous prologue where William Castle himself appears to introduce the film: “At any time you are conscious of a tingling sensation, you may obtain immediate relief by screaming. Don’t be embarrassed about opening your mouth and letting rip with all you’ve got.” The finest moment in the film occurs near the end where Castle has The Tingler get loose in a silent movie theatre. There is that wonderful moment where the screen goes completely blank (this was probably the point where the electroshock buzzers were turned on and audiences jolted out of their wits). Castle’s voice again appears to assure audiences that there is no cause for alarm. A couple of moments later The Tingler is seen in silhouette entering the projection booth, whereupon Castle invokes the audience to scream for all they are worth and stun The Tingler. It is an absolutely glorious moment where both the film and the meta-filmic combine – the invocation is as much to the audience that is watching the film and being jolted as it is anything to do with what is going on on screen. The film ends with another blank screen and Castle’s voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, just a word of warning, if any of you are not convinced you have a Tingler of your own, the next time you are in the dark, don’t scream.” 

In recent years, there have been a number of remakes of William Castle films and a remake of The Tingler was at one point announced, although has yet to emerge.

William Castle’s other films of genre note as producer-director are:– as director of Crime Doctor’s Manhunt (1945), the sixth in a series of Columbia crime thrillers, of which Castle directed several, featuring a forensicologist against a split-personalitied killer; the psycho-thriller Macabre (1958); House on Haunted Hill (1959); the haunted house film 13 Ghosts (1960); the psycho-thriller Homicidal (1961); Mr. Sardonicus ((1961) about a man with his face caught in a grotesque frozen smile; the juvenile comedy Zotz! (1962) about a magical coin; the remake of The Old Dark House (1963) for Hammer; the Grand Guignol psycho-thriller Strait-Jacket (1964) with Joan Crawford; The Night Walker (1965), a psycho-thriller about a dream lover; the psycho-thriller I Saw What You Did (1965); the psycho-thriller Let’s Kill Uncle (1965); the ghost comedy The Spirit is Willing (1967); the reality-bending sf film Project X (1968); as producer of the classic occult film Rosemary’s Baby (1968); as producer of the anthology series Ghost Story (1972-3); Shanks (1974) with Marcel Marceau as a puppeteer who can resurrect the dead; and as producer of the firestarting insect film Bug! (1975).