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Sep 5, 2014 · Sept. 4, 2014 3:15 PM PT. Producer-director William Castle was something of a P.T. Barnum. The master showman took out an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London for his 1958 thriller “Macabre,”...
- Writer
Apr 21, 2016 · In the schlocky world of ’50s/’60s horror film marketing, William Castle was the undisputed king, and the “Emergo” effect was possibly his greatest promotional gimmick.
Feb 17, 2024 · With 'House on Haunted Hill,' William Castle popularized the horror movie gimmick, and set the stage for future midnight cult movie showings.
Oct 31, 2017 · William Castle’s first “Gimmick” film was the suspenseful "MACABRE". The picture really wasn’t a horror movie, but an old style thriller of the race against time variety. "Doctor Rodney Barrett’s" wife and her sister had been murdered in the past and some believe he's their killer.
- Flying skeletons! Actual hypnotism! Life insurance policies! The history of cinema is full of crazy gimmicks, desperately trying to get you to buy a ticket.
- Polyvision
- Life Insurance Policies
- HypnoVista
- Emergo
- Percepto!
- Illusion-o
- No Late Admissions
- Smell-O-Vision
- Fright Breaks and Coward's Corners
By William Bibbiani
Posted: Aug 9, 2018 7:55 pm
Some movies pack audiences into the theater the old-fashioned way, with compelling stories and charismatic stars. And if that doesn't work, a crazy gimmick sometimes does the trick.
"Gimmick movies" have been around since the early days of cinema, back when cinema itself was still new, and considered pretty gimmicky all by itself. The gimmicks ranged from innovative storytelling techniques to outlandish marketing tie-ins, from genuine examples of ingenuity to flat-out lies. And for every gimmick that took off - like synchronized sound, widescreen filmmaking, or 3D - there are plenty that only worked once or twice before audiences caught on and realized that they were duped, or at least that there were very few practical applications for the gimmick in question.
One of the earliest examples can be found in Abel Gance's Napoleon, a biopic which feature a finale in widescreen, decades before widescreen became the norm in movie theaters. Gance achieved the effect by putting three movie cameras side-by-side, which also allowed the filmmaker to engage in scenes that played out simultaneously from multiple angle...
One of William Castle's earliest movie gimmicks was for a thriller called Macabre, in which a father has only five hours to find his kidnapped daughter, who has been buried alive. The film was so scary, Castle claimed, that he was required to offer audiences a $1,000 life insurance policy just in case they died of fright. Movie theaters had people ...
The thriller The Horrors of the Black Museum stars Michael Gough (Alfred from the Burton/Schumacher Batman movies!) as the proprietor of a private torture museum who hypnotizes people into performing heinous acts, but when the British film was imported to America, the distributors thought it needed another selling point. So they added "HypnoVista,"...
Not every William Castle gimmick movie was cunningly brilliant. For his popular thriller The House on Haunted Hill, which starred Vincent Price as a millionaire who agrees to pay a fortune to anyone who can spend the whole night in a haunted house, he offered audiences a chance to experience "Emergo," which was just a skeleton on a wire that zoomed...
William Castle's classic horror thriller The Tingler stars Vincent Price as a scientist who thinks he's discovered a parasite that feeds off fear, and the only way to kill it when it attaches to your spine is to scream. At one point in the film "The Tingler" escapes, lights go out, and Price screams, "Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic! But ...
William Castle's 13 Ghosts is about a family who moves into a house with, you guessed it, 13 ghosts. When the ghosts appear, the screen turns blue and the ghosts reveal themselves as bright red projections. That's where Illusion-o comes in! The audience was handed red and blue tinted visors and told that if they believe in ghosts they should watch ...
Partially inspired by the gimmicky storytelling and marketing of William Castle, the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock decided to try his hand at novelty filmmaking. Not only was Psycho a twisting, turning horror thriller which killed off the protagonist in the first half of the film - breaking just about every rule in the book - but also, no one...
You can see movies, you can hear movies, so why can't you SMELL them? The thriller Scent of a Mystery featured a rather impressive cast - including Denholm Elliott, Peter Lorre and an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor - in a murderous whodunnit where the clues are often revealed via odors released into the audience at key points in the movie, like the sm...
William Castle's Homicidal told the story of a female serial killer, and Castle was so confident in the film that he gave the audiences a "Fright Break" towards the end of the film. If you were too scared to watch the ending, you could get your money back. The gag reportedly backfired, and refunds were actually being issued, until Castle added the ...
Jun 1, 2023 · In 1958, he started off with a bang, mortgaging his house for the film Macabre and putting in place his very first gimmick. To each audience member he would give a thousand dollar life...
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Nov 20, 2020 · In the 1950s, Hollywood's nerves over a declining industry in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II sparked a wild revolutionary craze: gimmicks.
