Disembodied screams, rattling chains, and ghoulish groans amidst creaking doors- all a delicious mixture of frightful sounds that emanate from a jet-black screen.
Suddenly Watson Pritchard’s floating head narrates the evening’s spooky tale…
“The ghosts are moving tonight, restless… hungry. May I introduce myself? I’m Watson Pritchard. In just a moment I’ll show you the only really haunted house in the world. Since it was built a century ago, seven people including my brother have been murdered in it, since then, I own the house. I’ve only spent one night there and when they found me in the morning, I… I was almost dead.” -Watson Pritchard
The marvelously dashing face of Vincent Price or for the film’s purposes, Frederick Loren’s head sporting a plucky mustache and highbrow tone introduces himself in front of the imposing Modern-Ancient structure.
“I’m Frederick Loren and I’ve rented the house on haunted hill tonight so my wife can give a party. A haunted house party"¦ She’s so amusing. There’ll be food and drink and ghosts and perhaps even a few murders. You’re all invited. If any of you will spend the next twelve hours in this house, I’ll give you each $10,000. Or your next of kin in case you don’t survive. Ah, but here come our other guests…”“It was my wife’s idea to have our guests come in funeral cars… She’s so amusing. Her sense of humor is shall we say, original. I dreamt up the hearse. It’s empty now but after a night in the house on haunted hill"¦ who knows.”“Lance Schroeder a test pilot, no doubt a brave man but don’t you think you can be much braver if you’re paid for it?”“Ruth Bridges the newspaper columnist. She says the reason for her coming to the party is to write a feature article on ghosts. She’s also desperate for money. Gambling.”“Watson Pritchard a man living in mortal fear of a house and yet he’s risking his life to spend another night here"¦ I wonder why? He says for money.”“Dr. David Trent a psychiatrist. He claims that my ghost will help his work on hysteria. But don’t you see a little touch of greed there around the mouth and eyes?”“This is Nora Manning- I picked her from the thousands of people who work for me because she needed the 10,000 more than most. Supports her whole family… Isn’t she pretty?”“The parties’ starting now and you have until midnight to find the house on haunted hill.”
Von Dexter’s music, a mixture of solemn strings, and a sustained and queasy Hammond organ & Theremin greet us with an eerie funeral dirge while the shiny black gimmicky funeral cars pull up in front of the quite sinister post-modern structure.
And this is just the opening fanfare of William Castle’sclassic House on Haunted Hill!
White’s story is quirky and wonderfully macabre as it works at a jolting pace delivering some of the most memorable moments of offbeat suspense in this classic B&W B-Horror morsel from the 50s!
The success of the film inspired Alfred Hitchcock to go out and make his own low-budget horror picture- Psycho 1960.
Much of the style and atmosphere can be attributed to the unorthodox detail by art director Dave Milton and set designer Morris Hoffman. The exterior of the house is actually The Ennis Brown House in Los Angeles, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, built in 1924, and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
There’s a pervasive sense of dread in House on Haunted Hill, that makes the house itself a ‘spook.’
Whether the house is haunted or not, its forbidding presence tells us that it just doesn’t matter. The history of the house itself, its violent past is enough to give one chills. While not in the classic sense like that of RobertWise’s diseased and imposing Hill House, William Castle does a fabulous job of inventing a parameter to tell a very cheeky and pleasurable little scare story. As David J Skal puts it succinctly “The real, if unintentional spook in House on Haunted Hill is postwar affluence.”
The narrative is fueled by the creepy atmosphere of the house itself. Not using a claustrophobic Old Dark House trope but rather a modern Gothic construction that swallows you up with odd motifs and a sense of malignancy within the fortress walls. The starkness of the wine cellar and it’s empty minuscule dark grey rooms with sliding panels is almost more creepy than black shadowy corners with cobwebs and clutter. Director of Photography Carl E Guthrie  (Caged 1950) offers some stunning and odd perspective camera angles and low lighting which aid in the disjointed feeling of the sinister house’s magnetism.
The constant explorations into the viscera of the house by the guests is almost as titillating as the criminal set-up and conspiracy that is afoot propelled by Von Dexter’s tantalizingly eerie musical score with deep piano notes and eerie wispy soprano glossolalia.
House on Haunted Hill works wonderfully, partly due to the presence of the urbane master of chills and thrills, the great Vincent Price who plays millionaire playboy Frederick Loren. Vincent Price was a versatile actor who should not be pigeonholed as merely a titan of terror, given his too numerous layered performances in great films like Otto Preminger’sLaura ’44, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’sDragonwyck ’46, etc. Vincent Price did however make his mark on the horror genre with House on Haunted Hill. The New York Herald-Tribune praised Price’s performance as having “waggish style and bon-vivant skepticism.”
As David J Skal puts it in his, The Monster Show {Vincent Price} “Could bring an arch elegance to the most insipid goings-on…“
The omnipresent Elisha Cook Jr. is superb as Watson Pritchard, the neurotic sot who is riddled with fear, spouting anecdotes about the house’s grisly history.
I adore Elisha Cook, from his cameo in Rosemary’s Baby, his performance as George Peatty in Kubrick’s masterpiece The Killing ’56 to his very uniquely intense role as Cliff the sexually jazzed up drummer in Phantom Lady ’44.
Elisha Cook Jr as the doomed George Peatty in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing ’56.
The strikingly beautiful Carol Ohmart plays Loren’s treacherously seductive wife Annabelle who is sick of her husband’s irrational jealousy. Has she already tried to poison him once but failed? The story alludes to as much. Annabelle wouldn’t be happy with a million-dollar divorce settlement, she wants ALL her husband’s money! Annabelle is Loren’s fourth wife, the first wife simply disappeared.
Director/Showman extraordinaire William Castle brings us writer Robb White’s story centered around a quirky, dilapidated mansion once owned by eccentric scientist/occultist Dr. Plato Zorba, who collected ghosts from around the world and invented goggles that enable you to see them. When Dr. Zorba dies, he wills the strange house and its contents to his nephew Cyrus Zorba (Donald Woods) and family, wife Hilda (Rosemary De Camp), son Buck (Charles Herbert), and daughter Medea (Jo Morrow). The Zorba family is broke; the bank has even reclaimed the last bit of furnishings. While blowing out the candles on his birthday, Buck wishes for a house with furniture that can’t be taken away.
So, the fortuitous inheritance comes just in time. Not long after moving in, they discover that the house is haunted. Cyrus finds Uncle Plato’s notes and learns about the 12 ghosts that inhabit the house, including Dr. Zorba himself, who also leaves his housekeeper, Elaine Zacharides (Margaret Hamilton), whom Buck constantly refers to as a witch, not a subtle homage to her role in The Wizard of Oz. Hamilton adds a nice bit of nostalgic camp to the creepy environment: floating objects, hidden panels, a bed canopy that closes up like a vice grip to crush the person sleeping in it, and lurking cobwebby fiends who lunge from the shadows. Trapped within the walls of the house are the 12 manifested ghosties: the crying lady, a feisty skeleton, a meat-cleaving Italian chef who murdered his wife and her lover in the kitchen, a roaring lion alongside its headless tamer, and Dr. Zorba himself. They need a 13th ghost to set them free. The family is in danger because of the fortune hidden in the house. Martin Milner plays Benjamen Rush, the lawyer who handles the estate for the Zorbas. Is there a flesh-and-blood killer among them looking for the hidden fortune? Well, you’ll just have to find out for yourself… A true William Castle fun house ride.
William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill (1959) is a quintessential campy horror film that has become a cult classic. Starring Vincent Price as the eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren, the movie follows a group of strangers invited to a supposedly haunted mansion for a night, with the promise of $10,000 each if they survive until morning.
The film’s plot revolves around Loren and his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), who have a tumultuous relationship filled with suspicion and accusations of attempted murder. Loren even gives out guns, which are presented as little party favors set inside mini coffins. The guests encounter various terrors as the night progresses, including apparent ghosts, gliding white-eye-balled witches, mysterious attacks, a severed head, and unexplained phenomena, all while Elisha Cook Jr. revels in the violent history of the house while he drinks himself into a stupor.
Castle’s direction combines gothic horror elements with psychological tension, creating a unique atmosphere that blends genuine scares with campy theatrics. The movie is famous for its use of carnival-style haunted house props and effects, which contribute to its distinctive tone. And his infamous gimmicks like Emergo, which entails a floating skeleton that elicited laughs from theatergoers who threw popcorn boxes at it rather than shiver in their seats.
House on Haunted Hill is particularly notable for its twist ending, which plays with audience expectations about the nature of the haunting. The film keeps viewers guessing whether any of the major players elaborately staged the happenings or if it was supernatural in nature.
The movie’s impact extends beyond its initial release, influencing future horror films and inspiring remakes. Vincent Price’s iconic performance has cemented the film’s place in horror cinema history.
1 down, 149 days to go… Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally, affectionately known as MonsterGirl
They want my blood. Their lives are mine. I still get squeamish.
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964)
Directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney SalkowThe Last Man on Earth 1964 is based on the best-selling sci-fi/horror novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, who, unhappy with the script, used the pseudonym Logan Swanson for the screenplay. The film remains pretty close to the book, and keep in mind that The Last Man on Earthpredates Night of the Living Dead (1968) by 4 years.
Piero Mecacci ( Suspiria 1977, Hatchet For A Honeymoon 1970, The Young, The Evil and The Savage 1968, was responsible for the film’s make-up.
Matheson’s story is perhaps the first involving vampire-like beings whose origin is not rooted in the supernatural but stems from a scientific, biological catastrophe. This pandemic wipes out an entire civilization. It is also the first of three adaptations of Matheson’s book, and stands alone as the most striking, although I will always have a special kind of 70s love for director Boris Sagal’s version of TheOmega Man 1971.
Heston plays Neville, and Rosalind Cash plays Lisa in The Omega Man (1971), the second adaptation of Matheson’s book. It is an even more modern reworking of a timeless story. A victim of the plague in 1971.
Starring Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan, Franca Bettoia as Ruth Collins, Emma Danieli as Virginia Morgan, Umberto Raho as Dr. Mercer, and Giacomo Rossi-Stuartas Ben Cortman. In 1971, it is the wonderful Anthony Zerbe as Matthias who reprises the role of the vengeful cult leader of ‘the family’ who craves Heston’s (Neville) lifeblood.
“Alive among the lifeless… alone among the crawling creatures of evil that make the night hideous with their inhuman craving!”
Synopsis:
“December 1965. Is that all it has been since I inherited the world? Only three years. Seems like 100 million.”
The year is 1968, Vincent Price in a somber fashion plays Dr. Robert Morgan who like Sisyphus is condemned to repeat his daily tasks of replenishing his stock of garlic and mirrors (the undead hate both), adding gasoline to his generators, collecting the dead bodies that lay strewn around his dismal and cluttered house, and throwing them into the enormous pit where he burns the remains while wearing a gas mask, which is effectively creepy on its own.
“I need more mirrors, and this garlic has lost its pungency.”
For much of the film’s beginning, Morgan narrates his story as an inner dialogue: “An empty, dead, silent world.”
“There was a time when eating was pleasurable now it bores me. just a fuel for survival, I’ll settle for coffee and orange juice this morning. But first, there’s my life to consider, I better replace that garlic I’ll need more lots more, better stop off and get ’em”
Morgan is the seemingly sole survivor in a global outbreak of an unknown bacterium. By day, he collects his needed supplies, tries to make contact by radio with any other survivors, makes repairs to his house, from the onslaught of undead who attack by night, and basically tries to maintain his sanity in the bleak environment of apocalyptic ruin.
Each day, he wakes up, checks off the date on his primitively scrawled calendars, sharpens his wooden stakes, the weapons he uses to defend himself against a surviving race of vampire-like undead that roams the night air, calling out his name, “Morgan, come out!”pounding at his door. “Morgan! We’re going to kill you!” they taunt him endlessly, led by his old colleague Ben Cortman.
Former colleague Ben Cortman taunts his old friend Morgan on a nightly basis…
Living Ben Cortman: There are stories being told, Bob.
Robert Morgan: By people who are out of their minds with fear.
Living Ben Cortman: Maybe. But there are too many to be just coincidental. Stories about people who have died and have come back.
Robert Morgan: They’re stories, Ben, stories.
Robert Morgan: “I can’t afford the luxury of anger, anger can make me vulnerable. it can destroy my reason and reason is the only advantage I have over them. I’ve gotta find where they hide during the day. Uncover every one of them.”
Morgan tests the sharp point of his newly crafted wooden stake, a primitive weapon in the modern world.
“And how many more of these will I have to make before they’re all destroyed?”
“More of them for the pit. tonight there’ll be more of them, they live off the weak ones., leave them for the pit.”
The use of the gas mask has a chilling effect visually.
Less like a Gothic Hammer vampiric epic or prior decades features from Universal and Bela Lugosi featuring swarthy eastern Europeans, The Last Man on Earth is set in a modern urban landscape and acts like a hybrid horror/science fiction morality play, as Morgan drudges on to persevere against the army of soulless humans that haunt his existence.
They have become inhuman things to hunt, and he has been transformed into a veritable Adam living in a post-nuclear anti-paradise with no companionship. It’s merely the primal need to survive that drives him. In this way, he has been reduced to a scavenging animal, living on instinct, with an inescapable mission to hunt and kill people who were once human like himself.
“I can’t live a heartbeat away from hell.”
Morgan inhabits a world, where everyone else has been infected by the plague, they cannot tolerate sunlight, hate to see their own image in mirrors, and more likened to the ancient folklore of Vampires are repelled by garlic.
At night, these undead civilians try to get into Morgan’s house; they have a desire to kill him as much as he has to destroy every one of them.
Each day, he gets in his large automobile in search of more lifeless bodies scattered around the city and seeks out those in hiding to use his wooden stakes to impale and then throw them in the mass grave, fumes rising from the gasoline-soaked funeral pyre.
He finds a dead girl outside his house and picks her up as she flops like a rag doll. He finds another one in his driveway. He loads them into the trunk of his car. He realizes that he’s out of gas. Dead bodies line the road.
Notice the legs and feet dangling out the back of the station wagon like rubbish being taken out to the dump…
“I can get rid of them later, right now I’m out of gas.”
As he drives over scattered bodies like human road kill, he thinks to himself.
“They can wait too, I’ve got my life to worry about, those mirrors will have to be replaced before dark.”
The cinematography by Franck Delli Colliis stunning as it is stark. He paints an apocalyptic wasteland, with the addition of the mass graves and gas masks, which to me, evoke the specter of war-torn Europe after WWII.
In a flashback, we see Morgan as a happily married man with a beautiful wife and daughter. As the memory unfolds, we see that the plague has affected his wife and daughter. While his daughter is taken away to the public burning pit after she succumbs, Morgan secretly buries his wife, not knowing that the dead are coming back to life.
Once he returns home and is attacked by his dead wife, he realizes that he must dispose of all the plague victims before they reanimate themselves into zombies who can spread the plague. Morgan has a theory that his immunity to the bacteria is due to an infected bite he received from a vampire bat while stationed in Panama. This prior exposure to the plague allowed his blood and immune system to build up a tolerance over time.
One day, he finds a wandering dog and takes it home, joyous for the company the little guy will be. Unfortunately, he, too, has fallen ill from the plague, and sadly, Morgan has to kill him, too. Just to let you dog lovers know what to expect…
During one of his daylight excursions, he notices a woman moving around in the distance. It is Ruth Collins, who is terrified of Morgan when she first sees him, but he convinces her to come home with him. When Ruth becomes sickened by a string of garlic waved in her face, she claims she is just weak, but Morgan becomes suspicious of her.
Morgan catches Ruth trying to inject herself with the vaccine that he’s been working on, which seems to stave off the effects of the disease. At first, she attempts to point a gun at Morgan but eventually admits that she was sent to spy on him and that she is part of a secret group of people like her, who are infected by the plague but are using a treatment that restores their health while still in the bloodstream but wears off after a time only to be reinfected again.
Ruth tells Morgan that her group is trying to rebuild their wiped-out civilization, while destroying the remaining infected walking dead, also telling Morgan that many of the people he has killed were technically still alive.
Morgan- “Your new society sounds charming.”
Ruth Collins: You can’t join us. You’re a monster to them. Why do you think I ran when I saw you, even though I was assigned to spy on you? Because I was so terrified, what I’d heard about you. You’re a legend in the city. Moving by day, instead of night, leaving as evidence of your existence bloodless corpses. Many of the people you destroyed were still alive! Many of them were loved ones of the people in my group.
Morgan: I didn’t know.
Morgan transfuses his own blood into Ruth’s while she is asleep, and she is immediately cured.
This encourages Morgan as he sees hope that he can now cure the remainder of Ruth’s people, the surviving yet suffering group of humans between the living dead and Morgan, the last completely healthy survivor of the human race.
In the climatic ending, the hand of irony strikes Morgan’s triumph down, as Ruth’s people begin to attack, forcing Morgan to flee. The band of Ruth’s survivors then kills off the rest of the undead, who are aimlessly threatening, menacing, and, of course, stalking Morgan’s house.
Ruth’s people see Morgan and begin chasing him, as he picks up tear gas and grenades from a police station arsenal, they exchange gunfire, and Morgan is wounded.
He finds his way into a church, with Ruth begging her people to let Morgan live.
They finally impale him on the altar with a spear. Of course, a very Christ-like image, the symbolism is not lost here, he has been sufficiently sacrificed, the only man who could truly save them.
Morgan’s last dying words are “You’re freaks, all of you! All of you, freaks, mutations!” and declares that he is “the last true man on earth.”
This is truly not the end, my friends… -MonsterGirl
Urbane master of horror Vincent Price stars in one of William Castle’s atmospheric carnival rides as Dr. Warren Chapin, a pathologist whose milieu is the autopsies of executed prisoners from the State prison.
Chapin is driven by a curiosity to find out the source of the mysteriously evil force that creates the SENSATION of fear, and so he sparks a theory that there is an organism called… The Tinglermanifests itself at the base of the spine when one is experiencing abject fear. The Tinglerhowever is subdued by the act of screaming. This nightmare from the vertebral id looks like a giant centipede or a flat lobster with mandibles, lots of legs, and armored scales.
Each of us is inhabited by one of these creepy crawling death grippers, which grow larger as our fear expands, but because of our ability to scream, it lays dormant, incognito, and in repose at the base of our spines.
At first, Chapin locks himself in his lab, experimenting by taking doses of LSD and trying to induce fear first in stray cats and then in himself.
So it goes until Chapin meets Ollie and Martha Higgins who own a revival silent movie theater, and oh yes, Martha happens to be a deaf-mute, who also has an extreme phobia of the sight of blood.
As you know, I adore Judith Evelyn and am not very happy when it’s suggested that Chapin injects her with some LSD instead of a sedative in order to induce some nightmarish experiences, in which Martha will not be able to ‘scream’ therefore unable to suppress the little monster waiting to grip her when the moment of fear takes hold…
Click on the image, to see the ghostly chair at work…
In one of the most memorable classic horror movie sequences, Martha (Evelyn) during her presumed lysergic acid journey is stalked through her modest, bleak, and sinister apartment by a ghoulish phantom, who hurls a hatchet at her and then maneuvers her into the bathroom, where blood runs from the sink taps and the white porcelain tub fills with actual red-colored blood (the film is of course in B&W) An arm rises from the tub and clutches toward Martha, who is in the throws of primeval fear, made all the more brutal by the fact that she cannot utter a sound thus not… scream out!
Dying of fright on the bathroom floor, Ollie wraps her up in a sheet and brings her to Dr. Chapin’s house. Sensible, skip the police and straight to the autopsy I say!
Chapin had figured that Martha’s extreme fear would enable the Tingler to grow to its veritable actual size, and thus give him the opportunity to catch a living specimen, by slicing open Martha’s back and peeling the monster from her spinal column.
Having set out to try his experiment, he was unaware that husband Ollie equipped with a ghoul mask, axe, and tub filled with tomato red blood ( in a B & W film, using special focus lenses for the colored sequences) was plotting to scare his poor wife to death, and appropriate Chapin’s LSD inducing experiment to frighten Martha to death.
Once Chapin has the Tingler, Ollie takes his de-tinglered wife back home and Chapin’s wife Isabel (Price always seems to have a scheming hussy for a wife in these flicks) slips him a Mickey and lets loose the Tingler on her unconscious husband, which proceeds to clutch at his throat like a tick on a sunny august hound dog. Luckily sister-in-law Lucy arrives just in time to… SCREAM!
“Don’t you hate it when your neighbor’s dog fluffy humps your leg whenever he’s out for a walk!”
The Tingler lets go of its death grip, Chapin puts the thing in a pet carrier and goes off to Ollie’s apartment to put the darn thing back onto Martha’s backbone. He soon realizes that Ollie murdered his wife, a fight ensues, and the Tingler gets loose, slipping through the floorboards, and is now inside the movie house looking for someone to death grip!
From Guilty Pleasures of The Horror Film page 137- Article by Tom Weaver
William Castle had told Price that:
“Usually people who are frightened scream, and that keeps their Tingler from growing. Judith Evelyn will play a deaf-mute who runs a silent movie theater. Experimenting you scare the hell out of her, but because she can’t utter a sound she’s unable to scream-her Tingler grows, crushing her to death, you operate, remove the Tingler from her spine, but it escapes and gets into the silent movie theater. Well then, make believe that the theater is actually where the picture is playing…all hell breaks loose!”
In Weaver’s article, he discusses the waning horror movie genre after WWII and how Henri-Georges Clouzot’sDiabolique in 1955 was at the vanguard of cinema.
Vera Clouzot in her husband’s masterpiece Le Diaboliques 1955.
Castle was so impressed with how much the younger audiences had a hunger to be scared pantless, that supposedly it was this French thriller, that inspired Castle to try scaring the pants off audiences as well.
Many a Film Noir was tinged with elements of the horrific, with dark undertones and psychological angles that became very influential in American and British cinema. Where else did darker cinema have to go in order to funnel its often transgressive, unorthodox, taboo energies but through the Psychotronic, Cult, or B-Movie horror genres?
The very bizarre, disturbing, and surreal Shanks directed by William Castle.
Just a little later in the early 60s, I think of The Stranglerwith Victor Buono in 1964 or Grant Williams in The Couch in 1962, The Nanny in 1965, or The Naked Kiss 1964 which filtrated pretty grotesque narratives of, Pedophilia, deranged psychosis, incest and again, the Oedipus complex.
Aldrich had ushered in a whole new persona for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford with his Grand Dame Guignol tour de force, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane 1962.
The trumpets were hailing for Castle to step up and create his own uniquely tacky ballyhoo! While not Freud in the inkwell, certainly at least some kitschy Schadenfreude.
Castle could see that young Americans were starving for entertainment that was part horrific and a little exhibitionist. He purchased a copy on the cheap of a horror/mystery novel called The Marble Forest and got television writer Robb White to put a screenplay together, and hey while they were at it, why not give it a french sounding title as a tout to Diabolique!
That’s when they released Macabre 1958which actually didn’t come until 3 years after the release of Diabolique. Weaver doubts Castle’s accuracy about certain details in his relatings about the series of events but then again William Castle was admittedly a showman, a huckster, the PT Barnum of Horror films, and didn’t deny that he could tell big whoppers at times. It was all in fun…!
William Castle and Mia Farrow on the set of Rosemary’s Baby!
There are even conflicting stories as to how the project for The Tingler came about. White who also wrote the script for House on Haunted Hill claims that it was makeup man Jack Dusick who showed White a foot-long rubber worm that he had created. “This worm, it haunted you… it scared you!!!”
White thought about the idea and went to Castle and told him that they should find out “where fear comes from” and they’ll use the WORM!
Actually, the concept of FEAR itself becomes a vital character to the narrative of The Tingler, although I’m sure Castle couldn’t give a hoot about the real ‘why’ more likely it was the ‘how’ to go about doing the ‘how’! He was more of the discount provocateur than an auteur. He had vision, it was just in 3D.
According to Castle, he asked an artist at Columbia’s art department what a Tingler should look like, ” Sort of like a lobster but flat, and instead of claws, it has long slimy feelers!”
Of course, the cast thought the script preposterous, but Price always approached anything he did with style, and an urbane dignity.
For the promotion of The Tingler, some theaters even had boxes in the lobby, where a live Tingler was being held. You were warned not to panic, but to SCREAM if it breaks loose!
White had written that they couldn’t find anything to make the Tingler look more frightening until Castle (Bill) came in one morning with a small vibrator which eventually saved the picture.
It was his idea to take out all the motors from thousands of vibrators and screw them under the theater seats, then rig everything up at crucial moments so that the audience would suddenly begin vibrating in waves, six rows at a time!
Again, whether this is true or not, Castle claims he got the idea one night after he got a violent electrical shock from changing a light bulb on his bedside table. William Castle wrote in hisStep Right Up! “I’m going to buzz the asses of everyone in America!”Â
By installing little motors under the seats of every theater in the country, the projectionist would get the special cues on the film itself, then press a button once the Tingler appears on screen to ‘jolt’ the audience, leading them to believe that the Tingler was loose in the actual theater!
Dona Holloway the Associate to the Producer dubbed the process PERCEPTO!
Now that I’m back in the NYC area, I have to see if the Film Forum on Houston Street still runs their horror/sci-fi/fantasy Festivals. Years ago, I happened to catch a showing of The Maze 1953 where they passed out 3D glasses to the audience. At one time the Film Forum ran The Tingler complete with Percepto! I would love to have had my ass in one of those seats…
As far as Robb White, he considered these films dumb, “I hated ’em” and “And for years didn’t see some of the films I made with Bill Castle. I mean they’re so dumb God!- there’s not a worm in your backbone when you get scared.”
most memorable classics of horror featuring one of Castle’s Barnumesque  gimmicks dubbed Emergo! An inflatable glow in the dark skeleton attached to a wire which floated over the audience during the final moments of the film.
Unfortunately instead of causing shivers and screams, the audience would hurl candy boxes, soda cups or any other objects at the poor hard working skeleton. So much for the amazing miracle of Emergo! Still William Castle knew how to engage his audience, and as far as I’m concerned his work is as relevant and captivating today, setting the stage for remakes and copycats abound.
The film stars the ever urbane Vincent Price as Frederick Loren who is now on his 4th wife, Annabelle played by the sultry Carol Ohmart.
Loren has invited 5 unrelated guests to a rented house for a ‘Haunted House’ party. He dares them to stay the entire night, in which all of them desperate for money, will receive $10,000 clams. Each guest is offered charming party favors…guns displayed in little coffins, what fun!
The house has a violent history as owner Watson Pritchard (the very familiar face of character actor Elisha Cook Jr.) terrified and gradually sotted, relates the history of the house to everyone. At midnight the caretakers Mr and Mrs Slydes will lock the doors there by trapping the guests in this frightening and treacherous haunted house on a hill.
Will they survive a night of mayhem, ghosts, mystery and murder!!!!!
Also starring Richard Long as Lance Schroeder, Alan Marshalas Dr. David Trent, Carolyn Craig as Laura Manning, Julie Mitchum as Ruth Bridgers, Howard Hoffman as Jonas Slydes and Leona Anderson as the iconic image of the blind Mrs. Slydes.
“Consult your doctor! Bring your seat belts!”
“Acclaimed The Super-Shocker Of The Century!”
“First Film With the Amazing New Wonder EMERGO: The Thrills Fly Right Into The Audience!”
