Horror maestro William Castle at the BFI

As BFI Southbank previews a new doc on ’50s low-budget horror maestro William Castle, Cath Clarke salutes this pioneer of cheesy thrills, whose gimmicks included wiring up cinema seats to – quite literally – shock viewers

‘It’s good to see you, my homicidal friends,’ says the man smoking a cigar, his cheesy grin spoiling the sinister tone a little. Audiences – children especially – in the 1950s loved this man: horror B-movie director William Castle. Critics might have called him the poor man’s Hitchcock, but the crowds didn’t care, not when Castle was turning their cinemas into bedlams.

Subject of a forthcoming documentary ‘Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story’, showing this week at BFI Southbank along with two of his movies, Castle was a master of brazen stunts and craftily engineered mass hysteria. He rigged seats with shock devices, stationed nurses at the end of aisles and even included a ‘fright break’ in one film, a 45-second get-out for audiences too frightened to carry on watching. Never mind that the films were more silly than scary.

John Waters is a big fan and calls ‘The Tingler’ (1959), also shown this week, ‘the best movie ever made’. The film’s ludicrous plot sees Vincent Price as a doctor specialising in the study of fear. With an admirably straight face he discovers a creature that lives in the spine, which is aroused when a person is scared and can only be placated by very loud screaming. We finally get a glimpse of the critter (and the wires pulling it), a lobster-like thing with pincers. Just in case his audiences were unmoved, Castle fitted the seats with handshake buzzers. These were activated towards the end of the film when the on-screen tingler – and this is the genius bit – attacks a movie projectionist and the screen turns white. Often there was a plant in the audience, a woman who would faint on cue.

A master showman, Castle said that every movie has something to sell. His first big gimmick was in 1958 when he took out life insurance on behalf of everyone who went to see ‘Macabre’ (from Lloyds of London, no less) against death brought on by fright – audiences filled beneficiary slips on their way in. Shot on a budget of $100,000 it made $2 million. John Waters explains in ‘Spine Tingler!’ that as a 12-year-old he trouped into a cinema believing that people had died of fright watching the film and expecting it to happen right there in front of him.

Castle also invented a host of phoney new film techniques, claiming that ‘House on Haunted Hill’ (1959) was filmed in ‘Emergo’, a new process in which ghouls and ghosts would leave the screen and mingle with the crowds. This turned out to be a giant inflatable skeleton on a pulley that was floated over their heads. Cinema-goers were equipped with a ghost viewer/remover for ‘13 Ghosts’ (1960), filmed in ‘Illusion-O’. These viewers looked like 3D glasses with two strips of see-through plastic, one red (the ghost viewer) and one blue (ghost remover – you looked through that one if you were scared).

Alas, says Vic Pratt, co-programmer of Flipside, BFI Southbank’s monthly showcase of the weird and wonderful, there will be no buzzers or gimmickry when ‘The Tingler’ is shown this week. ‘We’d like to wire up the seats, but I’m told health and safety won’t allow it.’ Boo.

‘Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story’ screens on Thur together with ‘The Tingler’ and ‘The Crime Doctor’s Gamble’ at BFI Southbank. See bfi.org.uk.

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