The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964) After a series of successful Poe adaptations—some veering into comedy—AIP Studios took a big leap in budget with a project director Roger Corman had long wanted to do since making his first adaptation House of Usher: Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." Budget and lack of a satisfactory script is what was delaying the project. Plus, Corman was afraid his film would look too much like Bergman's The Seventh Seal (released in 1957), so production kept getting delayed.

 

In terms of financing, that couldn't have been more fortuitous: AIP had made a deal with a British production company to co-produce films and studio heads Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson made the suggestion to Corman that he might leave the California lots and move production there. Also, England had the Eady Levy, which was a tax on box office receipts that would be rebated to British productions with certain stipulations, meaning that 85% of any film applying for funds would have to be filmed in England, with an emphasis on providing work for British actors and crew (it's one of the reasons Stanley Kubrick moved to England to make Lolita...and stayed there).

But, there were other benefits besides financial. Corman could avail himself of British actors, utilizing Patrick Magee (again...as Magee had appeared in AIP's Dementia 13, written and directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola), Nigel Green, and a 17 year old actress named Jane Asher (who was just getting involved with some musician or other). For cinematography, he graduated from Floyd Crosby to a young up-and-comer named Nicholas Roeg. And he was able to utilize British sets, like the castle that had been built for the recently-filmed Becket.

An old woman gathering fire-wood approaches a figure in red: The figure tells her "Go to your village. The day of their deliverance is at hand." And, indeed, the flower he gives her contains the red death and by the time Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) goes to the village, the woman is already dead and the contagion is spreading. He arrests two defiant men, Ludovico (Green) and Gino (David Weston) and well as the girl who is the one's daughter and other's betrothed, Francesca (Asher). With the three secured, he orders the village burned to prevent the spread of the disease, while he invites the local noblemen to his castle for safe quarantine and salacious partying. "Act according to your nature" is his only request.

Prospero is a Satanist, a sensualist, and cruel master, and for him, the Christian Francesca, is both challenge and prize as he intends to turn her to his way of seeing things by any means necessary—but with her, he finds himself showing a bit of restraint. Sure, he'll make her choose between father and fiance over who should die by Prospero's hand, but, for him, that's uncommon restraint. He's a bad guy. A very bad guy, as fulsomely and charmingly as Price plays him, content to let everything in the city he lords over dies, while him and his lordly pals party all the while. Not exactly a stretch from reality.

Meanwhile, Prospero's mistress, Juliana (Hazel Court), seeing the interest her lord is paying to his new pet, decides she's going to go over his head and appeals to Satan just to ensure her interests don't get overlooked. Such an act even impresses Prospero, but, as they all learn (but for a mere handful of worthy), whatever one does in life, Death will end it. It's merely a question of...when.

Corman had looked commissioned many scripts for Masque, from Barboura Morris (an AIP company player, she'd starred in A Bucket of Blood), and even Robert Towne, who'd written The Last Woman on Earth for Corman, and who would become Hollywood's ultimate script-doctor, the Oscar-winning author of Chinatown and a director in his own right. None satisfied him, until Charles Beaumont, a short-story author and (along with Richard Matheson) one of the "go-to" writers for "The Twilight Zone," came up with the Satanist angle and the majority of the script, but by 1964, he was suffering from Pick's disease, and started farming out jobs to associates—he would be dead from something akin to Alzheimer's at the age of 39. R. Wright Campbell finished the screenplay, using ideas from other Poe works.

There are a lot of contemporary critics who consider The Masque of the Red Death the best of Corman's Poe adaptations, running neck-and-strangled-neck with the year's other Poe/Corman film The Tomb of Ligeia (which was written by Towne), and the film does seem to go beyond the series' formula for strengths and weaknesses, with a depth to it that other of the films lacked, and the dialogue is a little less plummy and the ideas a little more dangerous. The acting, also, has none of the weak spots the other Poe films had, as there doesn't seem to be any callowness in any of the leads—some of the extras seem to be struggling a bit, however.

Corman made Tomb of Ligeia in England, but he wasn't happy there. As he was used to working fast and filming quickly, he was frustrated with the speed of British crews and their insistence on tea breaks. Most of the Poe films were done in three weeks; The Masque of the Red Death took five.

And, yes, Corman was right to worry about comparisons with The Seventh Seal, with manifestations of the world's deadliest diseases walking the Earth (but using tarot cards, not chess-matches, to determine fates), but the multi-colored hues of the plagues' costumes have a tendency to throw one off a bit, reminding one of color-coded CDC threat-levels.

The color-coded plagues:

L-R: Tuberculosis, Yellow Fever, Scurvy, "The Red Death" (Anthrax), Cholera, Porphyria, and Bubonic Plague 

(Covid is probably last in line)

 

House of Wax

House of Wax (André de Toth, 1953) Oh, the money studio mogul Jack Warner invested in 3-D, only to see it fade away when the craze lost its "zhuzh" and no longer distracted Americans from their newly bought black-and-white broadcast television sets (epic films with wide-screen dynamics was more successful). The 1950's "3-D craze" had a little less dimension to it, fad-wise (and not very many other major studio productions were made in that format) but, that doesn't take away from the fact that Warner's investment in House of Wax created a technological achievement in film, being the first color 3-D movie with stereophonic sound—a feat that made it a surprisingly big hit at the box-office (more so than the monophonic color 3-D film, Bwana Devil) when it was first released (to those theaters that could actually accommodate the new processes), and also, ironically, made the film a staple of those new-fangled television sets (which is where I constantly ran into it in my youth). It also managed to revive the status of Vincent Price, who would spend the rest of his career starring in horror films, sometimes being the most expensive items in their budgets.

Jerrod and his Marie Antoinette—the wax-figure is "portrayed" by lead actress Phyllis Kirk

 

Based on an earlier Warner film, 1933's The Mystery of the Wax Museum—that was directed by Michael Curtiz in two color Technicolor—it tells the story of gifted sculptor Professor Henry Jerrod (Price), who is having a bit of a falling-out with his principal investor Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts)—Burke wants to see Jerrod's wax museum become a bit more sensational to attract business while Jerrod wants to concentrate on more life-like attractions on a par with his sculptures of Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and his personal favorite, Marie Antoinette. While Burke is upstairs going over the books, Jerrod takes a meeting with art critic Sidney Wallace (Paul Cavanagh) to see if he'd be interested in buying Burke out.

Wallace is funding some archaeological dig of other and will be out of the country for three months, but fully intends to fund Jerrod's expansion of his wax museum when he returns. This is promising news for Jerrod, but not for Burke who won't wait three months and turns on Jerrod, starting a fire in the museum to burn the place to the ground to collect the insurance money. That he has left Jerrod unconscious in the burning building is of no concern to him. And the gas-lights in the structure only ensures the sculptor's doom, creating a spectacular explosion that destroys the man...and his life's work.

The unseemly Mr. Burke cashes his insurance check for 25k—nobody being very good at checking for accelerants in 1902—and doling out just enough of it to attract gold-diggers like Cathy Gray (a blonde, pre-"Addams Family" Carolyn Jones), reassured that the body of Jerrod was never found. He shouldn't be so presumptive, as when he goes to stash the remainder of his money in his safe (fireproof, I hope!), he is attacked in his room and strangled by a mysterious black-cloaked figure, who then takes a rope and hangs the body in the walk-up's elevator shaft to make it appear a suicide.

Cathy is preparing for her upcoming date with a new fella, being helped into her frills by her housemate, Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk). Sue is having trouble making the rent, but Cathy assures her that she'll lend her some money if Sue's attempt to get a job as a hat-check girl falls through. It does, but after a shakedown by her landlord, Sue goes to her room and checks on Cathy, only to find her dead, and the perpetrator still in the room—a black-cloaked figure with a misshapen, scarred face. She screams and escapes through the window with the figure in hot pursuit.

She manages to lose the strange murderer in the foggy streets and finds shelter at the home of a friend (Angela Clarke) and her son Andrew (Paul Picerni), and the next day, they go to the police (in the form of Frank Lovejoy and Dabbs Greer), who are a bit skeptical of Sue's story. But, then, they're not much help in the case of Cathy's murder—as her body has gone missing from the morgue! It's the latest in a string of disappearing corpses that they can't explain.

 Price, a young Charles Bronson, and Cavanagh

 

But, remember that art critic Sidney Wallace? He comes back into town to meet with Professor Jerrod, who is quite alive, but wheelchair-bound and his hands burned so horribly that he can only supervise the work of his assistants: Carl Hendricks (Nedrick Young) and the deaf/mute Igor (Charles Bronson, but at the time going by Charles Buchinskey). Jerrod has changed his mind about things since the previous museum's fire—now he's going to only focus on exhibits of the macabre, a chamber of horrors, if you will, of the past and present day. Including one exhibit of the suicide of Matthew Burke...with a remarkably life-like wax figure that, in the first real incident of fragrant 3-D usage falls forward into the screen—realistically enough that it must've seemed like it was falling in people's laps. With that little shock comes...

It's the half-way point of the film, and a reel change was required, but with both projectors each showing one part of the 3-D image, the proceedings had to be interrupted to manage it. I used to run projectors, but nothing as sophisticated as in the theaters, so how they managed to keep everything in sync, I wouldn't know (what happens if the film in one of the reels breaks...do they have to swap out as many frames in the other reel?*). Anyway, that's not the most interesting thing about the 3-D process. The most interesting thing was that director Andre dé Toth was blind in one eye and wore an eye-patch over it, so he couldn't have seen the 3-D images if he tried!

It's in the second part of the film where the 3-D tricks really start coming in fast, threatening to invade the audience's space: there are two more fainting spells toward the camera (as a result of squeamish reactions to Jerrod's house of horrors) as well as a rather gratuitous sequence involving the museum's barker enticing ticket-buyers with a paddle-ball breaking the fourth wall by threatening to knock the audience's popcorn out of their hands) and an equally unnecessary can-can sequence where the dancers threaten to kick out jaws, and one chorine throws her derriére in your face (the 3-D version of putting butts in seats?). But, there are subtler things—flying angel decorations, splintering doors, one prominent fist. And it must have been a shock to suddenly see Charles Bronson's henchman pop up in the frame during a critical juncture. It's not can-can girls, but it probably caused a lurch in the customers.

Still, the strength of the movie is dé Toth's direction, done in long, tracking takes (which would have really showed off the changing perspectives in 3-D), especially the tours of each of the wax museums usually done in one sweeping tour, aided by Jerrod's "waxing" poetic about his creations. And dé Toth had a good eye (but only one) for composition, so that when he did cut away, it was always to something interesting and striking.

And, say what you will about the "Perils of Pauline" style-finish, it is a nerve-jangler with our heroine threatened to be entombed in her own wax coffin for display, and if the elaborate device used to do so isn't exactly practical, it is impressive looking, rivaling the sparking laboratories of previous screen-villains, and there's another sequence involving split-second timing with a guillotine that provides an unexpected jolt (enough that the actor involved did it under protest).

But, dramatically, the movie doesn't fool anyone. One can guess the identity of the black-cloaked figure on a murderous (and covetous) rampage in turn-of-the-century New York nearly as soon as he appears—unless you're six (which is what I was when I first saw it and the revelation was as shocking as finding out who Darth Vader was much later in my film-watching) and have had no previous experience with movie-making sleight-of-hand. You'd have to be conked in the head with a paddle-ball to be surprised by it (hmmm...maybe that's why they did it...!). But, the movie is true to its melodramatic roots (the original play on which it and the earlier version premiered in 1932).

House of Wax was voted into The National Film Registry in 2014 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Given its breakthroughs in color 3-D and stereophonic sound one should add "technologically" as well.

* Answer: Yeah, they did, or the resulting de-synchronization of images would cause headaches or even nausea faster than you could say "des-synchronization"!

 

"The film's out of SYNC!!"

 

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961) The year 1547. Francis Barnard (John Kerr) arrives at the Medina stronghold on the coast of Spain from England to inquire into his sister Elizabeth's recent demise. Not so recent to Barnard's shock—she has been dead for three months and he's only recently been informed. "Something in the blood" is the vague cause and that makes him even more suspicious. Perhaps if Catherine Medina (Luana Anders) wasn't so circumspect, and Elizabeth's husband Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) wasn't so...peculiarly and demonstrably aggrieved. No matter. Barnard vows not to leave the place until he "knows exactly what has happened here." Despite Medina's overwrought emotions, Barnard cannot be convinced that something suspicious hasn't happened to his sister.

A post-dinner visit by Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) reveals to Barnard that it wasn't some blood disease, but that Elizabeth "died of fright"—a shock to her heart. Nicholas Medina, you see, is the son of Don Sebastian Medina, "one of the Inquisition's most infamous, degraded..." torturers, it seems. And the Medina castle is just as he left it, with a basement torture chamber reeking of the evil "malignant atmosphere of the castle...the barbaric miasma that permeates these walls." Elizabeth was drawn to it, fascinated by it.

In blue-tinted flashbacks, Nicholas tells of the initial happy weeks of marriage between himself and Elizabeth (Barbara Steele), until her moods began to change and he would find her periodically wandering through the basement torture chamber, until one day she was found inside an "iron maiden", quite dead. But, Nicholas may not be entirely trusted, as he himself suffers from a wracked guilt, having witnessed the death of his uncle and mother at the hands of his father, accusing them of infidelity. Dr. Leon adds that although Nicholas' mother may have been tortured, there was speculation that she was entombed alive by his wicked father. That idea has become an obsession with Nicholas, only now it seems to repeat itself as everyone in the castle starts to hear nocturnal harpsichord playing—as Elizabeth once had—possessing the Don to think his late wife's spirit haunts the castle. And him.

Something, indeed, strange is going on, as everyone has heard the playing with Elizabeth's ruby ring found near the keys and Barnard's presence and truculent insistence to get to the truth only inspires more tragedy. He can't leave well enough alone, going so far as to insist that Elizabeth herself may have been prematurely buried—which seems to be born out when they break through her walled-in sarcophagus and find the moldering skeleton of Elizabeth seemingly trying to scratch through her coffin-lid. This drives Nicholas right over the babbling edge.

Although ostensibly the hero of the story, Barnard is, for the story's purposes, more of a useful idiot. It is only appropriate, then, that he should be the potential victim for the setting and device of the title. With Nicholas' mind snapped by Elizabeth's presence, he seems possessed of his torturer-father's mad spirit and straps his nosy antagonist to a slab in the deepest reaches of the castle and starts the elaborate process of lowering a razor-sharp pendulum ever lower to eviscerate his unwanted guest.

However convoluted the way is to get him down there, the sequence in the pit is a genuine nail-biter, with the heavy blade moving alarmingly fast in its swings looking to nearly slam into the camera as it passes near along with a vicious cross-cut editing employed that seems to build with every oscillation of the stroke until the thing threatens to shred Barnard's shirt as it relentlessly moves on its path to disembowel him. In fact, Barnard is such an unsympathetic character that one wouldn't be surprised if he actually does get sliced in two before the end credits.

The script is far more elaborate than the previous effort, House of Usher, had been with less psychic imaginings and more genuine evil informing its plot, with healthy doses of the previous film's curses and cracked psyches and obsession with premature burial. Yes, the cast is still limited...to six major players this time (up from Usher's four) with Price and "Britain's first lady of horror," Barbara Steele, at the start of her film career fresh from Mario Bava's Black Sunday, as the leads (even though Steele has barely six minutes of screen-time, her presence rather haunts the film). Price is allowed to go fully over the top of this one as he fairly jabbers his way into madness thinking himself the reincarnation of his dead father.

But, the movie has less to do with any supernatural evil than it does with the malignancies of evil perpetrated by real flesh-and-blood human beings who just happen to have a mean streak and no compunction to curtail it. In a way, people get the comeuppance they deserve not by spirits but by their own actions There's a genuine plot being perpetrated and those actions only unleash a monster rather than the planned consequences intended. And the final cruelty Matheson has devised is one even Poe might have blanched at—complete and utter uncaring apathy—with a surprise twist in the final shot.

Oh, it's entertaining, alright. And although Price may be going a bit overboard thespianing his way into lip-curling madness, he's fun to watch. But, the skill-level has gained a few notches with much more moody cinematography than the previous Poe film and a third act that's a corker including a line that has seared into my movie-memory forever: "Maximillian, we must break into the torture chamber! Quickly!"

 

You can say that again.

The Pit and the Pendulum was the first AIP Poe film to use 

(and re-use!) these groovy psychedelic graphics

House of Usher (1960)

House of Usher (aka The Fall of the House of Usher) (Roger Corman, 1960) Roger Corman was getting tired of the usual grind at American International Pictures—get enough budget-money to make two black-and-white movies that they could get into drive-in's or the bottom of double-bills and use that money to make one good color film (in Cinemascope...or something like it) that might attract some talent...and box office.

To his horror, he got what he wanted. And something else besides—he got an expanded shooting schedule of 15 days, "a luxury" for AIP. As other studios were making films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe (which was in the public domain), they chose a good "bottle-story" "The Fall of the House of Usher" and secured the talents of fantasy/horror novelist Richard Matheson to come up with a screen-story based on elements of Poe. Script in hand, Corman then spent 1/3 of the film's $300,000 budget on its star Vincent Price, who lost weight for the role, dyed his hair an almost white-blonde and even shaved off his signature mustache for the part. Then to create the proper atmosphere, Corman sent a crew into the Hollywood Hills to photograph what was left of a recent wild-fire and, hearing of a local fire department burning a derelict barn, sent out a couple cameramen to get dramatic shots. That location footage would all save time and money in the special effects department. And, thriftily, be reused in later Corman films.

Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon) rides on horseback trough the misty New England deadlands where sits the House of Usher to see his fiancee Madeline (Myrna Fahey), who parted from him at the request of her brother and only relative, Roderick (Price). Like many of the Corman Poe heroes, his audience is instantly refused, but he persists, and gaining interest, an odd request is made by the butler Bristol (Harry Ellerbe)...to remove his boots.

There's a reason, beyond preserving the carpeting. When meeting the reluctant Roderick, Winthrop's raised voice sends him into a paroxysm of agony. Roderick, you see, (and he implies Madeline) is suffering from "a morbid acuteness of the senses," due to their family history. "Mine," he explains "is the worst for having existed the longer, but both of us are afflicted with it. Any sort of food more exotic then the most pallid mash is unendurable to my taste buds. Any sort of garment other then the softest, is agony to my flesh. My eyes are tormented by all but the faintest illumination. Odors assail me constantly, and as I've said, sounds of any degree whatsoever inspire me with terror." Brother and sister, he says are like "two pale drops of fire guttering in a vast consuming darkness."

But, it goes beyond that. Roderick believes the Usher line is thoroughly cursed, so much so that the very house is crumbling as if by the weight of a generational evil—the front tower itself has a large crack in it, the land around it dead. "This house. The pall of evil which fills it is no illusion. For hundreds of years, foul thoughts and foul deeds have been committed within its walls. The house itself is evil now." To Winthrop, these are the ravings (although quiet) of a madman, and he informs Roderick that he intends to take Madeline away and marry her—which, if the house is cursed and is going to crumble, would it be a good thing, no?

But, Roderick will have none of it. "You cannot take my sister out of this house. If she were to bear children, the Usher evil would spread - malignant, cancerous." He warns Winthrop to leave the house forever, forget Madeline, and spare himself a terrible fate. Which, of course, Winthrop has no intention of doing. He entreats Madeline to leave with him, but, in the night, she dies and Roderick has her buried in the family crypt, her coffin chained.

Roderick can't be reasoned with, but Winthrop learns from the butler Bristol, that Madeline has, in the past, suffered from cataleptic fits, leading Winthrop to fear the worst—to persuade him to leave, Roderick has taken advantage of her seizure to pretend that she is dead and has prematurely entombed her. And, at that point, there's a lot of running around and a lot of activity that, if we were staying true to Roderick's infirmities, would have paralyzed him.

Considering AIP's previous output, House of Usher looks positively sumptuous. And if most of the players are a little stiff—stiffer than Madeline becomes—Price more than compensates for it with a theatrical performance that stops short of chewing the "pallid mash" of the scenery, but luxuriates in Matheson's funereally purple prose. He's the center of the story, anyway, so his hefty chunk of the film's budget is money well-spent—if you're putting it all up there on the screen. And Corman's compositions take full advantage of the widescreen format, filling the screen with detail, despite the limitations of the budget. Those extra five days of filming he got were well worth it.

And the Poe preoccupation with premature burial (which would obsess the Corman-Poe adaptations, as well) lends just enough horror to the story that it doesn't resort to "monster-fare" as one of the producers who grudgingly approved the budget complained. The movie made over a million dollars in its initial run, more than justifying the risks taken and launching a string of nicely written, morbid dramas for many years to come.

The Tingler

It isn't Hallowe'en month unless we put in a mention of a William Castle production—and we'll actually have a couple of them this month. The producer of low-budget—high concept "stunt" movies (aided by little tricks he'd add at theater showings) were nobody's conception of "art", but there was something altogether entertaining about the lengths (and depths) he'd go to put patrons into seats—and attempt to scare them OUT of them.

Today's movie may be a high-water mark for the tricks he'd play on the audience...and the movie he built around it may be the campiest, goofiest film he ever made. Of course, it has to be presented on "Take Out the Trash" Day.

The Tingler (William Castle, 1959)

 

I am William Castle, the director of the motion picture you are about to see. 

 

I feel obligated to warn you that some of the sensations—some of the physical reactions which the actors on the screen will feel—will also be experienced, for the first time in motion picture history, by certain members of this audience. 

 

I say 'certain members' because some people are more sensitive to these mysterious electronic impulses than others. These unfortunate, sensitive people will at times feel a strange, tingling sensation; other people will feel it less strongly.

But don't be alarmed—you can protect yourself. 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, because the person in the seat right next to you will probably be screaming too. 

 

And remember this—a scream at the right time may save your life.

What might have caused that mentioned "strange, tingling sensation" was not the titular "Tingler"—the microbial life-form that the movie makes pains to inform us lives in all of us, only to grow into a large pinching life-form that can crush your spine in moments of terror—so much as the WWII surplus airplane de-icing motors that Castle had strategically wired under certain seats in the major theaters where he was showing The Tingler. Basically, he spent $250,000 of the film's budget to plant industrial "joy-buzzers" under the keisters of his audience—a process (along the lines of past years' 3-D craze) that he dubbed "Percepto!"

Sure, it was cheesy, but Castle was a cheesy film-maker with the heart of an eccentric carny-barker. A cut-rate Hitchcock* who wasn't satisfied with keeping his thrills on the screen, he delighted in breaking the fourth wall separating film and audience and violating his paying customers' safe-space. Nothing may have delighted him more than seeing explosions of popcorn.

And The Tingler may have been his presentational masterpiece. The movie follows a prison pathologist, Warren Chapin (Vincent Price, delightfully straight), who, when performing autopsies on executed convicts, notices a spine-encrusting form on their X-rays that he reasons is a microbial life-form mutated by the fear of its hosts. He makes this disturbing assumption while performing an autopsy on a former prisoner in front of the guy's brother-in-law, "Ollie" Higgins (Philip Coolidge), who had just been hanging around after witnessing the guy's execution. Chapin speculates to this guy he just met that, evidently, screaming will negate the effects of what he dubs "The Tingler."

Chapin offers Higgins a ride from the prison to the revival-house movie theater run by him and his deaf-mute wife Martha (Judith Evelyn)—they only show silent pictures (naturally) and live in the flat above the auditorium. Martha is an over-excitable type and when Chapin cuts himself on an offered cup of coffee—the guy's an expert surgeon, after all—she has a reaction that causes her to faint dead-away. Chapin treats her for her nervous condition ("barbituates"), but she wakes up to nightmarish hallucinations: opening windows, zombie creatures coming alive, thrown axes, even red blood coming out of the tap...in a black-and-white movie!

Poor woman dies of fright. Ollie calls Chapin for help and rather than call the police, they take Martha to Chapin's home-autopsy room (he takes his work home evidently), where—in the cleanest medical procedure in the movies—he removes the fully-grown "tingler" from her spine—because she couldn't scream, the thing stayed full-size...and alive!

"It's IN the theater?"

There's an awful lot of unnecessary travel going on merely so that director Castle can make sure that the "tingler" ends up back in the movie theater, where it will escape and he can pull a meta-switcheroo, showing us the silent movie the audience is watching, so that the "tingler" can interrupt the movie-movie, plunge the real theater into darkness, and set up a panic in both fictional and real movie theaters. 

Castle did this with those "joy-buzzers" under the seats, and "planted" patrons who would scream on-cue in the dark, only to have them on stretchers (with EMT's) when the black-screen stopped and the movie once again began...in the movie and in real-life.

Sound confusing? Sure, but, Castle does it so fast, with the deliberate technical issues of a broken film and a purposely black-screen that audiences are "primed" for an unexpected jolt—which will be coming from a place they least expect it. And this was "back-in-the-day" where theaters weren't required to have aisle-lights for safety—you'd have a theater plunged into absolute blackness with only a glowing "EXIT" sign for comfort. Considering the number of "feints" and tricks that Castle had already pulled off in the film, the transposition of movie-audience with movie audience was just a third-act topper.

Castle fills the film with goofy conjecture, duplicitous wives, duplicitous husbands, even an early experiment with LSD—"the walls, the walls!" yells Chapin, tripping under the effects only to be weirded out by a skeleton in his lab. Then, during the freak-out sequence with Higgins' wife, Castle suddenly changes expectations with the black-and-white film itself, by incorporating color into the sequence—a combination of using color film into a scene where the bathroom scene is painted in shades of gray, even the actress was made up with gray make-up. By the time, the rubber "tingler" creature is brought into the film, you're not sure what to expect. Frankly, given the nature of what is ultimately presented on screen, the most effective way to show it is to turn the lights out and not show it at all.

All movies manipulate. We're shown only what the director wants us to see, cut in a way to jolt our expectations and sell the illusion. Castle, however, wasn't satisfied with that, given his limited budgets and his unlimited imagination. Mise en scène and montage weren't enough for him. Not when he could move the manipulation out into the audience and play more tricks with an audience's complacency. And he did it with a con-man's cunning and a prankster's glee. How do you get a horror-movie crowd into a theater? You tell them not even the theater is safe. That's something you can't get at home from television.

"The walls! The walls!"

* I'm reading Laurence Leamer's rather tawdry collection of mini-biographies, "Hitchcock's Blondes" right now and there's a pull-quote of a conversation Hitchcock has with writer Ernest Lehman after they'd worked together on North By Northwest that sounds a lot like Castle: 

"After a number of martinis sufficient to limber up his vocal chords and open up his emotions, he put his hand on Lehman's. 'Ernie, do you realize what we're doing in this picture?' he said in a whisper, announcing that what he was about to say was only for the screenwriter's ears. 'The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment, we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord, and they react that way. And someday, we won't even have to make a movie—there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we'll just press different buttons, and they'll go 'ooooh' and 'aaaah' and we'll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won't that be wonderful?'"

Leamer, Laurence. Hitchcock's Blondes. Penguin Random House, 2023