Olde Review: Rosemary's Baby

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This Saturday's ASUW films in 130 Kane are Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, and Robert Wise's The Haunting.

Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) Rosemary's Baby opens with this theme:* it's a lullaby, sung charmingly off-key by Mia Farrow, its star, but underscored with even more off-key, sometimes baleful accompaniment. And as this lullaby oozes out on the soundtrack, the image we see is of a line of New York apartments--not an unusual opening shot for the beginning of a movie, in fact, it's pretty much of a cliche. 

 

And so is the opening situation--two young newly-weds-in-love house-shopping. We've seen it hundreds of times. It's an everyday occurrence. The apartment is lovely, the couple buys it, and everything is quite normal. 

 

Until a new-found friend of Rosemary's commits suicide, and Rosemary's relationship with her eccentric neighbors turns rather familial, and a bizarre fate befalls the fellow who got her husband's job. Now, that it looks like success for them, they decide it's time to have a kid...and see, there's this chocolate mousse...

Well, I don't have to go any further for I'm sure the legend of Rosemary's Baby has preceded it. 

 

But what separates Rosemary... from other gothics is the perverse outlook of its director, Roman Polanski. Yes, everything's normal, and it is that very normalcy that makes the intrusion of Demonic Forces so doubly terrifying. One can accept odd happenings on a dark and stormy night on a cliff-top castle, but on a sunny day in a New York apartment complex?** 

It makes the horror so much more palpable to be surrounded by normalcy for it increases the possibility of something happening to you. And thus, Polanski places threats in such "normally" innocent and reassuring things as a chocolate mousse, or Ralph Bellamy (who had hawked aspirins for years on the tube) playing a "witch" doctor, if you'll excuse the pun. 

It's an unorthodox approach to the Gothic Horror Story...at least it was in 1968, when it was released, and to paraphrase an ad for Polanski's latest film, The Tenant, "No one does it to you like Roman Polanski."***--not William Friedkin in The Exorcist, or Richard Donner in The Omen. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is head and shoulders...and horns, above them.

 

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on October 22 and 23, 1976 

 

Still true, but, my God, after Polanski's conviction of child-rape, that's one hell of a movie tag-line on The Tenant! Polanski's arrest, trial and conviction would come later, two years after The Tenant was released, but it sure is the ultimate sick joke.

As for Rosemary's Baby, it still tops the lists of "Movies No Pregnant Woman Should Watch" and it still takes the prize as the best "Devil Walks Amongst Us" movie (sorry, Damien and Regan), and it's no small part due to Polanski's sick sense of humor—Orson Welles, in one of his conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, referred to him as "one of those morbid boys"—and his way of mixing the mundane and the sacrilegious. 

The most entertaining parts of Rosemary are the elderly and uncomfortable neighbors—the "legacies" of the Bramford Hotel, and the best of them is sprightly Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her role. It resurrected Gordon's career, and she went on to star in a long list of films in her twilight years. But, there are others, like Patsy Kelly, Ralph Bellamy (the joke in his early roles was that he was always the dullest of leading men and Polanski makes full use of that reputation here), Elisha Cook, Jr. (a favorite of producer William Castle), Hope Summers, and Phil Leeds (he would end up a fixture on "Seinfeld"), all semi-familiar faces that, in other circumstances, might provide comfort, all part of a conspiracy to make an anti-domestic situation to welcome the Anti-Christ.

Add to it the presence of Mia Farrow, the urchin break-out star of TV's "Peyton Place" who'd just married...Frank Sinatra!...and had a quality that could charitably be called "odd." You're not sure if she's going crazy, has a pre-postpartum depression, or if something weird is actually going on, and it keeps audiences on a tightrope tension of sympathy for/suspicion of Rosemary, the yin and yang of our sympathies and cynicism. And, of course, Polanski (out of Ira Levin, who cloned Hitler and roboticized housewives in other thrillers) turns that into your worst nightmare.

Producer William Castle had a carnival-barker-showmanship to him, gimmicking customers into screenings of his goofy-creepy thrillers and horrors and after Hitchcock (inspired by Castle's box-office receipts and asking "what if someone good did it?") managed to best his efforts with Psycho, he wanted to do the Master of Suspense one better. With the solid story-ideas of Rosemary's Baby, head and tails above what he could conceive, he was able to get that much better and gain some industry clout, although he ultimately had to cede most of the creativity to Polanski, and his Paramount studio-bosses. He would always be a B-movie-maker, but Rosemary's Baby made him see the promised land of the A-list.

 

* Yeah, there's nothing wrong with your computer--there is no song. I usually backed my radio-reviews with an appropriate piece of music, and for this one, I used the actual theme on the soundtrack (that I recorded on cassette from a TV broadcast...I used to do that).

Here it is:

 

** Ironically enough it's the high-end and rather exclusive Dakota building, standing in for the "Bramford." John Lennon would be shot in front of the Dakota a decade later.

*** EEE-Yikes!

 

Legendary producer-showman William Castle appears outside the telephone booth for a cameo.

 

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

 

Strait-Jacket (1964)

It's October. Guess I'd better start paying attention to horror movies. 

Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day. 

Strait-Jacket (William Castle, 1964) It wouldn't be Hallowe'en here at BXC without some review of a film by that wacky prankster of the cinema, William Castle. Castle made b-movies cheap and under-budget and that made him well-regarded by studio's. But, he was more than a writer-director-producer, he was also a superb salesman and promoter. "Superb" as in successful, not so much in sophistication. Castle liked to add an element of "extra" to his films to garner them a bit more attention, ala the "3-D" craze of the 1950's. Castle would come up with some stunt for the theater and then give it an exotic consumer name, like "Percepto" or "Illusion-O" or "Emergo" (the last was just a glowing skeleton that rode a wire into the theater from the screen), some cheap little sap-draw that could increase the audience and the box-office "take," a little surprise that might increase interest and lure viewers away from their television sets. But, it was all done with humor, imagination, and the sensibilities of a huckster. Castle is the favorite director of John Waters and Robert Zemeckis, and in Joe Dante's Matinee from a few years back, John Goodman had a grand time playing a Castle-like director.

Look at the poster; it screeches "WARNING! Strait-Jacket vividly depicts ax murders!" Warning? More like "Come and Watch, Suckers!" And from the beginning, Castle starts with the double ax murder that lands Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) in an insane asylum for twenty years punctuated with blasts of electro-shock therapy. Harbin comes home unexpectedly to catch her husband (Lee Majors...Lee Majors?) and his mistress together—and clothed—in bed together. She snaps, and grabs a nearby—handily nearby—ax and decapitates, then dismembers the sleeping lovers, all this in front of her 3 year old daughter Carol. 

EE-yikes. "Mommy Dearest". "No more wires hangers" are nothing compared to an ax murder. 

The consequences of her actions are not execution or life-imprisonment, instead she is committed to an asylum—even given the extremes art direction can take, it's one of the least calming and therapeutic asylums one could imagine. Not to cast aspersions, but Lucy is locked away for a nightmarishly long time.

Twenty years on, grown-up Carol (now Diane Baker) is awaiting her mother's release from the asylum she's been in for the past decade or so. She has been living on a farm with her Uncle Bill and his wife (Leif Erickson and Rochelle Hudson—she was one of the kids in Wild Boys of the Road), who have raised her like her own. But the loss of her mother has shadowed her past and, as she tells her beau, rich-guy Michael Fields (John Anthony Hayes), she is looking forward to seeing her Mother again, but not without a little trepidation. Mom is, after all, a convicted ax-murderer. What can possibly go wrong...living on a farm and all?

Mom comes home and Carol, now a sculptress, is overjoyed, showing her the sculpt she made of her Mom's face from memory and encouraging her to put on the old jingling jewelry she used to wear...that she's kept for her all these years, even getting Mom to go buy a wig to restore her looks to the way she was when Carol was a kid and when...you know..."the ax-murder?" Lucy and Carol have completely different ideas about nostalgia and "living with the past!"

"Cut...cut...CUT-lery!"

Meanwhile, Lucy tries to keep it under control. But it's tough-going. First, she still feels unsure about being out of the (whispers) "you-know-where" and resists the urge to go back. Then, Carol starts all this "remember when" jazz, then there's that weird farm-hand named Krause (Academy Award-winner George Kennedy, in his early "snaggle-tooth" phase), who always sounds like he's making a threat, then there's the voices she starts to hear—that weird nursery rhyme kids are singing about ax-murders. If those kids don't stop, heads will ROLL...no, no, better not say that!

Then, there are the nightmares...(or ARE THEY?). One night, Lucy wakes up, only to find two severed heads on the pillow next to her and an ax within reach. Screaming, she wakes up Uncle Bill...but (of course) when they enter her room, there is no evidence of heads or of ax. Maybe Lucy is just losing her own head. 

She won't be alone. Lucy is so unstrung that she starts drinking and acts rather aggressively towards Carol's beau, which leaves her quite miffed and Lucy unstable. She is visited by her shrink from the asylum who suggests that maybe things are moving too fast and that Lucy should probably come back to the asylum. Lucy runs off and the doc repeats his fears to Carol. They start to search for Lucy, but when the doc starts rummaging around the barn, he is murdered with a swift blow from an ax.

The author of the screenplay is Robert Bloch, the fellow who wrote the novel "Psycho", which Alfred Hitchcock turned into a hit film in 1960. Like that story, there is enough ambiguity in the story-telling that the audience is kept off-kilter, not having anybody to root for, and having their expectations—other than to see something gruesome happening—subverted by some deft narrative sleight-of-hand and up-ending how things appear. Bloch was a prolific writer, creating odd little mind-benders from Hitchcock's TV program (including its gruesome "banned" episode "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"), as well as "Star Trek" and popular spy shows of the 1960's. Strait-jacket was just another of his morbid little audience-teasers.

He had to work for it, though. Joan Blondell was originally to star, but had to bow out due to an accident. Crawford came in and insisted on script-changes, including a new epilogue that undercut the way Castle wanted to end it, and had other demands as well, such as having her psychiatrist played by Pepsi-Cola Vice-President (Joan had married the President). It wasn't as if heads would roll if she didn't get her way, but Castle didn't mind her little interferences. He was getting a performance that would pack the theaters, and if there was some controversy, it just helped the picture.

Just another money-maker for William Castle.

Castle tags his film with a ®-slashing joke.

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Gosh, it's still October. Guess I should dig up some old "Horror" reviews...

House on Haunted Hill (William Castle, 1959) It's your typical haunted house story with a particularly greedy and venal twist (enough so that it would make an interesting "reality" show*): a clutch of "swells" are invited to spend a night in a "ghoul" house—one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, no less—that has seen seven murders and is haunted by the restless spirits of the victims; whoever can stay in that mansion for one night will be rewarded $10,000, paid by the erudite (and eccentric) millionaire-host Frederick Loren (Vincent Price). The history of the house is verified by one of the guests, the paranoid and alcoholic Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr.) who babbles on about the strange goings-on and things that go bump, crash, splash and sizzle in the night.

The architecture of the place is a little suspect—Wright, notwithstanding—secret rooms, disappearing doors, and a basement with an amenity no house should be without, a basement with a pit-bath of hydrochloric acid...handy if there's no recycling service.  

And just to spice things up a bit (because God knows a haunted house isn't enough), each participant is given a loaded pistol, decoratively placed in a small complimentary coffin. What good firearms would do against restless spirits, already dead, is a question, but the answer would lead one to suspect that ghosts may not be the main problem at the address. But, that's never brought up. Pretty soon, people start disappearing, getting conked, grabbed, and (when all else fails) killed. Through it all, Loren just smiles and cracks wise in sepulchral tones. It's his party, you can die if you want to.

Director Castle—the P.T. Barnum of the movies—enhanced this with a gimmick he called "Emergo"—a glowing skeleton would emerge from a casket stage-left and fly over the audience (not exactly "smell-o-vision" but it would do). Just one more feint in a movie full of them, both momentary and unexplained, as Castle was the master of the cheap trick.

The film was remade in 1999 starring Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs and Peter Gallagher, and produced by Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Terry Castle (daughter of William).

 

*—although that entire phrase ('interesting reality show") is complexly oxymoronic.

It's a Small World (1950)

It's a Small World (William Castle, 1950) Having nothing to do with Disney or animatronic children, this is, instead, an exploitation film directed by William Castle, who, a few years later, would be directing exploitative horror films that would be presented with outrageous in-theater gimmicks.

The gimmick here is the star, Paul Dale (real name: Dale Paullin from Iowa and still alive, thanks), who was, in the old politically-incorrect parlance, a midget, but is now called (in the phrase I still see as demeaning) "a little person."* It is (as the poster tag puts it) "the amazing story of a man forced to live in a child's world." Well, not in a child's world per se. But, in an adult world perceiving him as a child and all that that entails, in ways both exploitative and marginalizing. And in an ironic way, the movie shows that his world isn't small, but people's perceptions of him (in their own small minds) are.

When most kids are going through "growth spurts," Harry Musk is left behind. He keeps anticipating when he's going to catch up to everybody else but it never happens. His father (Will Geer) is a simple farmer and shelters Harry from the vagaries of the "normal" world that entails the kids at school beating him up for being a "shrimp," his own sister outpacing him in the growth department (and bitching that she can't bring friends around because Harry's such a freak). The one friend Harry has is Janie who becomes his friend at 8, and grows up and out of his life. Harry is crushed.

Because of the sister thing and because Harry isn't much help around the farm, when he turns 21, he decides to go out and make his way in the world by offering his services as a "little person" to a promoter. The guy wants him for carnies and things like that and for Harry it's a chance to be useful and... somebody wants him. But when the guy turns out to be an exploitative creep, Harry runs away. He makes his way to a nearby town, where a gal appears interested in him...but ultimately not in that way. Then, he starts working as a shoeshine boy, and for awhile he seems content.

Perhaps the best term to use for Harry Musk is "disenfranchised." Nobody sees him for who he is, but for what he is...and what most see is how they can con him or make a buck from him. It's only in the film's third act that he finds a full measure of happiness and that is in a segregated community of "outsiders."

This one showed up on the cusp of the '50's, where folks were still reeling from a devastating war and pushing hard to return to "normal." But, "normal" is not the same to everybody. The decade roiled with a fallback to earlier prejudices and tribal suspicions. Now that we didn't have to pull together, it was safe splinter back into groups of "us" and "them." In its own weird way It's a Small World is a plea for tolerance, knowing that the world will come up short and that the only recourse is to fall back into the familiar tribe. The larger world can be a despicable place, but there are pockets of comfort...no matter how small.

*"Heighth-challenged" is another one that is "politically correct" but feels very wrong and makes me shudder, accentuating a negative and pointing out what is "wrong" in comparison to "the normal." Well, what's normal? My version would be to use (if I had to) the merchandising term—"fun-size." Or how about "compact?" Better yet...don't mention it at all.

Mr. Sardonicus

Mr. Sardonicus (William Castle, 1961) It just wouldn't be Hallowe'en without a visit to the films of William Castle, an inveterate showman of B-movies, who always gave his audiences a bit of theater with their trashy movies, that were done with such a humorously satirical edge ("Filmed in 'Illusion-O' or 'Emergo' or 'Percepto!'" which were usually just special "rigs" in the theater) they could be seen as something of a knock at studios' trumpeting of new film stocks and aspect-ratios, all developed in order to make a theater film "an event" (and drag people away from their televisions).

Castle was fun. And not a bad film-maker, either—just not a great one. He wasn't much on atmospherics (as a producer, he always kept his eye on the budget), but his films were done with a humor and an archness that came across from the screen, even without the swooping skeletons and shocked theater-seats that he would plant in the loges.

William Castle explains it all for you.

Mr. Sardonicus had a less sophisticated gimmick. Castle, himself, introduces the film jocularly and the film begins with Dr. Robert Cargrave (Ronald Lewis) arriving in the European country of Gorslava at the behest of his former love, Maude (Audrey Dalton), now the Baroness Sardonicus, whose husband (Guy Rolfe) has a strange malady she wants the doctor to cure.

Sardonicus was once Marek Toleslawski, a peasant farmer, whose father Henryk buys a lottery ticket. That night, however, his own ticket gets punched and he dies in his sleep. The ticket, however, is a big winner. Small problem, though: it is buried with Henryk. Marek's wife at the time, Elenka, persuades him to dig up his father's corpse to retrieve the winning ticket, and the sight of his father's grinning corpse, creates a hysterical reaction—he can no longer speak, and his face has been paralyzed into a terrifying grin, similar to the ghastly one he saw on his father's corpse. Seeing his face, his wife died of a heart attack and Marek's purloined winnings have made him rich enough to buy a castle and a title—the Baron Sardonicus.

The Baron spends his life in torturous experiments (on others, of course!) hoping to find a cure for his condition. Somehow, with his bad reputation, ghoulish face and torturing habits, he managed to win the heart of Cargrave's former flame (which speaks volumes about her, even if Sardonicus cannot...speak volumes, that is). But, the good doctor, despite being disturbed about the whole situation, reluctantly agrees to try to find a cure for the Baron, out of love for Maude. As the baron has mentioned that he will mutilate her face, if he isn't cured, well, that's just another incentive.

Baron Sardonicus, being reflective.

How does it all work out? Ah, now that's what makes Sardonicus unique. Castle's little trick with this one is that the audience gets to decide with glow-in-the-dark cards—what Castle calls "The Punishment Poll,"—what fate should befall the characters? Talk about bread and circuses—theater-goers could vote like Romans (or Siskel and Ebert), as the card showed thumbs up or thumbs down. Castle (on-screen) took the count of the cards (one thus suspects it was rigged, and evidently no evidence of an alternative ending has been unearthed) and the audience's "decision" played out on the screen. That the ending that is shown is always the "thumbs down" version shows what Castle thought of his audience's ability to practice leniency—none at all. Why else would they be showing up at a creepy movie like Mr. Sardonicus?

Like most Castle movies, one can't take any of this too seriously, as the film is being presented in deadly earnest, despite the crazy ideas and the Sardonicus make-up that produces more mirth than actual horror. It is a jolly little ride, not too different (or as frightening) as the spook-house at the fair, and its effect is just as short-lived.