Everyone's favorite fast-buck horrormeister William Castle had a checkered career. He started out as a promising director with the occasional excellent sleeper hit (When Strangers Marry) hidden in his filmography. At the same time that Robert Aldrich was paying his assistant's dues, Castle was also working as an assistant director for luminaries such as Orson Welles, on The Lady from Shanghai. By now most fans are well aware of his string of horror-lite hits, that relied on clever gimmicks to distinguish themselves: insurance policies against dying while watching the movie, real props suspended in the air over the theater audience, chairs wired for vibrating motors, audience-participation polls. He tagged his gimmicks with words like Emergo and Percepto, names that stayed in the memory of impressionable and imaginative moviegoers longer than the movies themselves did. Castle was deified in Joe Dante's wonderful 1993 movie Matinee, which reinvented the huckster as a joyful showman every bit as impressionable and imaginative as the kids he catered to. 13 Ghosts was one of his biggest hits, and one of the few where his gimmick was actually seen in most of the theaters where the film played.  ¹

1. Although all the advertising for House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler prominently featured the gimmick, very few theaters were ever wired for 'Percepto' chair buzzers or rigged for 'Emergo' flying skeletons. The poster for The Tingler just showed a theater chair, which promised the scary thought of some kind of REAL audience participation. Since people screamed in the movie, we kids assumed that only a few chairs could be outfitted for the gag, and that we hadn't been so lucky as to be seated in one.
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2. One of Tim Lucas' very best brainstorms in his magazine Video Watchdog was his perception of a big mystery in The Tingler. His theory is that Columbia thought the tone of the show too black and too 'dangerous', and that a clever reshoot of certain scenes was undertaken to lighten things up, to make Vincent Price a terrified hero instead of a diabolical villain. As finished, the movie plays straight until the third act, whereupon things simply don't make sense, especially in hindsight: the deaf-mute woman's hallucinations, the actions of her husband, carrying a body across town for a secret autopsy - and then taking it back home again? The movie ends without a real resolution, relying on sheer fun to carry it through. Lucas simply reasoned through the logic of Robb White's careful story setup, and realized that Price's now-isolated LSD session was originally just the first use of the drug. The deaf-mute woman's husband used LSD on her as well, which would account for the surreal scares in the bathroom and other 'impossible' occurrances. Also, Lucas thinks Price may originally have actually shot his wife dead, and that the Tingler was returned to HER body to dwindle and die, not the deaf-mute lady's. It's just a fascinatingly clever piece of film detection by Lucas, the kind of thing that made Watchdog a must-read. I wish I could get my hands on an original shooting script!
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3. Savant found the viewer provided with the disc to be rather on the small side, but adequate. A coupon provided offers to sell you more at an exhorbitant 2.95 each.
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4. Wayne Schmidt, who did the film restoration at Columbia, said that the elements for the Illusion-O version of 13 Ghosts were intact and that the photochemical production of new prints, etc., required some trial and error but basically went off without a hitch. The only problem was explaining the 'process' to the eager marketing people, who thought Illusion-O was 3-D or something. The Tingler was much more problematic in that all the original 35mm elements for that movie's color sequence had faded terribly. When faded to red, the bathtub effect just didn't work. A 16mm IN had to be used, instead. It's great that Columbia has the oomph in its DVD division to pursue these oddball restoration problems; these can't be million-selling DVD titles we're talking about.
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