The disc: The William Castle Film Collection
The details: The William Castle Film Collection piles up eight, count ’em eight, of Castle’s gleefully absurd horror films from the early 1960s in one bountiful package. Castle was a low-rent Hitchcock, as much of a carny huckster as a director, despite the fact that he directed some very creditable B movies in the 1940s and served as associate producer to Orson Welles on Lady From Shanghai. He was loud and proud, shooting his movies in a couple of weeks for up to $200,000, then spending six to eight times that on promotion.
The Tingler was promoted with “Percepto,” which was more or less a buzzer attached to selected theater seats that would be cued by Vincent Price onscreen telling the audience members to scream for their lives. Cued by the buzzer under their butts, they did so. Homicidal came with a “Fright Break,” a 45-second timer on the screen that gave scaredy-cats time to get out of the auditorium and into the “Coward’s Corner” before the murders started.
Castle was an archetypal master of exploitation filmmaking, and, as was typical, the films themselves, divorced from the magnificent ballyhoo, are often a little disappointing. The Tingler and Strait-Jacket — Joan Crawford as an ax murderess — are great fun, but Mr. Sardonicus (a witch’s brew of Phantom of the Opera and The Man Who Laughs), Zotz and The Old Dark House are slow going. Homicidal, 13 Frightened Girls and 13 Ghosts are considerably better, or at least giddier.
The set comes with a full array of trailers and examples of Castle’s showmanship, and the main extra is an excellent feature-length documentary: Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, which showcases such Castle fans as John Waters and Joe Dante, whose film Matinee was a loving homage to Castle.