THE FILMS: Macabre (1958, William Castle), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), Matinee (1993, Joe Dante)
THE CONNECTION: These films all mark important moments in William Castle’s career and how he left a lasting impact on film and pop culture.
THE THINKING: Today is William Castle’s birthday, so this week’s triple feature is a celebration of the man and his contributions to Hollywood. If you ask critics, most of his films were B-level at best. But if you ask the audiences that lined up around the block to see them when they were released, they would have said that nobody created a better moviegoing experience. In-theater gimmicks like “Percepto” and “Emergo” were the tools Castle used to turn okay stories into immersive theme park rides which had young people everywhere talking about them. And today, nearly fifty years after his death, an entirely new audience is making his work as relevant as ever through revivals and retrospectives—oftentimes complete with the marketing stunts that made him so beloved.
Macabre William Castle (1958)
This is the first picture William Castle directed that wasn’t a contract piece for Columbia, where he spent years working under infamous studio head Harry Cohn. There he was a hired hand, helming whatever projects were assigned to him whether they were interesting or not. During the forties and fifties he directed dozens of B-movies—mostly noir and westerns—whose acclaim was overshadowed by what he went on to do.
It was a sold-out screening of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique that changed everything. In his autobiography Step Right Up! I’m Going to Scare the Pants Off America, Castle describes taking his wife Ellen to the local theater on a stormy night to see the film everyone was talking about. Astounded by the line of ticket holders standing in the rain, he knew something special was happening. By the time the end credits rolled he knew what he had to do: make people scared.
Castle began the search for the right property and landed on the book The Marble Forest by Anthony Boucher. It’s a ticking clock thriller about a small-town doctor who receives a message that his daughter has been kidnapped and buried alive and realizes he only has a few hours to find her. Castle believed this film was going to be a huge hit, but none of the studios did. So when Columbia turned it down he took a giant leap of faith and mortgaged his home to put $90,000 into making it.
Macabre was finished, but even though it borrowed heavily from Diabolique Castle feared it wouldn’t have the same effect on audiences. So before its release, with no money for reshoots, he incorporated the first instance of what would quickly become his trademark: the theater gimmick. In this case, he offered “fright insurance” from Lloyd’s of London to moviegoers that guaranteed $1,000 to the beneficiary of anyone who “died of fright” during their viewing. He sold Macabre to Allied Artists and it was loved by audiences, who delighted at the stunt.
Like most of the films William Castle is remembered for, Macabre‘s appreciation relied heavily on the in-person experience of seeing it in a theater. Watching it at home—without the “fright insurance”—leaves you with just the film itself. And that’s okay in this case; it’s no Diabolique, but it is a solid film from the era that shows off the filmmaker’s abilities beyond flashy marketing.
Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski (1968)
After the success of the fright insurance William Castle began incorporating a promotional gimmick into all of his films’ releases. Macabre‘s follow-up, House On Haunted Hill, used “Emergo,” which amounted to an inflatable skeleton on a string moving around the theater. It wasn’t scary, but it was definitely entertaining. The Tingler rather ingeniously merged the in-house scare with the film itself: Onscreen, the monster gets loose in a movie theater, and of course the viewers are watching from a movie theater—so the monster is then also loose in the real-life theater. Castle’s brand of circus-like promotion was loved by everyone, and even his contemporaries took notice.
It’s said that Alfred Hitchcock saw the success of House on Haunted Hill and decided not only to dip his toe into the horror genre with Psycho, but also to promote it with his own gimmick; there was a large clock outside theaters which counted down to the cutoff time for admittance. Thus began a short-lived Beatles vs. Beach Boys–esque rivalry between the directors, and Castle tried to make his own Psycho with Homicidal, a gender-bending tale of murder and money. It was appreciated, but nowhere near as well-received as Hitchcock’s.
Despite the schlocky nature of William Castle’s better-known films, he always wanted to be taken seriously. While under contract at Columbia he bought the rights to the detective novel If I Die Before I Wake and gave them to Orson Welles, whom he had befriended years earlier. He wanted Welles to go to bat with studio head Harry Cohn on his behalf. Cohn loved the idea but insisted that Welles direct and it became The Lady From Shanghai. Castle felt defeated and began down his road of campy horror, but he never gave up on the idea of doing more.
In 1967 Castle came across a yet-to-be-published version of Ira Levin’s horror novel Rosemary’s Baby. He immediately recognized it as a potential hit and also the film that would earn him the respect he’d chased. So he mortgaged his house and bought the rights. He took it to Paramount studio executive Robert Evans who immediately saw the potential. But Evans wasn’t interested in having Castle direct; he wanted someone young and exciting—Roman Polanski.
Rosemary’s Baby is an important film for a lot of reasons. Its success marked a turning point for Castle, its producer; he was now running with the big dogs. It was also one of the first projects Evans would develop at Paramount—he’d subsequently make The Godfather and Harold and Maude. Polanski brought a European-auteur sensibility to the film—something Americans hadn’t really experienced. His style of filmmaking was raw and creative, not like much of the saccharine fare U.S. audiences had been fed since 1934, during the Hays Code. A new generation of filmmakers was about to expose young moviegoers to things that were entirely fresh and game-changing, and Rosemary’s Baby was at the forefront.
The story is wild—a mother is secretly coerced into giving birth to the devil’s son by a coven of witches led by her eccentric neighbors—and Polanski captures it beautifully on film in a frantic style which makes the viewer feel as crazy as Mia Farrow’s paranoid character. it received a lot of critical acclaim and even a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Ruth Gordon and a nomination for Polanski.
But despite the success and fame Rosemary’s Baby brought to all who were involved in it, Castle believed the film was cursed. The Catholic church condemned it, and Castle began to receive loads of hate mail telling him he would burn in hell. And there were sudden deaths, too: the film’s composer, Christopher Komeda, died of a brain haematoma shortly after production and of course Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family. Castle himself got incredibly sick and had a kidney removed.
Despite the success of Rosemary’s Baby, Castle never made a successful follow-up. Instead he made Project X, a campy sci-fi/horror film nobody went to see. After that he made Shanks, a weird horror film about a young mute puppeteer who finds a way to turn the deceased into puppets. It stars Marcel Marceau, a bit of stunt casting that Castle thought would be enough to draw people in. Needless to say, it wasn’t. And his next production, Bug, which would be his last, didn’t fare any better. It seemed that as audiences were changing, opting for more visceral films in the seventies, William Castle was stuck in the past. Rosemary’s Baby would be his only foray into critically acclaimed cinema.
Matinee, Joe Dante (1993)
William Castle never reached the artistic status he always strived for. But he was nonetheless beloved by audiences and filmmakers alike. Late in his career he even had a cameo in Shampoo, because Warren Beatty was a fan, and also in The Day of the Locust, because John Schlesinger admired him so much. And unbeknownst to him, some of the kids who were having the time of their lives when their seats buzzed during The Tingler would be so inspired that they’d go on to make their own films. In the late nineties filmmakers Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver would create Dark Castle Entertainment, a studio under the Warner Brothers umbrella with the purpose of remaking Castle’s films for new audiences. After a few titles they branched out into new properties, but have recently committed to seven new reboots of the director’s classics including The Tingler and the aforementioned Macabre.
Another filmmaker profoundly influenced by Castle is Joe Dante, the director of eighties classics like Gremlins and Innerspace. His love of the man was so great that in 1993 he made Matinee, a fun and campy film in which John Goodman plays a very Castle-like director driving around the country to premiere his new film, Mant, complete with Tingler-esque Rumble-rama seats in the theaters. It’s a loving homage to a man whose joy came from entertaining people. William Castle spent a lifetime trying to garner respect as a filmmaker, and Matinee gives that to him. The ripples of his artistry continue to spread in Hollywood—it doesn’t matter that he achieved it with the help of flying inflatable skeletons.
FURTHER READING (AND WATCHING):
- Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story
- Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America
- “Rosemary’s Baby: It’s Alive!” (Ed Park for Criterion)
WHERE TO WATCH:
- Macabre
- Rosemary’s Baby (and a beautiful Criterion edition is available on Blu-ray here)
- Matinee