The Dark Séance – Step Right Up! Gimmick Films Explained!

What is a gimmick film?

If the subject is what we’re here to discuss, then it only makes sense that we should first define our terms. After all, the very idea of the motion picture itself can be seen as a gimmick – still photographs shown in sequence to create the illusion of movement by tricking the eye and the mind.

Then, when talkies began to replace silent films starting in 1927 with The Jazz Singer, the concept of “sound pictures” were considered a bound-to-be-short-lived gimmick by many in Hollywood, an attitude famously immortalized in the 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain.

For our purposes, however, a gimmick film requires something more than a simple (or even a complicated) technological advance to qualify. The gimmick films that we are here to discuss are those which incorporate some sort of external element to their production or release as a way to break down the fourth wall between film and audience and transform watching a movie into participating in one – or, at least, offering the illusion of doing so.

A gimmick film, in essence, gives the audience something to do besides just watch the movie. Some way to participate – or, at least, to feel like they are participating. Sometimes these gimmicks are baked into the film itself in some way; more often they are entirely extricable from it, something that was done in theater auditoriums, rather than on the screen. Almost always, these gimmicks are part of the film’s advertising. A way to pull audiences in, and promise them an experience, rather than merely a movie.

As such, gimmick films are relatively rare during the early years of the motion picture, when the idea of movies themselves were still novel enough on their own. Instead, gimmick films come into their heyday with the advent of television – giving movies something to compete against, and forcing show business to find new ways to draw people to the picture houses. One of the earliest and most persistent forms of gimmick picture arrived in 1952, with the release of Bwana Devil, the first feature-length 3D sound film in color.

Though 3D had been around for some time already, it had not yet found its niche within the film industry, until the “3D boom” kicked off by Bwana Devil, which lasted for just a few years between 1952 and 1954 and saw the release of a variety of memorable 3D horror and thriller features including House of Wax, The Mad Magician, It Came from Outer Space, Robot Monster, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Dial M for Murder, to name just a few – not to mention plenty of 3D films in other genres.

Critically, for our purposes, these films all had several features in common: they required the audience to do something (put on glasses, in this case); they literally seemed like the film was “coming out of the screen;” and their 3D quality was heavily emphasized in their ad campaigns. “The Miracle of the Age!!!” promised the tagline for Bwana Devil, “A LION in your lap! A LOVER in your arms!”

3D is one of the few gimmicks that spread beyond a single movie – and one of the few that has recurred throughout cinematic history. Though never entirely absent from the stage, the popularity of 3D movies waned after 1954, then saw several more major booms in the 1980s through the early 2000s.

Standout (for good or ill) entries in the 1980s boom included several third installments in horror franchises, including Friday the 13th Part III, Jaws 3-D, and Amityville 3-D, while the early 2000s saw blockbuster movies routinely released in 3D, thanks to new advances in the technology to produce and screen them, with possibly the most dramatic being James Cameron’s Oscar-winning 2009 hit Avatar.

Most of the time, however, the gimmicks used in gimmick films were not as widespread as 3D, and were usually confined to a single film. They are most inextricably associated with the oeuvre of William Castle, who produced a memorable run of gimmick pictures between 1958 and 1975, with different gimmicks for each movie.

Castle was far from the only practitioner of the gimmick, however. The early success of films like Macabre and House on Haunted Hill prompted other filmmakers to attempt similar tricks – the 1958 release of The Screaming Skull offers viewers a free burial service if they die of fright while watching the movie.

One of the best-known gimmick films of the modern age is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though it didn’t begin as one. Originally a stage play, the cinematic version of Rocky Horror – released in 1975 – didn’t initially catch on with audiences. It wasn’t until midnight screenings at New York’s Waverly Theatre that the current tradition of audience participation began, transforming the movie from a thing you watch to a thing you do.

Other notorious but short-lived gimmicks include variations on “Smell-O-Vision,” which released scents into the theater, allowing audiences to “smell” what was going on in the movie. John Waters, an avowed fan of gimmick films broadly and William Castle specifically, famously released his 1981 film Polyester in “Odorama,” accompanied by a scratch-and-sniff card – a much less intrusive (and more cost-effective) approach than actually pumping scents into the theater’s ventilation system.

While all these gimmicks and many others besides varied considerably, they all had two things in common: They were designed to help sell the movies they accompanied, and they did so by promising audiences a more immersive experience. A way for the movie to come out of the screen and into the auditorium.

Often, these gimmicks were a way of competing with television, trying to draw audiences back to the theaters in a time when they could – for the first time ever – watch movies and shows in their own living rooms.

In our current age of streaming on-demand and dazzling home theater setups, the theatrical experience has lost much of the shine that it may have possessed even in the heyday of the gimmick films – a condition not helped by the fact that the movie palaces of old have largely given way to big box multiplexes – and new sorts of gimmicks, from marketing hype to themed popcorn buckets, are even now being trotted out to try to lure viewers back to the cinema.

Over the coming months, we’ll be exploring these and more, from the earliest days of motion pictures right up to our latest blockbusters, and how they all tie back to those midnight spook show Blackouts and the monsters we hope will come out of the screen and invade the audience.