The Dark Séance: Are You Afraid of the Things That Can Come Out of Your Dreams?

On a warm June evening in 1961, young men lined up outside the RKO Keith Theater in Washington, D. C. in response to a “werewolf wanted” sign that had been placed in front of the building.

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“Prospective applicants were screened, and the winner was changed into a werewolf by a local make-up artist in front of the theater on opening day,” writes Kevin Heffernan in his 2004 book Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold. “He then rode around town in a convertible accompanied by a black-masked ‘cat girl,’ also selected from a pool of applicants.”

This was a promotion ginned up by the theater itself to publicize a double-bill of Hammer’s Curse of the Werewolf and Shadow of the Cat – though, as gimmicks go, it would probably have been a better fit with AIP’s 1957 hit I Was a Teenage Werewolf.

Prior to the 1958 release of William Castle’s Macabre and its baked-in insurance policy gimmick, such promotions had often been the purview of individual theaters and exhibitors – which sometimes lent the moviegoing experience even more of a carnival ballyhoo atmosphere, as whatever stunt your neighborhood theater was getting up to might not be available anywhere else.

Distributors frequently offered up promotional ideas, but left them to exhibitors to pull off. Take, for example, the pressbook for Columbia’s 1944 release, Cry of the Werewolf, which encourages theater-owners to, “Borrow from your local museum a collection of voodoo drums, horns and devil-dolls like those used in West Indian Voodoo rites. Make up a lobby display of all you can get. If the owner agrees, allow patrons to try out the instruments for themselves to see if they get any weird effects or have any strange reactions.”

But what if your local museum didn’t have a bunch of objects used in “voodoo rites”? Not to worry, the pressbook was also filled with other elaborate suggestions, ranging from “ghostifying” the lobby with “luminous-painted skeletons, silhouettes of bats, cobwebs,” and so on, in a pitch straight out of the midnight spook show playbook, to recommendations as ill-advised as to “borrow a live wolf (properly caged, of course!) from your local zoo for exhibition in your lobby.”

Castle’s appearance on the scene helped to show that these sorts of publicity stunts could become standardized across theaters and reap big profits for distributors and exhibitors alike. These gimmicks took a variety of forms, among them tests of various kinds that practically dared audiences to come see the movie.

At the top of several of the posters for William Castle’s otherwise largely gimmickless 1964 film The Night Walker is a table, with spaces for YES and NO. Above this are the words “DARES YOU TO CLAIM,” while the rows below hold statements such as “you have never had the impulse to kill in your dreams” or “you have never had forbidden desires in your dreams.”

The film in question is one of Castle’s less well known, following a woman who is plagued by strange nightmares after the mysterious death of her husband. Though not generally renowned on its own merits, The Night Walker has several claims to fame, including re-teaming former married couple Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck, in what would ultimately be the latter’s last feature role. It was also the last black-and-white film made by Universal.

In Castle’s continuing efforts to capitalize on the success of Psycho, The Night Walker was written by Robert Bloch – the second of two times that Bloch and Castle would collaborate, the former being Strait-Jacket, which was released earlier the same year.

“From the macabre genius that wrote Psycho,” crows one advertisement for The Night Walker, which also promises “screen realism never before achieved.”

An October issue of Variety announced that Castle had dropped $25,000 to produce a “six minute promotional film, titled Experiment in Nightmares,” with “Hip Hypnotist” Pat Collins “questioning six mesmerized subjects on their nightmares.” The resulting short was intended to prove “that dreams reveal our secret fears and that everyone is a potential ‘Night Walker.’” Promotion of the film also included a “dream contest” in issues of Modern Screen magazine, according to the American Film Institute.

All of that may have been enough to get audiences into seats without one of Castle’s patented gimmicks – but throwing that little test onto the posters didn’t hurt.

The Night Walker wasn’t the first film to use such ballyhoo, and it was by no means the most ambitious. That prize may go to 1963’s Dementia 13, the feature debut of legendary director Francis Ford Coppola.

Dr. William Joseph Bryan Jr. – identified on Wikipedia as “one of the founders of modern hypnotherapy” – compiled a list of thirteen questions “for the purpose of weeding out viewers who might be adversely affected by the movie.” The questions include such gems as “Did you ever do anything seriously wrong for which you felt little or no guilt?” Not to mention non-questions like “Death by drowning in a pond is best described by the word ‘exciting’” and “the most effective way of settling a dispute is by one quick stroke of the axe to your adversary’s head.”

According to Mark Thomas McGee in Beyond Ballyhoo, “The director of the Advertising Code Administration did not find Dr. Bryan’s test amusing, fearing that it endorsed the idea that movies could cause crime.”

Dr. Bryan himself was not without controversy. He claimed in a 1972 radio interview that he was the chief of the Air Force’s “brainwashing section” during the Korean war, and was accused in a 1978 book of using posthypnotic suggestion to induce Sirhan Sirhan to assassinate Robert F. Kennedy.

He worked on the Boston Strangler case and was an officially credited technical advisor on Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962) – while also claiming to have done uncredited work on The Manchurian Candidate that same year. In 1969, he was found guilty by the California State Board of Medical Examiners of “unprofessional conduct in four cases involving sexual molesting of female patients” he had placed under hypnosis.

“How much can you stand before you go ‘Berserk’?” asked a similar but less ambitious test for Columbia’s 1967 Joan Crawford vehicle Berserk. As in the Night Walker test, four of the five questions were yes/no, things like, “Saw-teeth savagely slashing a girl apart rip my nerves” and “I get dizzy watching a garroted body swinging.” The last question showed a Rorschach-like blot of ink, and your options were, “This reminds me of a stain of” either ink or blood.

If you answered more than three questions “yes” – I gather, in this case, “blood” was equivalent to “yes” – then you were advised to “see Berserk at your own risk.”

Never especially common in the first place, such tests may be a thing of the past, but their brand of ballyhoo – the idea that the movie might, indeed, be too scary for you – is one that still exists today. A recent example is the infamous “heart rate challenge” that was used to drum up publicity ahead of the release of Hereditary in 2018.

Moviegoers wore Apple Watches and data was collected from the device’s health app, “tracking the heart rates of 20 participants during promotional screenings of the movie at eleven different Alamo Drafthouse Theaters.” The results were then baked into videos that showed the heart rates spiking during the movie’s scariest bits – absolutely the kind of thing William Castle would have done, had he been able to back in the ‘60s.