The Dark Seance: A Real Fake – The Career of William Castle

In his memoir, William Castle tells an anecdote about meeting a young Susan Hayward in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. “A pretty red-headed girl was putting her foot in Jean Harlow’s footprint, so I decided to put mine in Lon Chaney’s,” he writes.

“Someday, I’ll be a superstar,” the young Hayward says. “And I’ll frighten audiences,” Castle replies.

Ever the showman, Castle’s memoir should probably be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s likely that many of the scenarios he describes in it are perhaps a bit “better than true” – but the fact of his longstanding desire to “scare the pants off audiences” seems undeniable.

An orphan from the time he was eleven, Castle dropped out of school at age fifteen to become the assistant stage manager of the touring production of the stage version of Dracula, a position for which he was recommended by none other than Bela Lugosi himself.

Even if much of Castle’s memoir is embellished, his career was one filled with remarkable coincidences, daring gambles, and surprising successes. Before directing the gimmick-laden horror films which were his passion, he had already helmed dozens of competent B-pictures for Columbia (and occasionally other studios), produced plays, worked as associate producer on Orson Welles’ classic The Lady from Shanghai, and much more.

To hear Castle tell it, he was suggesting gimmicks almost from the very beginning. One of his first films for Columbia was the earliest of a series of eight Whistler pictures, four of which would be directed by Castle. “I suggested having some sort of gimmick at the audience level,” Castle recalls in his memoir. “We could have an actor dressed like the character Richard Dix played, run up the aisle of the theatre screaming and have several plants in the audience faint.

Even before he got his start in pictures, Castle also understood that the purpose of the gimmick was to draw the audience in. Describing a “rather daring” stunt in a play he directed, he says, “It was a great gimmick for the spectators, making them part of the play.”

If Castle is to be believed, he even tried to bring 3D to Hollywood three years before Bwana Devil, pitching it to Universal in 1949 as “SEE-A-VISION, The New Sensation Where You’re Part of the Picture.” It was turned down, but Castle did eventually direct a movie in 3D during the boom that followed the release of Bwana Devil.

“I decided to throw every goddamn thing I could think of at the camera,” Castle writes about directing Fort Ti (1953). He then describes attending the preview screening with his wife, Ellen. “The audience, with glasses perched on their noses, ducked constantly. Tomahawks, balls of fire, arrows, and cannonballs seemed to fly out of the screen. Smiling, I said to Ellen, ‘I’m not a director, I’m a great pitcher.'”

Castle had a reputation for turning out B-movies competently, quickly, and on budget. He seems to have respected the work and the people who worked with and for him. But what he really wanted to do was horror, and he hadn’t gotten much opportunity to do so by working as a contract director at Columbia.

His break finally came after he saw a screening of Henri Clouzot’s 1955 classic Diabolique, though he had to make it happen for himself. Columbia was unwilling to let him produce a film as well as direct one, so Castle mortgaged his house in order to finance what would become Macabre, the first of his gimmick horror pictures.

Released in 1958, Macabre’s gimmick was simple enough – Castle took out a policy with Lloyds of London to insure theatergoers against death by fright. (Actually, because it was impractical to insure the entire world, he insured himself against indemnity in their deaths by fright, instead.) The certificates, which offered a sum of $1,000 to be paid to a named beneficiary should the unthinkable occur, helped to turn Macabre into a blockbuster. The $90,000 picture made more than $5 million at the box office.

From there, Castle’s reign as “King of the Gimmicks” began, as did a seemingly-unstoppable run of classic, gimmick-laden horror pictures including House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, 13 Ghosts, Homicidal, Mr. Sardonicus, and more. “By 1964,” Castle rights in his memoir, “I had built a mini company within a major studio. A staff of twenty, under contract, did nothing but work exclusively on my films, sometimes around the clock.” In addition to this, “William Castle fan clubs were now forming throughout America, almost in every city, 250,000 strong.”

While Castle seemed to enjoy his crown as “King of the Gimmicks” – and struggled to set it aside, even when he aimed to – he also harbored more artistic ambitions. “I fantasized that someday I would hear the phrase ‘The envelope please,’ and win the coveted Oscar,” he writes in his memoir. “‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for bestowing this great honor upon me… I will now put my legs behind my neck and balance the Academy Award on my head…'” (Double-jointed, Castle had gotten his start in “show business” by performing as “The Spider Boy” at his summer camp’s annual circus.)

The closest Castle would come to his coveted Oscar was when he bought the rights to Ira Levin’s 1967 novel, Rosemary’s Baby, before the book was even published. Originally, Castle wanted to direct but, according to him, was convinced to hand the reigns over to Roman Polanski, who created one of the most celebrated horror films of the modern world.

While it didn’t end with Castle receiving an Academy Award to balance on his head, it was a massive success, nabbing two Oscar nominations (with Ruth Gordon winning one for Best Supporting Actress) and four Golden Globe nominations (Ruth Gordon once again taking hers home), among its many accolades.

Though a success by just about every other conceivable measure of the word, Castle never really received the sort of critical acclaim he hoped for… even after his death. The entry for Castle in The Fearmakers, John McCarty’s 1994 book of horror movie directors, reads something like a hit piece:

            “Like Tod Browning, William Castle contributed a body of work to the genre of fearfilm that remains notable but that might have been more distinguished had he restricted himself to producing his films and not chosen to direct them also. That the great critical and commercial fearfilm success of Castle’s career was the classic chiller Rosemary’s Baby (1968), a film Castle produced but left to the more talented Roman Polanski to direct, would seem to confirm this assessment.

            “Like Browning, Castle was a showman with a carnival pitchman’s sensibility. Unlike Browning, however, Castle’s sensibility wasn’t rooted in the kind of ‘sucker born every minute’ attitude Browning often seemed to have held toward his audience. Castle simply loved the show business of moviemaking more than the art, and his work reflects his attitude. The fearfilms he directed remain memorable – some even classic – more for the gimmicks he devised to exploit them and lure audiences – and for his cheerful rifling of suspense and shock techniques and plot elements from other, better films – than for any aesthetic qualities.”

 Yet even McCarty’s assessment can’t shake the idea that Castle is genuine in his enthusiasm and affection for the form and genre, his work filled with “brazen mimicry that does not strike one as contemptuous or mean-spirited, but, rather, winning.” In short, William Castle may have been a fake… but he was a real one.