The Dark Séance: Do You Believe in Ghosts?

If the “Percepto” gimmick from The Tingler isn’t William Castle’s best-known gimmick, then the ghost viewers from 13 Ghosts must be. Officially dubbed “Illusion-O,” these ghost viewers are similar to standard red-cyan anaglyph 3D glasses, except that the cellophane lenses are located directly atop one another, rather than over each eye.

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Here’s how William Castle himself explains it, in his introduction to the picture: “When you came in, you were given a special ghost viewer, like this. […] You must only use it when the screen changes to this kind of a bluish color. Then you raise the viewer to your eyes, and you look at the screen through it. If you believe in ghosts, you look through the red part of the viewer. If you do not believe in ghosts, you look through the blue part.”

While the majority of the film is in black-and-white, the sequences when you’re supposed to use your ghost viewer are tinted blue, while the ghosts themselves are red. Looking through the red lens, the ghosts pop out of their surroundings. Looking through the blue lens, they’re invisible – which makes for the odd sensation of watching an empty room while various voices howl and go “oooooooooo.”

In a review from the year the film came out, Variety wrote that, “The idea is sound and exploitable, but the execution doesn’t fully come off.” They’re not wrong. The ghost viewer is a delightful idea in theory, but leaves a little something to be desired in execution.

For one thing, it means that all of the ghost scenes have to be telegraphed by the screen changing to blue. It also means that the ghosts can’t generally interact with the other actors. As a January 1961 review in The Monthly Film Bulletin had it, the ghosts “are far less effective when witnessed than when their presence is merely suggested, especially when their viewability depends on a process as unremarkable as Illusion-O.”

Of course, the execution of the gimmick is less important than the appeal of it, and 13 Ghosts was enough to get people into seats, helping to cement Castle’s legacy as the “King of Gimmicks.” According to the American Film Institute, 13 Ghosts had a budget of around $500,000, but raked in more than $1 million at the box office.

Besides a memorable example of Castle’s dedication to gimmickry, 13 Ghosts is also the second-to-last collaboration between William Castle and writer Robb White. Up to this point, the two had worked together on all of Castle’s gimmick pictures, beginning with Macabre and continuing through House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler.

In fact, given that this run produced Castle’s best-remembered films, it could be argued that White’s writing style is as much a part of our idea of what a “William Castle movie” is as Castle himself. White might not have wanted to see it that way, however. He described his relationship with Castle as “cold” in an interview with Fangoria in 1985, and he spoke of the films they did together in only slightly more glowing terms.

“No idea, then, that you were creating films that some people think are classics?” John Wooley, interviewing White for Fangoria, asked.

“No,” White replied. “And I don’t think they are, either.”

Certainly, once White departed, the tone of the movies would begin to change. Described as “a writer’s writer,” Robb White wrote a lot more than screenplays. Well before Macabre, he had already written a range of adventure and war novels, often for young readers. A few of these have also been adapted to film, including his Edgar Award-winning 1972 novel Deathwatch (adapted twice, as Savages in 1974 and Beyond the Reach in 2014) and the 1956 submarine drama Up Periscope, filmed under the same name in 1959.

Though such adventure stories were his stock in trade as a writer, he wrote a bit of everything, including episodes of Perry Mason, articles for a variety of magazines, and various less reputable publications. As he explained to Tom Weaver in an interview, “I wrote as a woman for True Stories and got raped in a hayloft about once a month.”

His screenplays for William Castle all share certain hallmarks in common. Whether they involve ghosts, monsters, or simple murder, they all feature a noir-ish focus on human greed. House on Haunted Hilluses its ostensibly haunted house as a backdrop for the dueling murder plots of the husband-and-wife duo played by Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart. A man uses The Tingler to knock off his wife. The eponymous ghosts in 13 Ghosts may be real, but they are mostly benign, while the actual threat comes from an unscrupulous lawyer in search of a hidden fortune.

Unfortunately, White and Castle would part ways after Homicidal, the following year, and while Castle would work with several other great writers, including Ray Russell and Robert Bloch, nothing else would ever quite match the run of films that White and Castle made together – even if White didn’t necessarily see it that way.