The Dark Seance – In the Spirit of Foul Play

For the first of his gimmick films after the departure of Robb White, William Castle went searching for something different… and by most accounts, he found it while reading an issue of Playboy by the side of the pool during a Hawaiian vacation with his family.

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“Rushing to the nearest telephone,” Castle writes in his memoir Step Right Up, “I purchased the film rights to ‘Sardonicus’ and hired Ray Russell, the author, to write the gruesome screenplay for my next feature.”

Russell’s novella had appeared in the January 1961 of Playboy, where the author was also working as fiction editor. By October of that same year, Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus was on theater screens – and along with it was Castle’s latest gimmick.

“For years I have searched for a unique way whereby a motion picture audience can actually decide the climax of a picture,” Castle says from his director’s chair in the trailer for Mr. Sardonicus. The hypothetical solution to that problem? The “Punishment Poll.”

The premise of the Punishment Poll sounds simple enough on paper – and in actual practice, it is indeed probably one of the simplest of all Castle’s many gimmicks. Audience members who walked into the theater were given a small card, about the size of a playing card, with a glow-in-the-dark image of a hand printed on it. Depending on whether the card was turned one way or the other, the hand could be giving a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

“Thumbs down meant death; thumbs up, life,” Castle writes in Step Right Up. “Just before the final scene, the picture stopped and my image came onscreen, asking the audience how they felt about the fate of Mr. Sardonicus.” In his usual avuncular manner, and wielding an oversize version of the Punishment Poll card, Castle asks viewers, “But has Mr. Sardonicus been punished enough? Don’t you agree with me that such a miserable scoundrel should be made to suffer and suffer and suffer?”

The idea was that there were two endings to the movie. If the audience voted for mercy, then the ending where Sardonicus lives was shown. If they voted for more punishment, then the ending where he dies in agony was shown.

“Columbia had seen the final cut of the picture and demanded that I reshoot the final scene, which they cautioned would be unacceptable to audiences,” Castle writes. “In the scene in question, Sardonicus, unable to eat or drink because of his frozen grin, goes insane as he slowly and agonizingly dies. Columbia wanted a more palatable ending and insisted I let Mr. Sardonicus live. I refused adamantly, and just as adamantly they demanded another ending.”

That, according to Castle, was how he came up with the idea of the Punishment Poll. “I would have two endings – Columbia’s and mine – and let the audience decide for themselves the fate of Mr. Sardonicus.”

As he appears on screen, Castle pretends to tally the votes, asking patrons in the back to hold their cards up higher, and so on. Then, invariably, he announces that the verdict has been “no mercy” and orders the projectionist to carry out the sentence.

“Contrary to some opinions,” Castle writes in his memoir, “we had the other ending. But it was rarely, if ever, used.” Film historians generally disagree with Castle on this point, as no alternate ending of Mr. Sardonicus has ever been found, and some of the film’s actors have said that no additional footage was ever shot. More likely, it’s another example of Castle’s ballyhoo continuing even long after the movie’s premiere.

Castle couldn’t have chosen a better film for his Punishment Poll conceit. The Sardonicus of Russell’s original story, which Jonathan Rigby calls a “wonderfully sadistic work,” is one of the cruelest villains in gothic literature, albeit humanized just enough to inspire at least a stirring of pity, as well as revulsion.

Mr. Sardonicus was Russell’s first screenwriting credit, but it wouldn’t be his last. Besides working with Castle on another film (the unlikely 1962 comedy Zotz!), Russell contributed screenplays for Corman on The Premature Burial and X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes, both starring Ray Milland, and for Terence Fisher’s odd, uncredited remake of Castle’s remake of The Old Dark House, The Horror of it All from 1964.

Russell is also credited as having contributed the story for the 1966 TV movie-cum-theatrical release Chamber of Horrors, while his 1976 novel Incubus was adapted into the notorious 1981 movie of the same name.

Among its many other qualities, Mr. Sardonicus is notable for being Castle’s only gothic film in the traditional historical sense. While Russell’s original novella takes place in the middle of the 19th century, Castle’s film moves the action to 1880, first in London, and then in the fictitious central European country of Gorslava.

“He was making a type of film that wasn’t really his strand, if you like,” Jonathan Rigby says, in one of the various special features included in the Indicator Blu-ray of Mr. Sardonicus. “He was making an old-fashioned gothic thriller, and that wasn’t quite his thing.”

In accomplishing this, Castle had help from a mainly European cast, including a couple of Hammer alums playing his two leads, as well as Austrian character actor Oskar Homolka, who had previously worked with directors such as Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock.

“I managed to re-create England on Columbia’s sound stages in Hollywood,” Castle writes. “We built a graveyard where Sardonicus, opening his father’s grave, steals a winning lottery ticket from his father’s body. The spooky moors were built on another stage where dried ice, sprayed with a heavy smoke, kept the fog low. Sardonicus’s castle was a Gothic re-creation, and this, too, was shrouded in fog.”

The result is a film very different from many of the others in Castle’s filmography, yet also of a piece with them in many ways. And while Castle’s Punishment Poll is far from his most memorable bit of ballyhoo, it may be the gimmick that does the most to literally involve the viewer in the movie – or trick them into thinking it does. After all, what could break down the fourth wall more than being able to literally change the action on screen… even if that turns out to only have been another illusion.