The Dark Séance: It Actually Puts You in the Picture – Can You Stand It?

“HypnoMagic opens up whole new vistas to the director and is bound to work an organic change throughout the medium,” crows a press release advertising The Hypnotic Eye (1960), “something like when pictures first learned to talk. Now they’re discovering the value of psychological research to dramatic art, with new ways of communicating, new ways of reaching people where they live.”

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Just what was HypnoMagic? To quote Mark Thomas McGee in his book Beyond Ballyhoo, it was a “gimmick name coined by producer Charles Bloch to promote his film The Hypnotic Eye.” In practice, HypnoMagic simply amounted to star Jacques Bergerac, in his role as the sinister hypnotist Desmond, putting on a demonstration of hypnotism for the audience in a scene just before the climax of the picture.

To once more quote McGee: “He asks that the house lights be turned on, which is the cue for the projectionist to raise the lights about 40 percent. At this point the audience in the movie and the audience in the theater merge as Bergerac speaks directly into the camera.”

Bergerac then gives a lengthy but relatively anodyne demonstration of hypnotism, one which also makes use of branded “Hypnotic Eye” balloons, which could be purchased by theaters directly from Allied Artists at a cost of $20 per thousand balloons, with the intent that they were to be handed out to audiences before each showing – an example of another kind of common theatrical gimmick.

“Even if Bergerac was capable of hypnotizing an audience,” McGee writes, “he would have been prohibited from doing so by law.” Instead, as Charles Bloch has it, the audience doesn’t “experience the actual sensations, but the psychological effects of them. By inserting this scene just before the climax, we are able to give people the illusion of being catapulted into the climax itself.”

Rarely has the intent of the gimmick to break down the fourth wall and merge audience and movie ever been stated more directly.

It goes without saying that HypnoMagic did not, in fact, “work an organic change throughout the medium,” but it also wasn’t the only film to attempt such a stunt. For Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), it was “HypnoVista,” which amounted to leading off the film with a 13 minute lecture on the subject of hypnotism, delivered by Dr. Emile Franchel.

“You will feel the damp chill of the tomb,” Dr. Franchel assures the audience, “the warmth and heat of true love, the panic of absolute fear, the emotions of anger, pity, hate, affection, happiness, sorrow, tears, laughter. In fact, all emotions.”

And after all, who could gainsay him, since this is ultimately the essential promise of all films, whether they hypnotize you or not?

Not every movie that attempted to cash in on these sorts of pop psychology gimmicks went the same route as HypnoMagic or HypnoVista. The Mask (1961) returned to a familiar gimmick – 3D. However, rather than making the entire movie using the 3D process, only certain dream sequences were shot in 3D. When it was time for one of these sequences to begin, audiences were instructed by an unforgettable voice over the film’s soundtrack to “PUT THE MASK ON NOW!”

Audiences were given specially made 3D glasses branded as the “Magic Mystic Mask,” with instructions printed on the inside: “Each time the man in the picture puts on his mask you look through this for the shock of your life!” In addition to the usual immersive depth of 3D, this approach helped to simulate the demanding pull of the fictional mask, which may have been a metaphor for addiction.

My World Dies Screaming (aka Terror in the Haunted House) was advertised as, “The first picture in PsychoRama! The Fourth Dimension!” What did this actually mean?

In 1958, the flick’s producer did a presentation to a film trade group, the FCC, and the National Association of Broadcasters. This presentation included clips of the film, some of which contained “subliminal messages” while others contained “the exaggerated supraliminal symbols” which are briefly visible in the only versions of the film that are still extant today.

These symbols included absurd cartoon drawings of leering faces – among them what looks to be a mad scientist with a rat in his mouth – as well as messages such as “Scream Bloody Murder,” “Die Louder,” and “Die Dead.”

Only one other film was ever made using “PsychoRama,” a 1959 crime drama called A Date with Death, but according to the American Film Institute, the only extant version of A Date with Death contains no discernable subliminal messages, suggesting that, if they were ever there, they may have been removed subsequent to release.

In 2001, Rhino Entertainment released Terror in the Haunted House on home video, complete with a claim that it was “banned by the U.S. government.” While it wasn’t, actually, there were concerns raised about the process of “subliminal communication,” and the National Association of Broadcasters prohibited TV stations from using “subliminal projection.”

To the best of my knowledge, however, the U.S. never made any law against subliminal messages – let alone going so far as to specifically ban Terror in the Haunted House. The UK did, though. Well, not ban Terror in the Haunted House, but they did put a kibosh on the use of subliminal messages “as a persuasive technique.”