The Dark Séance: Newer Than Tomorrow!

Besides HypnoMagic, HypnoVista, and PsychoRama, there were plenty of other gimmicks that were hailed as “technical innovations” that would change the way that audiences watched movies – though they rarely did.

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“I kept reading in the paper about all these people with different processes, which were absolutely nothing,” said special effects genius Ray Harryhausen, as quoted in Mark Thomas McGee’s Beyond Ballyhoo; “wide screen, narrow screen, upside down screen, Blubberscope, whatever…”

William Castle had invented a variety of names for his assorted gimmicks – Emergo, Percepto, and so on – and just about everyone else did, too. “Inspired by 3-D and CinemaScope, new technical innovations were developed at an astounding rate,” writes McGee; “hardly a difficult task since, as often as not, these ‘innovations’ were nothing more than a fancy name.”

Many of these were new monikers for existing cinematic techniques, as in the dizzying array of different nomenclatures applied to stop-motion effects, of which Harryhausen’s trademarked Dynamation is the most well-known. Others include Dynarama (somewhat inexplicably used by Columbia in place of Dynamation when promoting Harryhausen’s Sinbad pictures), Fantamation (used for The Crater Lake Monster, 1977), Fantascope (for Jack the Giant Killer, 1962), Mystimation (for the odd mélange of effects employed by Karel Zeman, notably in The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, 1958), and Regiscope (for The Beast of Hollow Mountain, 1956).

Old-fashioned matte and blue screen effects got compelling new names, too, as in Amazoscope (The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock, 1959) and Perceptovision to describe the various works of notorious schlock director and Mystery Science Theater alum Bert I. Gordon. Then there’s Vitamotion. We may not know what exactly Vitamotion was, but it was hailed in ads for the 1960 US release of the 1956 Russian film The Sword and the Dragon (known in its native language as Ilya Muromets) as, “The film process newer than tomorrow!”

While many of these were just new names for old things, others were different, such as Norman Maurer’s Cinemagic. The son-in-law of Three Stooges star Moe Howard, Maurer was a comic book artist who created “an attempt to blend live action with line drawings,” as McGee describes what was then called Artiscope in Beyond Ballyhoo.

Despite AIP’s publicity department promising that Cinemagic, “acclaimed by leading showmen as the most amazing new motion picture process since the invention of the camera, will take audiences into the world of the fourth dimension,” it was only used in two pictures: 1959’s The Angry Red Planet and 1962’s Three Stooges in Orbit, both to memorable, if not always convincing, effect.

Even these weren’t alone. For a time, it seemed like every new film that came out had to have a new process with a bombastic name associated with it. You can see similar efforts still at work in modern movies, from directors like Christopher Nolan shooting in IMAX to Ryan Coogler’s fiddling with aspect ratios in Sinners. Do these have a bigger impact on the actual moviegoing experience than the “Blubberscopes” of yesteryear? Probably sometimes. Other times, probably not.

While all of these are gimmicks, however, designed to get audience members into theater seats, few of them are actually intended to break down the fourth wall and transition viewers from watching the movies to experiencing them, as so many of the other gimmicks we’ve discussed here do.

However, some of the “technical innovations” of the age of ballyhoo did just that. Besides the various gimmicks employed by William Castle, one of the most notorious of these was Sensurround, which was pioneered by Universal for their 1974 disaster epic Earthquake. (Disaster movies were all the rage in the 70s.)

The premise was simple enough. The soundtrack for the film included low-frequency “pseudorandom” bass effects that were felt more than heard. Essentially, when the movie was playing, a special amplifier and added speakers and subwoofers would produce the sound that audiences would “feel” as a rumble in their seats.

Sensurround was a big hit, nabbing Earthquake an Academy Award for Best Sound and making the film one of the highest-grossing of 1974 – it beat out Godfather 2. Intended as a gimmick that would extend beyond a single picture, Sensurround was subsequently used in Midway (1976), Rollercoaster (1977), and the theatrical releases of a pair of patch-up features made from Battlestar Galactica episodes.

The process had problems, though. Besides the fact that people seeing movies in other theaters often complained about the rolling bass notes – a difficulty that we still face in modern multiplexes, if we happen to be seeing a quiet film next door to an explosive one – the Sensurround system offered structural concerns, as well.

Installing Sensurround was something of an undertaking. “Before installing Sensurround, all cinemas had to be checked to make sure the structure could withstand the rumble,” writes Thomas Hauersley at in70mm.com. “Each installation required three days of setting up Sensurround to make sure the system would work, but also making sure the cinema could actually handle the vibrations.”

At the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, where Earthquake had its “World Premiere,” a “fish net” was installed under the ceiling to catch falling plaster shaken loose by the Sensurround system.

All this combined to ensure that Sensurround was about as short-lived as any of the other various “technical innovation” gimmicks with catchy names, yet it left its mark on the cinema-going experience more than most.

“Maybe it ultimately failed,” Hauersley writes, “but Sensurround had a profound influence on how movies are presented today – both in cinemas, and in home-cinemas.” Sensurround helped to popularize the subwoofer, and huge speakers powered by large amplifiers are now standard in cinemas all over the world.

“Around 1976/77 Dolby Laboratories began to add enhanced low-frequency channels to movie soundtracks,” continues Haursley. “The audience flocked to see films ‘in 70mm Doly Stereo,’ because they knew it was a superior sound experience with Dolby’s ‘baby boom’ bass soundtrack giving extra ‘punch’ in the low end when needed We can all thank the pioneering of Sensurround for that!”

It isn’t just in the world of sound where the legacy of Sensurround is felt, either. Haptic feedback, which employs a similar concept to William Castle’s Percepto gimmick, became popular in video games with the advent of PlayStation’s DualShock controllers in 1997, although haptic feedback in video games goes back at least as far as Sega’s 1976 arcade racing game, variously known as Road Race, Moto-Cross, and Fonz, due to its licensing tie-in with Henry Winkler’s character from Happy Days.

Similar haptic feedback devices have also been placed in some theater and even home theater seating, so that the seats actually “rumble” in time with events on-screen – an innovation that William Castle would have loved.