The Dark Séance – Watch Them Shiver in the Cowards’ Corner!

“I never saw the picture, I disliked it so much.” That was writer Robb White, describing Homicidal, the last film he worked on for William Castle, in an interview with Fangoria in 1985.

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!

“I stopped into a theater to see Psycho, and I died of embarrassment,” White recounted, after he had finished writing Homicidal. “That was just a steal from Psycho, the whole goddamn thing.”

“He hadn’t come to you saying, ‘Let’s do a knock-off of Psycho?’” Fangoria asked.

“No,” White replied, “he’d never mentioned Psycho. As far as I knew, Homicidal had nothing to do with Psycho. Bill said, ‘Look, we’ll have this old dead woman sitting in a chair, and we’ll push her down the steps.’ Well, I’ve forgotten really what Homicidal was all about. I’ve forgotten whether the hero was a man or a woman.”

That question of whether the actor was a man or a woman – it was a woman named Joan Marshall, credited as Jean Arless – was one half of the two-part gimmick designed by Castle to help sell Homicidal, which hit screens in June of 1961, less than a year after the debut of Psycho.

In the film, Marshall plays the dual roles of Emily and Warren. To explain why would be to give away the film’s ending… if preserving the twist in a sixty-year-old movie that was already a knock-off of Psycho is really worth doing.

According to Castle, casting the dual roles was a challenge. “Interviewing many beautiful young men, most of them gay, I finally decided a man was wrong,” he wrote in his memoir. Enter Joan Marshall, who read for the role of Emily before Castle sent her down to Ben Lane, Columbia’s head of makeup. “I know it’s short notice,” Castle told him, “but I’m going to send a beautiful young lady down to you. I want you to make her look like a man.”

Two hours later, Joan Marshall returned to Castle’s office. “My secretary, not recognizing her, asked the man his name. The transformation was indeed astonishing.”

Castle also went to great lengths to keep the casting under wraps – hence the screen name of Jean Arless. “It was a neutral name,” Castle wrote, “it could have been male or female.” However, this sort of ballyhoo wasn’t Castle’s specialty. For that, we have to go to the other half of the gimmick for Homicidal – the notorious “Fright Break.”

Here’s how cult movie maven John Waters (who we’ll discuss at greater length in a later column) described it in his book Crackpot: “A yellow cardboard booth, manned by a bewildered theater employee in the lobby. When the Fright Break was announced, and you found that you couldn’t take it anymore, you had to leave your seat and, in front of the entire audience, follow your footsteps up the aisle, bathed in yellow light. Before you reached Coward’s Corner, you crossed yellow lines with the stenciled message: ‘Cowards Keep Walking.’ You passed a nurse (in a yellow uniform? … I wonder), who would offer a blood pressure test. All the while a record was blaring, ‘Watch the chicken! Watch him shiver in Coward’s Corner!’ As the audience howled, you had to go through one final indignity – at Coward’s Corner you were forced to sign a yellow card stating, ‘I am a bona fide coward.’”

While Castle’s previous gimmicks had broken down the barriers between film and audience – or, at least, given the illusion of doing so – the Fright Break was the first to literally stop the film in order to involve the audience, though how many people actually took advantage of the opportunity to get a full refund by visiting “Coward’s Corner” is unknown. However, the August 3, 1961 issue of Daily Variety quotes Castle as saying that the gimmick was “working great,” with theaters taking in $20,000 weekly, and only paying out $100 in refunds.

And while Robb White may not have liked Homicidal, not everyone agreed with him. In fact, many critics have cited Homicidal as possibly Castle’s best picture – including no less than Time magazine, who placed it among the top ten films of the year and declared, “Made in imitation of Hitchcock’s Psycho, it surpasses its model in structure, suspense and sheer nervous drive.”

Maybe not accurate, but I’m sure William Castle enjoyed the praise.

Homicidal wasn’t the first movie to warn the audience when the scary part was coming. According to Mark Thomas McGee in his book Beyond Ballyhoo: Motion Picture Promotion and Gimmicks, the 1959 Filipino/American co-production Terror is a Man may have pioneered the idea of a warning bell before the movie’s most gruesome moments, a trick which was rehashed in Cannibal Girls (1977).

The producers of Chamber of Horrors “embellished” the idea, adding a “Fear Flasher” to the “Horror Horn,” which they advertised as “The Year’s Most Startling Entertainment Innovation.”

So integral were these to the sale of the film that they take pride of place on its poster, where each one is explained in detail. “At the start of certain scenes that many may consider too shocking, a red light will begin its signal on the screen to alert you to the terror ahead,” reads the description of the “Fear Flasher,” while the “Horror Horn” adds, “At the same time the Fear Flasher starts blinking its warning, the Horror Horn will sound the alarm. Precisely at this instant, shut your eyes and hold your ears.”

“This is a detective story and you are the detectives, but the question is not who is the murderer but who is the werewolf,” states the opening narration for the 1974 Amicus horror film The Beast Must Die. It then cautions viewers to “watch for the werewolf break.”

The “werewolf break” in question was described in a 1974 issue of the Monthly Film Bulletin as “a visual recap of events and personalities and a fifteen second pause for thought,” so that viewers could make up their minds about who they thought was the werewolf. The Film Bulletin went on to describe the werewolf break as being “amusing enough and brings a touch of the old-time fairground entertainment into proceedings.”

And, really, that’s what these gimmicks are all about, right? Well, that, and selling tickets…