The Dark Séance: Well, We Warned You…

In Macabre, it was William Castle’s own voice that assured audiences, “You are now insured against death by fright.” Before The Tingler, the man himself appeared for the first time to warn viewers that “a scream at the right time may save your life.”

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Of course, Castle didn’t exactly invent this approach. Since 1955, Alfred Hitchcock had famously been appearing at the beginning of each installment of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where he would introduce the episode with a morbid and humorous monologue.

Go back a little further, however, and these instances of speaking directly to the audience become more common still. James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) opens with character actor Edward Van Sloan, who plays Doctor Waldman in that film and had previously played Van Helsing in Tod Browning’s Dracula earlier that same year, emerging from behind a curtain.

“How do you do?” he greets the audience, before telling us that producer Carl Laemmle “feels it would be a little unkind to present this picture without just a friendly word of warning. We are about the unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with two great mysteries of creation: life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So, if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now’s your chance to uh, well… we warned you!”

While it may seem counterintuitive in our modern, spoiler-phobic age, warning people that they were about to be scared was a tried-and-true gimmick that had been used by carnival barkers for about as long as there had been carnivals for them to bark at, and is still used by Halloween haunts every year.

Talking up the scariness of what they were about to see not only helped to sell tickets, it also primed the audience, putting them on the edge of their seat before the filmmakers had delivered even a single jolt.

Introductions weren’t the only places where such techniques were put to use, either. Roland West’s The Bat Whispers (1930), a talkie remake of his silent adaptation of The Bat from just four years earlier, ends with star Chester Morris emerging from behind a curtain and exhorting the audience not to tell anyone about the movie’s twist ending.

It seems that the eponymous master criminal gets his feelings hurt whenever people find out his true identity, and subsequently “goes around for days, killing people without the slightest enjoyment for his work.” Because of this, Morris asks audiences not to tell their friends the identity of the Bat. “In return for your consideration in this matter,” he assures them, “he promises not to haunt your homes, steal your money, or frighten your little children.”

Nor was The Bat Whispers alone in employing this sort of ballyhoo. Plenty of movies with ostensibly shocking endings asked audiences not to share them around. Sometimes, this was presented much as it would be today – don’t spoil the fun of other viewers, who haven’t had a chance to see it yet. Other times, it was couched in terms of respect for the people who had worked so hard to put the ending together in the first place. It’s their story, after all, let them tell it.

Psycho went one step further. “No one – but no one – will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho,” warned posters and advertisements featuring Hitch himself pointing at his watch with a look of disapproval on his face.

“We won’t allow you to cheat yourself!” shouted theater standees. “You must see Psycho from beginning to end to enjoy it fully. Therefore, do not expect to be admitted into the theater after the start of each performance of the picture. We say no one – and we mean no one – not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)!”

Today, such an exhortation probably seems unnecessary, but in 1960, it was more than a gimmick – it upended the way that motion pictures were shown. Prior to the release of Psycho, most movies were played by theaters on a loop, and the auditorium wasn’t cleared out or cleaned in-between. After the movie, there would often be a newsreel and a cartoon, maybe even another feature, and then the movie would start up again.

This led to a tendency for patrons to walk in whenever they felt like it, start the movie wherever they came into it, then watch until that scene came around again.

Such an approach is hard to imagine today, but was common enough in the early part of the 20th century that exhibitors felt powerless to stop it, despite efforts including a 1937 “Go-to-the-Show-on-Time” campaign and a single-theater experiment for the 1950 release of All About Eve in which “no patron is to be seated after the picture starts” – an experiment that ended after only four days, with the film’s distributors lamenting that “you can’t break with one engagement the half-century-old habit of patrons going to the movies when they like, or on the impulse of the moment.”

Maybe All About Eve hadn’t been able to do so, but with Psycho, Paramount was determined to. When Psycho premiered in New York, theaters had Pinkerton guards on hand to prevent people from entering after the film had started, and to hustle them out when it was over.

The idea, according to the Hollywood Reporter, came not from Hitchcock himself, but from Jerry Pickman, who was Paramount’s vice president for advertising and publicity at the time. “The enjoyment of the film would be diminished unless patrons see it from the beginning,” he argued. Hitch picked up this idea and ran with it. “I realize this is a revolutionary concept,” he said, “but we have discovered that Psycho is unlike most motion pictures. It does not improve when run backwards.”

There is no denying the massive impact that Psycho had on the horror genre, but its greatest impact may have been on how we watch movies in the first place, as Psycho’s closed door policy shortly became the norm for movie screenings, as it still is today.

“Paramount won’t let anyone enter theatres where Psycho is playing after the picture starts,” the Hollywood Reporter’s review of the film pointed out. “No one will want to leave before it is over.”