In July of 1958 there was some chatter in the press that director William Castle was going to direct and produce two additional horror films, this was as a result of the success of Macabre.
Up until this point he had been a prolific director of B-action fair, including a number of Westerns, four entries in “The Whistler” series, some television work and the 1947 script and associate producer credits on Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai.
Legend has it — and anything from the mid-1950s related to Castle will have some embellishments — that he got inspired by French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique and decided to branch into horror as both a director and producer.
The two future horror films — which would be written by the Macabre’s screenwriter, Robb White (Castle’s partner in Susina Productions) and directed by Castle — would be House on Haunted Hill and Hysteria (which ended up being The Tingler).
Film Masters has a new limited-edition Blu-ray of House on Haunted Hill ready for genre fans to enjoy just in time for Christmas … street date is Dec. 16.
Castle came up with the idea of issuing $1,000 insurance policies for anyone who dropped dead of a heart attack while in attendance at a showing of Macabre.
For House on Haunted Hill, Castle teased the idea with Allied Artists (the film’s distributor) to have “Smell-O-Vision” and to use the newly developed “Emergo” process to give the illusion that objects were flying into the audience at the appropriate jump-scare points in the film.
The film got a test screening the Rives Theatre in Martinsville, Virgina on New Year’s Eve of 1958 and then opened at RKO’s Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco on Wednesday, January 14, 1959 touting “The 13 Greatest Shocks of All Time” and being the “First Film with the Amazing New Wonder – EMERGO – The Thrills Fly Right in to the Audience!”
Film critic Paine Knickerbocker, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, dismissed the “Emergo” gimmick, but had this to say about the film itself: “The film is far better than one might suspect from the title, and yet it actually pretends to be more: it is merely an old-fashioned mystery suspense film and a pretty good one.”
Indeed, “a pretty good one” and suddenly William Castle was on his way as the producer and showman extraordinaire of genre films during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s … The Tingler, 13 Ghosts, Homicidal, Mr. Sardonicus, Zotz, 13 Frightened Girls, The Old Dark House, Strait-Jacket, I Saw What You Did and more!
Bonus goodies include commentary by Cereal at Midnight host Heath Holland.
