Movie ballyhoo is in good shape this Halloween season. The made-for-$10,000 Paranormal Activity has become a runaway hit, thanks to clever Internet marketing. “Chaos reigns” T-shirts are being hawked (or foxed) outside theaters showing Antichrist. The timing of The William Castle Film Collection on DVD couldn’t be better, though Castle, the master of promotional gimmickry, would have gone a lot farther: Handing out “ghost viewers” for Activity audiences to see specters, or placing “Percepto” buzzers under the seats in Antichrist auditoriums to give you an extra jolt.

Castle, who started as an assistant stage manager to Bela Lugosi on his Dracula stage tours, charmed directors George Stevens and Orson Welles with his chutzpah, then won over the notoriously unwinnable kingpin of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, who put him to work on grinding out B-pictures. Castle stepped away from the studio to make two career-defining horror pictures, 1958’s Macabre and 1959’s House on Haunted Hill. The movies are entertaining but the real fun was in picking up your “Death by Fright” insurance before the former, or dodging the plastic skeleton hoisted above your head—the miracle of “Emergo”!—during Hill. The films were astonishingly successful, and Castle (who was paid homage in Joe Dante’s sweet Matinee) returned to Columbia a star in his own right.

A number of the eight films in this collection are retreads, but remastered for greater goose-pimpling clarity. The new-to-DVD ones, like the Tom Poston-starring Zotz! (1962) and the Hammer Films co-production The Old Dark House (1963), lacked more exploitable gimmicks, or any gimmick at all, and helped bring that phase of Castle’s career to an end. By producing Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning Rosemary’s Baby (1968) he achieved the artistic respectability he craved but, as the bonus disc documentary Spine-Tingler! The William Castle Story shows he was unable to parlay that into much else of lasting interest in his last frustrating years. (more…)