Enter the Spooky Schlocky Haunted Castle

By Chris Dimick
Pants-wetting terror caused by creepy celluloid is great and all.
But horror movies shouldn’t just be scary; they should also be fun.
No one understood this better than William Castle, the 1950s and 60s horror movie producer/director that's been shamefully underappreciated by mainstream critics.

Overshadowed repeatedly by his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, Castle created a different kind of horror/suspense product – one that elicited less praise from critics than Hitch, but an equal amount of adoration from true horror fans.

Because William Castle’s movies have been mistakenly and accidently left out of the RDHP movie stable to date (and hopefully we can change this soon), here is an homage to the king of spooky schlock and his impressive library of endearing horror films.

Great Grabbing Gimmicks
Though he created such beloved horror films as “House on Haunted Hill” and “13 Ghosts,” Castle was never content enough with his films to let them stand on their own merit. In addition to that insecurity, newfangled TV was also sucking away theater audiences.
So, to GUARANTEE people would fill the theater for his movies, Castle accompanied each picture with a new exciting gimmick.
These tactics were less than subtle.

















For his 1959 Vincent Price vehicle, “The Tingler,” Castle had theaters install electric shock devices in random theater seats. At a specific moment in the film where the actors are confronted by menacing body-inhabitant “the tingler,” theater management would throw a switch and send a mild electric shock into audience members, eliciting screams of terror.
This gimmick, named “Percepto,” and was just one of many “o” themed attractions Castle included in his films.



For perhaps his biggest hit, 1959’s “House on Haunted Hill,” the new, amazing film technique “Emergo” was employed.
When a skeleton rises from an acid vat in the film, a lighted plastic skeleton on a wire would appear in the actual theater from a black box next to the screen.
This “frightening” prop would then swoop over the heads of the audience, controlled by a lucky theater usher. The skeleton would be pulled back into the box as Vincent Price reels in the skeleton in the film.

According to IMDB, many theaters soon stopped using “Emergo” because when the local boys heard about it, they brought slingshots to the theater. When the skeleton started its journey, the rowdy boys would pull out their slingshots bombard it with stones, BBs, ball bearings and whatever else they could find.

For 1960’s “13 Ghosts,” the gimmick "Illusion-O" involved the audience receiving a pair of special glasses that were needed to “see the ghosts”. These ghost shaped "ghost viewers" contained a red filter and a blue filter.

Like many of his films, Castle himself filmed an introduction to 13 Ghosts where he explained the gimmick to audiences.

If you believed in ghosts, you would look through the red glasses, causing the ghosts to appear on the screen.
But if you didn’t believe in ghosts, or were too scared to actually see them, you would look through the blue filter, causing the ghosts to remain unseen.

Scream and a Smile
Castle was a marketing genius for including these gimmicks in his films. Even if they didn’t always work right or live up to their hype, the tricks elicited great word of mouth among the B-movie horror crowd.
How many movies do you hear from a recent viewer “we were sitting there, and then all of a sudden I got electrocuted at the film’s climax!” or “seriously, a fake-looking skeleton comes out of the screen at one point.” You’d probably want to check that out, wouldn’t you?!

 





















But beyond all the gimmicks, Castle’s movies are great for more film-focused reasons. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and in turn invite the audience to just sit back and enjoy the entertainment value of the film.
If you get scared, okay, great. But that wasn’t the entire point of a Castle movie. He wanted to entertain you more than scare you, and succeeded time and time again with his schlocky, spirited B-horror flicks.

Time has been more than kind to Castle’s movies because of this. While his scares might not get modern day folks to jump, his humor, wit and snarky attitude still rings home.
How can you not root for a guy who appears before each one of his films, and goes to such promotional lengths to get an audience’s attention?

Castle personalized his movies, making it easy for audiences to develop a relationship with the director (much like Hitchcock did by directly promoting his films.)
It doesn’t matter that the plots of some films were flimsy and outlandish (the tingler is an inherit body-monster that grows on and crushes one’s spine when they don’t scream in fright?)


Each Castle film is a party, not a funeral! Don’t sweat the details, just enjoy the ride. It is rare that Hollywood gives us such free-wheeling fun and abandon for convention, even in horror.
On shoe-string budgets, Castle managed to create films that are both creepy and captivating. You just feel good watching these films.

In the mood to smile while you scream? Pop in one of the great William Castle films listed below. Even if a skeleton doesn’t fly out of your screen, you will feel your own skeleton tingle with contentment.


Top Five William Castle Films























House on Haunted Hill (1959)
Millionaire Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) offers five people $10,000 to stay a night in a remote haunted house, giving each of them a loaded gun as a “party favor.” Throughout the night, they're terrorized by skeletons, disembodied heads and other grisly apparitions. Will any of the guests survive to win the prize? Or will the house scare them to death?





















13 Ghosts (1960)
A bumbling family man on the brink of losing his house inherits his eccentric ghost-hunting uncle's mansion, and stumbles upon spirits that are only visible to guests who wear special goggles. While his family is thrilled at first to have a huge home of their own, the uncle’s captured Caspers soon revolt against their new keepers.





























Mr. Sardonicus (1961)
A search for a winning lottery ticket in his dead father's grave causes Baron Sardonicus' face to freeze in a horrible grimace, until he forces a doctor to treat his affliction – with even more grotesque results! For this films gimmick, Castle let the audience vote on the evil Sardonicus’ fate at the end of the film --via the "Punishment Poll.”




















The Tingler (1959)
Dr. Warren Chapin is a pathologist who regularly conducts autopsies on executed prisoners at the State prison. He has a theory that fear is the result of a creature that inhabits all of us, and this creature is only suppressed by our ability to scream when fear strikes us.
He gets a chance to test his theories when he meets Ollie and Martha Higgins, who own and operate a second-run movie theater. Martha is deaf and mute, and if she is unable to scream, extreme fear should make the creature, which Chapin has called the Tingler, come to life and grow. Using LSD to induce nightmares, he begins his experiment.




















I Saw What You Did (1965)
Two prank-calling teenagers become the target for terror when they whisper “I saw what you did” to a psychopath who has just murdered his wife. Various antics bring one of the teen girls in contact with the killer, who stalks the girl in an attempt to silence her. Features a fabulously over-the-top performance by Joan Crawford as the killer’s amorous (and much older) neighbor.






Ties for the Guys

After finally finding a black slim fit suit at a reasonable price for our groomsmen (Many, many thanks to awesome hive member kirabee for directing me to LA's fashion district for affordable suits!), we moved onto the ties.


Mr. Cheetah loves the way a skinny tie looks with his amazing suit, so he'll be wearing the black striped skinny tie in the middle. Our two ushers will be in the fuchsia number on the right, and the groomsmen will all be wearing the black and silver (it looks white in the photo) bold stripe tie. Bonus: All these ties were at least half off at Macy's and Nordstrom Rack!

Which tie is your favorite?

The Last Pair Standing



Mr. Cheetah: It's not long before you get to see me in my full bridal get-up, so just wait a wee bit longer. Thanks!

So, I think the epic earring search may finally be over. What do you think?


And of course I have a few back-up pairs up my sleeve, just in case. ;)

And There Will be Noms

Warning: Not to be read on an empty stomach.

One our favorite parts of planning this whole wedding shindig? The tasting! Mr. Cheetah and I made the two hour drive to and from Palm Springs in one afternoon just to attend our tasting--and those four hours in the car were not a waste, my friends. The Viceroy knows how to feed a person!

First up, Apps!

Bruschetta: Buratta Cheese, Marinated Tomatoes, Arugula Pesto

Sliders

Crab Cakes with Corn

Truffled Mac & Cheese

Tuna Tartare with Avocado, Tomato, and Crisp Wonton

We had our choice of four of these, which one do you think got the boot (even though it was super yummy delicious)?

The Salad:

Greens with Strawberries and Walnuts

Heirloom Tomato Salad

We only get one salad option, any guesses what we picked? Hint: It tastes amazing!

The Main Course (served family style):

Local Channel Island Halibut, served with a Farm Fresh Organic Yellow Corn Succotash (quinoa is pictured)

Petite Filet, Creamed Spinach with Roasted Tomatoes and Point Reyes Blue Cheese (Sauce on side)

Free form Spinach & Mushroom Lasagna (served plated)

The Specialty Cocktail:

Raspberry Lemondrop. I'll take one now, please.

I better find some time to eat at the wedding--there is no way I want to miss all this glorious food!

The Final Countdown

We are dangerously close to single digits in the Cheetah Wedding countdown.


I can't wait for all these last minute projects to be finished (and out of my house) and I am so freaking excited for our wedding to finally be here. I'm looking forward to standing at the altar with Mr. Cheetah, reciting our vows, surrounded by our nearest and dearest. It's going to be amazing to be on the dance floor in the best dress I'll ever wear, dancing the night away with my new spouse and all our fabulous guests. Hearing the toasts our loved ones are writing for us is going to be a beautiful, once in a lifetime experience. But the fact is I'm really going to miss being engaged.

We've had ten plus years as a dating couple. We'll have decades of marriage. But we've had only about 10 short months of engagement. Mr. Cheetah has also expressed sadness that this special period in our relationship is almost over. Being engaged has been fun. Sure, there have been lots (and lots) of stresses and hurdles in planning this wedding, but we've also enjoyed it. It's not everyday we get to plan an awesome party for all our favorite people. We've enjoyed the genuine interest and excitement that people have for us when they hear that we're engaged.

We're sad to end the engagement chapter in our relationship, but we're ready and thrilled to begin the next one. Here's to hoping that being a newlywed is just as fun!

Do you like being engaged as much as I do? Or are you ready to have it over with and just be married already?

All the Pretty Flowers

The Cheetah wedding is almost here and I just realized I haven't written one post about our florals yet!

Since I come from a long line of women who love flowers, it was always clear that we would have fresh flower centerpieces and bouquets for our wedding. We set up meetings with four florists on a big planning trip to Palm Springs. One wouldn't show us any pictures or samples (for reals), one had a different aesthetic than us, one was very talented--but took months to get us a proposal--that was twice our budget, and one was just right. It turns out that the first florist we met with was the perfect fit. He immediately got the pink, white, and yellow modern romantic look we're envisioning.

As we are having three long tables and a family style dinner, there isn't a lot of room left so centerpieces will be minimal and scattered.



Not only am I super excited about how great the simple design will look, it also frees up more room in the flower budget for my absolute favorite wedding florals: bouquets!



Oh man, I'm so pumped for my bouquet.

I gave our florist a bunch of images of bouquets I love (including those above) and I trust him to make something wonderful. Likely flowers include: roses, peonies, ranunculus, billy buttons, anemones and more!

Are you having fresh flowers at your wedding?

Film #56: Faust (1926)

Free-will is like a mullet.
You can choose a clean-cut business hair cut, OR wicked-long party hair.
But try and have them together, and you just end up looking like a fool.
In other words, it is impossible to be saintly and sinnerly at the same second, as beardo Faust finds out in this week’s silent film, "Faust."


















Title character Faust is a smart dude. A well liked old man physician and alchemist, he is busy expanding his mind with the sciences and trying to turn lead into gold. Basically just minding his own business.

But somewhere in the netherworld, an angel and demon get tired playing with their human toy-things and get into a school-yard argument.
“When it comes to humans, evil will always win,” shouts the demon. “No way, I mean, good’s better. Wanna bet?” yells the angel.

The immortals spot Faust and agree he is the perfect man to test their torturous bet on. The angel says that although man has free will (his greatest attribute), he will still side with “good” when tempted… at least eventually.
No so, the demon says, who bets that given the right circumstances even an educated, typically good man like Faust will fall to the dark side. It’s a bet! But what are the stakes?

If the dark side wins, evil gets control of all of mankind. If good wins, man retains his free will and, well, they don’t get much of anything else… besides bragging rights… but ohhhhhhhhh how those angels will gloat at the Company Picnic that year!

The demon gets right to business, tempting Faust by giving him the ability to stop a raging plague, find eternal youth, have any woman in the world, and receive great riches and power…. all in exchange for the small price of his soul.





















Will Faust give into temptation and banish mankind to evil control?
Will the angels get a chance to tell the Devil “I told you so, dum-dum?”
Just why is Faust’s beard so whack? Find out in the 1926 German made silent, “Faust.”




RDHP Ratings and Reviews

C-Rating: 0.1
Chris Dimick states:
“Preachy and boring. Put these together in a movie, and the result is my lowest RDHP rating to date. Faust was part religious propaganda, part self-indulgent snoooooooooooooze fest.
Not a second of this film will entertain or illicit any human emotion beyond the feeling to turn off the screen and do something more useful with your time; like do your taxes, clip your nails, or watch paint dry.
Faust, you Fail.















I try to give all silent films a chance, keeping in mind the culture at the time of their production, the production quality they had to work with, and the fact that sound is just not an option. Only in that environment can a person fully take in a silent film.
With this mindset, there are times when the silent movie experience is magical, i.e. Metropolis or The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari. And then there are times like Faust.

When the characters weren’t wrestling with morally-simplistic demons and angels in predictable, cliché, and stereotypical fashion, they were dilly-dallying along in the most boring love affair in the history of film.
At two hours in length, the movie is just too long for the amount of “entertainment” that is provided. Was there entertainment in this movie? No… it was drab, depressing, drawn out and just a plain miserable experience.
















If that isn’t bad enough, I have major problems with the anti-Enlightenment/science ideology of this film as well as its self-righteous religious overtones… but here is not the time nor place for that discussion (religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin are not appropriate discussion topics for the RDHP, and for good reason).

Bottom line, the film fails on many levels.

Yet why, Chris, didn’t you give Faust a 0.0 if you hated it so much? The .1 is split into a .05 for the brilliant effects (which must have been amazing to viewers in 1926) and a .05 for the infectious face-expressions/laugh/cackle of the demon Mephiso.
I've never seen anything like that full faced Mephiso look, and it was a small flicker of fun amongst the awful slog of pious boredom.















Go clean up the dog crap in the back yard. Scrape out the rock-hard cheese crust from the top of your microwave. Do anything… but watch this.


N-Rating: 2.3
Nick Rich states:
“As a horror movie Faust doesn't make the grade.
There's rarely a creepy moment (notwithstanding the copious shots of dejected looks on the peasant faces), there's no suspense (except for the viewer waiting for the film to end), and the film just has a general lack of things that might scare you (well, except the eternal damnation of your soul). Chris hit the nail on the head with this one: Faust is boring; but I'm not ready to write it off completely just yet.
As a horror movie Faust might not make the grade, but as a study of the time and people who made it I think it has merit.
Germany, 1926. 8 years after the most horrifying war the world has ever seen that robbed a generation of its brethren, and a nation of its dignity and prosperity. When I look at Faust, I see many parallels to the lives of the German people who may have been watching it in theaters when it was released; parallels that most likely would have evoked strong emotions in them.
  • The plague: Much like good old bubonic, the Great War cut a swath through Europe stealing millions of souls. Faust shows people dying in droves, at random, before your very eyes... imagine watching this as a people with the fresh memory of losing loved ones to a war that so completely devastated their lives.
  • The waring powers above: I'm certain the concept of greater powers deciding the fate of mankind evoked a strong feeling in Germans - as a country they had been stripped bare and hopelessly indebted, all by powers which I'm sure felt beyond their control.
  • Science and technology: Have you ever had one of those moments where you look at some newfangled piece of technology and think "why can't things be like they were in the good ol' days?" The loss of 9 millions combatants (not including civilians) due to "advances" in technology, likely made the world bitter of its recent technological advances, and honestly, I wouldn't blame them.
  • The evils of the world: Historically, most people on this little blue ball we reside on have had faith of some sort, and most of those faiths espouse the defending/removing oneself from the evils of this world. With the moral vacuum and spiritual vacuum left from the war, I would wager seeing clearcut illustrations of people succumbing to the indulgences of the world would stir strong feelings in an audience that had itself succumb or that was watching friends and family around it succumb.


All of these themes no doubt had a strong emotional resonance with their intended audience (one that is a bit more difficult for us to engage in 85 years later from our comfy couches) and are just a few things to consider while watching this film. Personally, I didn't find Faust to be preachy any more than a movie about the life of a sexually perverted killer is preachy; both are speaking to a world view (one may be more comfortable to swallow than the other depending on the audience, but I digress). I found Faust to be true to the time it was made by addressing relevant issues, fears, and emotions in a language and style its audience would know and understand.

You may be wondering why I scored Faust so highly if I didn't overtly enjoy it... well, that's a good question. As I've mentioned before, one of the things I love about films is that they are a time-capsule of sorts, giving you insight to the time and people from whence they came. I think Faust did an excellent job of doing just that and combined with the mostly solid acting and breathtaking visuals for its time make Faust a film that can't be dismissed. While modern audiences will likely feel as if this film drags on and would be disappointed if they went into it expecting horror movie, I think Faust holds a valuable glimpse into the mind of our past.

The Skinny: Check this film out of you want to get into a truly horrifying place - the head of a German post to World War I. Or if you have always wondered what would happen to you if you grew a 3 foot beard.”




Things We Learned From Faust:
-The Fourth Horseman is lazy.
-The plague doesn’t mess around.
-The Klan is always ready to help carry dead bodies.
-Faust’s beard caused the plaque, and AIDS, and bird flu, and...
-Youth makes you foolish.
-Out of ink? Use the blood from your arm sore!
-One can make a beard grow by eating Wheaties and pulling on it twice a day.
-Celine Dion signing in French is twice as horrible.
-People are horrible.
-Due to obesity, females are receiving their “monthly gift” earlier in life.
-Further back in time you go, the faster folks fall in love.
-Babies can be a constant reminder of the most horrible day of one’s life.
-Europeans get a little too close to their mothers and sisters:




















RDHP Presents:
Famous Beards!
Main character Faust rocked a gnarly chin-strap that reached nearly down to his knees. While most who rock this style are currently in-between homes (homeless), we here at the RDHP respect Faust for his facial follicle freedom! Below, some famous beards blowing in the wind.


Abe Lincoln
Just try and hold a 3rd grade play about Abe without strapping a itchy beard on some squirmy 8-year-old. Can’t do it, and why would you even try!?
















Liza Minnelli
Not only was she an occasional “date” for Michael Jackson, she also married producer David Gest. Those two gents are about as straight as Christina Hendricks figure… not that they would have noticed.





















Conan O’Brien
After his heart-wrenching breakup with NBC (who left him for old flame Jay), O’Brien went into hiding and grew a creepy beard in a fit of depression. Happens to all the broken guys. But seems he liked the homeless look, because he kept the mug-rug when he returned to TV in November.

























Unabomber
The king of back-woods-terrorist-chic.




















ZZ Top
What is more awesome than these beards? Answer, the irony that their beardless band drummer is named Frank Beard.

















Kids in the Hall – The Beard
Always shave after a vacation... your life might depend on it.