Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story

He thrills! He chills! He hucksters in living color! SPINE TINGLER! is a fun-filled documentary on the life of master showman William Castle, the P.T. Barnum of the movie business. Born William Schloss in New York in 1914, he spent his formative years learning the tricks of the Broadway trade. The siren call of Hollywood lured him at 23, and the newly Anglicized “Castle” was able to talk his way into a meeting with Orson Welles and a position as his assistant on “The Lady from Shanghai.” Castle really came into his own, though, as a director and marketer of B horror movies. He promoted masterpieces of the late 50s and 60s, such as “Macabre,” “House on Haunted Hill,” and “The Tingler,” by using all the audience participation ballyhoo he could muster: issuing life insurance policies to moviegoers in case of death by fright, stringing skeletons across theater ceilings to pop out at key moments in the plot, and installing joy buzzers under seats to zap people as Vincent Price's voice thundered “Scream! Scream for your lives!” Two of the kids who loved his gimmicks and his over-sized personality were, not surprisingly, John Waters and Roger Corman. In SPINE TINGLER!, they and many others shed light on the schlockmeister that was William Castle. –BB