JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL:Seat buzzers, floating skeletons and ghosts in the auditorium – tonight brings a return of cinema that went beyond 3D
IT IS, you will agree, profoundly annoying when some oaf answers his or her phone in the cinema. The slightest crackle from a sweet wrapper can send otherwise sane punters into angry paroxysms. Imagine, then, if a maniac decided to parade a luminous skeleton across the auditorium. What if a vandal had attached novelty buzzers to the seats? A refund of the ticket price would be insufficient. You’d demand heads on spikes. Would you not?
Yet, half-a-century ago, such inconveniences were used as selling points. Welcome to the bizarre world of William Castle. Born in 1914 as William Schloss, Castle, by all accounts a man of endless charm, was, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, one of the busiest purveyors of low-budget jolts to the masses. He never achieved the critical respect now routinely (and quite correctly) put the way of fellow schlockmeister Roger Corman. But William did manage to invent his own genre of cinema. If he’d got round to giving it a name, he might have plumped for Gimmickvision.
Beginning in 1958, Castle produced and directed a series of horror films whose exhibition involved the use of jokey stunts, each of which carried a name that suggested an amazing breakthrough in the cinematic process. The House on Haunted Hill, released in 1959, employed something called Emergo (a skeleton was cranked across the screen). 13 Ghosts used Illusion-O (the audience were given a viewing device that concealed or revealed spirits.) He handed out insurance certificates promising punters $1,000 if they died of fright. He stationed nurses at the doors of dangerously terrifying pictures.
Castle's most notorious "invention" was, perhaps, Percepto. Devised for The Tingler,a weird thriller released in 1959, the process was not quite so dangerous as later reports (and Castle himself) would have you believe. It has been suggested that the producer wired cinema seats to administer small electric shocks to his punters. In fact, he used joy-buzzers that emitted nothing more damaging than a faint vibration.
Tonight, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival offers a rare screening of The Tingler. "Everyone has this notion that you go into the cinema and you sit there in peace and quiet," Grainne Humphreys, the festival director, explains. "That's quite right and proper. But there are other ways and The Tinglerplays up to that." Humphreys admits that the festival has not managed to resurrect Percepto, but the screening will feature the sort of innovations that made Castle such a legend. If something luminous and hairy sits down beside you, he, she or it is probably part of the show.
So does the screening only have value as a celebration of kitsch? Not at all. The most surprising thing about The Tingler is that it's really rather good. Featuring a high concept that HP Lovecraft might have savoured – Professor Vincent Price discovers a spinal parasite that reacts to fear — the film has a proper plot and features several impressively baroque, positively psychedelic horror set pieces. You wouldn't confuse it with Don't Look Now. But you wouldn't confuse it with I was a Teenage King Kong, either.
Still, only one Castle film has secured a place in the critical pantheon. In 1968, he produced Rosemary's Babyfor Roman Polanski and, to his own surprise, ended up with his name on an art film. (Something very similar happened four years earlier when Tony Tenser, notorious Soho exploitation merchant, helped produce Polanski's Repulsion.) But the great impresario's reputation is secure. In 1993, Joe Dante directed John Goodman as a version of Castle in the delightful Matinee. A little over a decade ago, Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis, who fondly remembered enjoying Castle's films as youths, devised a production house, dedicated to cheap thrills, respectfully named Dark Castle. A few of their films – the recent Splicefor example — have been very good indeed. Most have been somewhat ropy. But they've all made a valiant effort to give the viewer an invigorating, chilly shock. It's an honourable objective.
The Tingleris at the Irish Film Centre at 8.00 pm. The festival will not cover patrons for death by fright
TODAY'S PICKS
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Another Irish co-production, Dieter Auner's documentary follows Romanian shepherds. The director will attend. Cineworld, 8.45pm
POETRY
Gentle, powerful Chinese film about a woman who, late in life, gains new understandings while taking a poetry class. Best screenplay at Cannes. Cineworld, 6.15pm
CARANCHO
Thriller following an Argentinean lawyer as he helps traffic-accident victims extract compensation payments. Ricardo Darín stars. Cineworld, 9.00pm
