10 Crazy Tricks Directors Tried To Pull On Audiences

If you know anything about the history of the cinema, it’s quite likely you’ve heard of William Castle, the notorious producer and director of fifties and sixties b-movie horror like House On Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, and The Tingler, and his endlessly inventive promotional gimmicks.

There was Homicidal’s ‘fright break’, where patrons too scared to watch the rest of the movie got a refund… provided they perform the walk of shame out of the theatre and sign a certificate of cowardice. There was Mr. Sardonicus, where the cinema audience got to vote on the eventual fate of the villain.

But none are as infamous as the prank associated with The Tingler in 1959. Castle’s movie was about a parasite that attached itself to the spinal cord and fed on fear, making its victim’s spines ‘tingle’.

He purchased old WWII aeroplane wing de-icing motors and fitted them to the undersides of certain seats in theatres showing the movie, and hired plants to melodramatically faint and be carried from the room during the film’s climax, which was set in a movie theatre.

Vincent Price’s voice then warned the audience that a tingler was loose in their theatre, followed by the projectionist activating the buzzers, jolting certain members of the audience from their seats - and freaking everyone else out around them.