10 Movies That Used Insane Gimmicks To Get Attention

In Horrors of the Black Museum, a man hypnotizes his assistant to get him to commit crimes to write about. This is one example where the gimmick was tacked on way late in production in a blatant attempt to get attention.

The studio felt that the film needed something extra to bring in crowds, and so an extremely lengthy, 13 minute prologue was added where actual hypnotist Emile Franchele would hypnotize the audience. It apparently doesn't work twice, and so an opening title card asks you to wait in the lobby for 13 minutes if Franchele has ever hypnotized you before. Yes, you may have just paid for a ticket, but now get the hell out and go outside.

This might sound like an extremely tedious way to open a movie, but audiences actually went crazy for it. Producer Herman Cohen explained that the so-called HypnoVista "helped make the picture a success, I guess, 'cause people were looking for gimmicks at that time.'" They sure were, and movies like these were happy to provide them.

Watching Horrors Of The Black Museum today, you can really understand why the studio wanted to add on an extra something. It's quite slow and bogged down by a bunch of uninteresting dialogue, but maybe the producers hoped that if you were hypnotized, you wouldn't realize how mediocre the movie was.