9 Horror Movies That Got Too Real As You Watched

Hollywood is always looking for ways to spruce up the moviegoing experience and make it more immersive for audiences, though these gimmicks also have a tendency to be short-lived.

Case in point we have the original 1959 Vincent Price-starring House on Haunted Hill, which features a late-film sequence where a skeleton emerges from a vat of acid.

And so, in his infinite wisdom, director William Castle devised a new feature called "Emergo," whereby he invited cinema managers to rig up a skeleton to the screen, which could then be "levitated" over the audience with a series of pulleys.

As daft as it sounds, Emergo did apparently work on audiences of the era, helping drive House on Haunted Hill to commercial success, grossing more than twelve-fold its budget at the box office. 

However, Emergo didn't become the new hotness in Hollywood, probably due to the logistics involved in rigging up cinemas and the personnel needed to actually operate the pulleys.

That said, there have been periodic screenings of the film which have brought the Emergo gimmick back, to the amusement of modern audiences.