DVD review: ‘Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story’

Director, producer, writer and sometime actor William Castle has often been labeled a “schlockmeister” for the renegade, low-budget quality of his pictures. But to a generation of horror fans and restless teens who embraced his movies and turned them into cult hits, he was undoubtedly a showman extraordinaire.

The hustling, cigar-chomping Castle was never satisfied to merely present a scary movie. His fondest and most outrageous movies had to come with an interactive gimmick. In 1958’s “Macabre,” he issued each ticket-holder a $1,000 Lloyd’s of London life insurance policy in case a death should occur from fright; for 1959’s “House on Haunted Hill,” inflatable, iridescent skeletons would sometimes float through the audience, and, most famously, for 1959’s “The Tingler,” moviegoers felt a tingly jolt at intense moments in the story from electric joy buzzers planted in random theater seats.

All this might sound quaint in this age of endless CGI effects, overdone 3D and saturation movie marketing, but in his day Castle, with his carnival-barker’s zest, was on par with such larger-than-life showmen as P.T. Barnum, and the reasons are made clear in director Jeffrey Schwarz’s fine and affectionate documentary “Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story.”