William Castle

Something Castle.

William Castle, I think, who developed a fixture called Scent of Mystery.

And you had to scratch a little sort of card as it went along, determining what, you know, smell you should get to go with the film.

And the American comic, Henry Youngman, said, oh, I didn't understand the movie.

Now, it was kind of schlocky.

It was produced by William Castle, who was a famous horror film director.

It was an NBC show.

And each episode was like a different standalone supernatural or horror-themed story.

I mean, initially, as soon as I hear, oh, we advertise at the farmer's market by bringing out the actors in costume, I think that's fantastic.

I'm a big fan of a lot of old horror movies, like the cheesy William Castle movies from the 60s, where they'd have a plastic skeleton fly out through the audience at the climax of the movie.

I think it's for House on Haunted Hill.

I love that kind of gimmick, and even with, you know, the early version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame they did in the 1920s, in certain cities like New York and Chicago, they had a guy dressed up as Quasimodo outside the theater promoting the movie.

For instance, he scored such films as X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes that we mentioned earlier.

He worked with names like Roger Corman and William Castle.

He scored Dr. Goldfoot in The Bikini Machine in 1965, The Dunwich Horror in 1970.

He did 1963's Black Sabbath.

I'd like to begin by asking you, as we're seeing the graveyard start to unfold here, how did this film come about?

From my understanding, both joel silver and bob zemeckis were huge fans of william castle a director from the 50s and 60s who made a lot of these type of b-movie horror movies of the time and got to know terry castle william's daughter and struck up a relationship where they could remake literally the entire library that was left over from william castle's uh of work and so They went through several processes, did several films before mine, and 13 Ghosts is a remake of one of William Castle's movies.

So this is actually a remake in itself from, I think it's 1958.

And it had a lot of the ghost glasses and that kind of stuff that you used to have back in those days when the B-movie matinees were all the rage and Mr. Castle's work was the hit of them all.

It's just kind of ironic I ended up in this place.

The other thing, though, I wanted to make sure that was incorporated within the script as we sort of were developing the stories was a sense of reality as well as a dark sense of comedy.

At the end of the day, this film of William Castle's, this film in particular, had a little bit more of a lightheartedness to it because it had this sort of glasses mentality.

So I thought there was a comedic presence within this particular film that he had made that we would want to transfer over to this new version.

I'm interested in the history of it.

But I've only discussed this film indirectly in a different episode, an episode on a film called Matinee, where John Goodman's main character is very clearly modeled on a famous, mostly schlock horror suspense purveyor by the name of William Castle.

But William Castle, as producer, did have one extraordinary credit to his name that was not House on Haunted Hill or that kind of sort of creepy movie, The Tingler.

William Castle also produced the notorious Roman Polanski's brilliant adaptation of Ira Levin's runaway, massive, best-selling book, Rosemary's Baby.

And I remember... 27 years ago now, when the Blair Witch Project came out, it had its fans, its fierce defenders such as myself, but it also had a lot of people that were disappointed by the film because you don't see anything.

You don't see a monster.

And that is a significant compliment to everyone involved in Rosemary's Baby.

And before I forget, I mentioned how this film came up in an episode on the movie, a wonderful, the Joe Dante film, Matinee, featuring what I believe to be John Goodman's best performance, because it's a lead role and he is just magnificent the whole way through.