5 Great Moments From the World's Craziest Filmmaker

One of Castle's earliest successes, 13 Ghosts told the story of Buck Zorba, a young boy who used a pair of "ghost goggles" to navigate through a haunted house stocked with an assortment of spirits that included a murderous chef, a burning skeleton, a ghostly lion, and other challenges suitable for a party of four third-level adventurers. In order to draw the audiences into the film -- or at least get them into the theater with a paid admission -- Castle gave viewers their own "Ghost Viewer" and even appeared in the film with his typical charm to explain how it was used.

The film used the same sort of red overlay that was used for 3D pictures, with the difference being that you were only supposed to look through one lens at a time. With the red lens, you could join Buck in seeing the ghosts. With the blue lens (the "ghost remover"), they were rendered invisible, which Castle promised would prevent heart attacks among his more sensitive audience members.

Here's what makes it genius: It's completely pointless. Not only were the "ghosts" clearly visible without the use of the red lens, nobody who doesn't want to see a ghost is going to go into a theater to see a movie called 13 Ghosts. There is no reason at all to have a little cardboard and cellophane "ghost viewer" thrown in, but as you might imagine, the kids loved it.

As the movie explains, he attempted to cure himself through cruel experiments on young women, tortured his subjects, threatened to mutilate his lovely young wife unless her ex-boyfriend could cure him, and was generally a pretty lousy dude. That's where the Punishment Poll comes in.

At the climax of the film, Castle himself comes onscreen to have a little chat with the audience, telling them that the fate of Sardonicus is in their hands. Each audience member was given a card with a picture of a thumb on it and told to hold it with the thumb up if they thought Sardonicus should be given a break and shown mercy, and to hold it with a thumb down if they thought he needed to be punished even more. Castle would then "count" the responses (from the screen) and then introduce the appropriate ending.

As you might expect, Sardonicus always got the bad ending. The thing is, that was the only option. Despite Castle's claim that he actually did film a happy ending for the Baron, no such ending was ever screened, or even found. And considering that there's no real break between Castle's gleefully sadistic vote tally and the ending, it's pretty safe to say it never existed to begin with.

And it was a disaster.

When the movie was first screened, the audience bailed on it en masse during the Fright Break, but it turned out that they were running a con on Castle. According to Spine Tingler!, Jeffrey Schwarz's amazing documentary on Castle's life and films, the people who left were actually people who had paid for an earlier show and never left, sitting through it twice to get their money back and a free night on the town. This, of course, is a problem, but Castle had the solution: Making actually leaving the theater and getting the refund a truly awful experience.

Thus: the Coward's Corner. In order to get your refund, you not only had to leave the theater during the Fright Break, you had to follow a yellow line to a section of the lobby that had been roped off and labeled as the Coward's Corner, complete with speakers piping in the clucking of chickens, waiting there until the end of the movie while everyone else filed past you. And if that wasn't enough, you still had to sign a certificate admitting that you were a coward before you could get the money.

But Castle was never one to miss an opportunity, so he decided to intervene on Schwanneke's behalf. He wrote a telegram to Hitler vowing that she would never return to Germany to "grease the wheels of the Nazi war machine," because, incidentally, she was busy starring in Not for Children, the new play at the Stony Creek Theatre. There's a lot of speculation on whether he actually sent the telegram or just leaked it to the press, but it got attention. The day after it ran, the theater was vandalized, with the box office smashed up and swastikas painted on the walls.

Here's the twist: Castle did the vandalism himself as a publicity stunt. And it worked. Not for Children was a guaranteed success ... after he took a weekend to write it.

In Spine Tingler!, filmmaker John Waters calls 1960's The Tingler "the greatest movie ever made." It's certainly one of Castle's biggest hits and features the most brilliant gimmick of his entire career.

Here's the plot: Vincent Price plays a scientist who discovers The Tingler, a creature that lives in your spine and feeds on fear. The more scared you are, the more it grows, until it crushes your spine and you die of fright. But! The creature can be weakened by screaming, so if you just scream whenever you get scared, you'll be fine. Price, as Dr. Warren Chapin, extracts a Tingler for study, but of course it escapes and causes all manner of trouble before the film.

The advertised gimmick was called "Percepto!" and it basically amounted to theaters wiring a few chairs with giant joy buzzers so that audience members would feel a "tingling" during the climax of the film. But that's only part of it.

The real genius comes from how it actually works in the film. The Tingler doesn't just get loose, it gets loose in a movie theater, and when it does, the screen goes dark, and Vincent Price's voice booms over the speakers, telling both the theatergoers in the movie and the audience watching them, "Scream! Scream for your lives! The Tingler is loose in the theater!" As goofy as those sentences might be, Price sells the hell out of it, and in a pitch-black theater where you start feeling your seat buzzing and hearing the screams of theater employees planted in the audience, that's a hell of an experience.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think anybody actually thought a crazy fear monster was crushing their spine, but you can't tell me that's not a thousand times more fun than, say, anything that happened in Avatar.