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.

In 1961, a year after the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Castle released Homicidal, a movie with some pretty striking similarities. You could charitably call it a good-natured homage, but it's worth noting that back then, Time magazine called it one of the best films of the year and said it "surpasses Psycho in structure, suspense and sheer nervous drive." That's not a bad endorsement, and Castle was so sure of his success that his gimmick for this one involved a money-back guarantee. The idea was that before the climax, the film would stop for a "Fright Break," and if anyone was too scared to continue, they could leave and get their money back -- a direct response to Psycho's legendary warning that no one would be admitted once the film started.

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.

OK, so this one's not actually tied into a movie, but I'm including it here for the sheer, unmitigated moxie of it. Before he got into films, Castle got his start leasing a theater in Connecticut from Orson Welles. He wanted to produce plays, and in 1939, he set his sights on actress Ellen Schwanneke, who had recently fled Nazi Germany, and offered her a starring role in a play called Not for Children.

There were two slight snags. One was that Not for Children did not, technically, exist. Castle had yet to actually write it, and while that's a pretty big snag when it comes to putting on a play, it's relatively minor in the scheme of things. The second problem was that Schwanneke had just received an invitation from Adolf Hitler to return to Munich for a reunion tour of her most famous play. If she had returned, there's very little possibility that the Nazis would have allowed her to return to America.

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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.