Karina on SpoutBlog

It’s probably going too far to suggest, as I’m tempted to do, that Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story should be considered a foundational document for anyone interested in the film marketing revolution that began with the fall of the studio system and still shapes the way most Americans learn about and consume movies today. Admittedly, visually and structurally, you cant say that Jeffrey Schwartz’ staggering of talking head interviews with competent after effects animation is exactly the stuff the reinvents genres; Schwarz makes a living making behind-the-scenes docs for the DVD releases of Hollywood films, and stylistically, at least, that shows. But despite its formal limitations, Spine Tingler is a vibrant and vital work of pop film historiography, and for a certain type of cinephile (myself included), it should be required viewing.

Castle began making his low-budget, virtually artless horror films in the 1950s, after a friendship with Orson Welles and a job on Lady From Shanghai led to a not-quite-satisfying career as a contract director of B pictures. As he was on his way in as a horror name brand, 1940s producer Val Lewton was on his way out. Though working in the same genre under similar financial limitations, the two men couldn’t have made more disparate kinds of films. Lewton’s films were, at their core, obstinately adult, almost invariably using the genre as a hook to address psychological and existential issues. Castle had no use for such weighty matters. His cheapie pics, aimed squarely at an audience young enough to buy into elaborate gimmicry, left nothing to the imagination, and sought only to make the kids jump and scream and laugh. That Castle’s type of sales pitch-as-endgame filmmaking replaced Lewton’s Trojan Horse artistry as a key cash cow for the studios is essentially emblematic of a move towards disposability in the pop culture on the whole at the time.

When you go into a doc about the filmmaker who had patrons sign insurance policies upon entering the theater in case they “died of fright,” you expect a certain amount of schlock, and on that score, Spine Tingler certainly delivers. But Schwarz also manages to graft a layer of humanizing weight onto the life of the man who thrilled the kids of the 50s and 60s with gimmick-fueled horror events like Homicide and The Tingler. Schwarz’ best asset in telling the story is Castle’s daughter Terry, who manages to offer a clear-eyed history of her father’s work and his grander function in a changing Hollywood landscape, and at the same time is totally willing and able to laugh at his foibles.

It’s Terry who first uses the word “chutzpah” to describe Castle relentless self-promotion, but she’s also able to put her father’s ballsiness into context. She tells a story about Castle’s early days as a theater producer. He had fallen in love with a German actress and cast her in a play; the actress then received an “invitation” to some kind of reunion back in Germany. Aware that if his new muse couldn’t travel to Nazi Germany and expect to come back, Castle allegedly sent a telegram to Hitler insisting that the actress was far too crucial to his own stage production to be spared for the length of the voyage. Terry Castle admits that she doesn’t know if the telegram was actually sent, or if her father had made it up in order to draw attention to the play; she’s well aware that it doesn’t matter, because from that point on, William Castle became known as a man who “said no to Hitler.”

As Terry tells it, her father’s chutzpah was a necessary coping mechanism for his massive insecurities. The gimmicks designed to fill seats began out of fear that the movies weren’t good enough to lure an audience on their own. They probably weren’t, but there’s something almost poignant about the idea of this great huckster showman, ballsy enough to turn the defiance of Hitler into a marketing campaign…but only because his paranoia demands it. By putting this split between entreprenurial drive and near-debilitating neurosis at the core of his movie, Schwarz is able to make this great swindler seem like not just a complex human being, but an honorable prototype of post-war self-creation. And yeah, it’s twenty minutes too long. But isn’t everything?

• Disney unveiled its through-2012 animation slate this week, with projects including “a sequel to Cars [and] an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story,” and a commitment to releasing nothing but digital 3D.
• Blair Witch Project star and Beautiful Losers co-director Joshua Leonard will direct Danny Huston and possibly 50 Cent in Spectacular Regret, a Crash-esque drama about “four Angelenos struggling to overcome past events.”
• Chloe Sevigny and Zooey Deschanel will star together in Divorce Ranch, a period indie written and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and “set in Nevada just after WWII, when a quickie divorce could be granted after residency was established.”