Indicator, out October 22

The master of the horror gimmick is showcased in this limited boxset of four of his Columbia features, bolstered by a great set of extra features.

While anyone interested in horror movies is likely to have heard of the hokey ways that showman Castle promoted his movies (skeletons on strings and cinema seats fitted with buzzers) it’s not been so easy to find the movies themselves in the UK, so Indicator’s collection of this gruesome foursome is much appreciated. The Tingler, Homicidal, 13 Ghosts and Mr Sardonicus each get a separate disc, though the best place to start is feature-length documentary Spine Tingler which serves as a career-spanning overview of the film-maker’s life and works.

It’s inevitable that Castle’s employment of gimmicks with exciting names like Illusion-O, Percepto, the Punishment Poll and Fright Breaks are remembered more than the films themselves, these were after all the showman’s MO and how he made his name. But what of the films themselves? These UK Blu-ray premieres all look far better than they deserve to be, far from the fleapits and drive-ins where they’d originally have been projected.

The Tingler features Vincent Price as a scientist who has discovered that a creature sits in our spines, regulating our fears – the only way to control it is to scream. It’s hysterical, in every meaning of the word, and at one point the film breaks down as a rampaging creature is loose in the cinema.

13 Ghosts is presented in both the original ‘Illusion-O’ version (85 mins) and regular black-and-white version (83 mins), but in the absence of the ‘ghost viewer’ the latter cut has little to recommend its Scooby-Doo-calibre plot, bar The Wizard of Oz’s Margaret Hamilton as a witchy housekeeper.

Mr Sardonicus boasts The Punishment Poll as its USP, the idea being that audience members would vote on one of two endings, though it appears that only one ending was ever filmed! Its protagonist is a man whose face has frozen into a rictus grin as a consequence of him robbing his father’s grave for a winning lottery ticket. It feels like it’s trying to ape the Universal Monsters movies set in bygone European states, or even the Corman Poe adaptations, but ultimately it’s just a macabre morality tale.

Final disc is Homicidal, a blatant Psycho rip-off with none of the subtlety of Hitchcock’s classic and a twist that is so obvious that it stops being a twist for fear of insulting your intelligence. The gimmick here is a ‘Fright Break’ allowing you to claim your money back before the ending if you’re finding it all a bit too much. The small print is that you had to stand in a public ‘cowards’ den in the foyer while waiting for your refund!

The movies are also presented with stills galleries, trailers, new commentaries, isolated effects tracks and personal appreciations by horror alumni like Kim Newman and Stephen Laws.

Verdict: Relics of an age of showmanship and carnival barkers, the ideas of these movies and the supporting material are far more engaging than the low-end (though beautifully restored) products, which sit some way below B-movie. Disposable, fun, popcorn fare that was made to a set formula for a specific, undemanding audience. P T Barnum would have been proud of Castle – there’s truly a sucker born every minute. 8/10

Nick Joy