Mikhael speidel biography of william

The mastermind behind the original 1960 feature film 13 Ghosts (2001) was famed filmmaker and terror impresario William Castle, who earned his reputation as a consummate showman for the innovative marketing campaigns he mounted for the low-budget horror films he directed, produced and zealously promoted from the late 1950s until his death in 1977.

Although Castle had been directing and acting in films since the early 1940s, his best known and most respected production was Roman Polanski's 1968 thriller Rosemary's Baby (1968).

Theatergoers were lured to Castle's B-movie classics by the allure of such imaginative gimmicks as "Emergo," in which a luminous plastic skeleton was rigged to fly out over the audience in sync with the appearance of a disembodied skeleton onscreen in House on Haunted Hill; "Percepto," which vibrated theater seats to simulate an attack of the titular beast in The Tingler; "fright breaks" were staged at screenings of Homicidal to p