You’ve probably seen a rash of memes about Regal Cinemas’ 4DX on your For You page recently. The theater experience that will shake the life out of you in your chair, or blast you with water, or if you’re going to see Alien: Romulus deploys a real-life face hugger to get you. But after seeing one of those videos, I remembered that this had all been done by one of the most ambitious filmmakers of the ‘50s and ‘60s, a man dedicated to completely immersing audiences in his films: William Castle.

A juggernaut of B-movies, Castle was a big fan of implementing silly gimmicks for even sillier horror films; you might end up in a “Percepto” shocking chair that gave the sensation of being attacked by a crawling parasite, or find yourself voting in a “Punishment Poll” on the fate of a film’s villain with glow in the dark cards. Or most hilariously, you might be given a $1000 life insurance certificate to be used in the event the film was frightening enough to kill you (a little north of $10,000 in today’s cash).

The Creation and Immediate Rerouting of Dark Castle Entertainment

Castle was a primetime player when it came to entertaining the imaginations of audiences and the minds of many young filmmakers. This included media visionary Robert Zemeckis, who in an interview described making his father take him to see all sorts of monster movies, but in particular those of William Castle.

Decades later, when he broke into the industry, Zemeckis linked up with American film producer Joel Silver. The two would later start the often-forgotten but fairly successful Dark Castle Entertainment, named in honor of William Castle. Their goal? To use the company as a springboard to remake Castle’s films. And while the first two films came to fruition, remakes of House on Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts respectively, this masterplan never really panned out. It’s anybody’s guess as to why they weren’t able to bring the homage dream to fruition, but the main suspect? Film rights disputes.

John Squires of Bloody Disgusting wrote a pretty interesting article about the prospective Thirteen Ghosts television series revival, which was halted by the SAG-AFTRA and WGA Strikes that set Hollywood ablaze the past few years. In it, show producer John Mediate explains that even if it weren’t for the strikes, Sony’s split franchise rights with Dark Castle for Thirteen Ghosts make getting their blessing much more complicated than a simple go-ahead. Likewise, the majority of Castle’s films aren’t solely William Castle Productions features, so getting Columbia or Allied Artists or any of the other rights holders to approve of remakes would have certainly been a problem from the jump.

My current running theory is that a lot of those remakes were killed early on because of it, with House and Thirteen being the only ones to make it to full film status.

From Critically Reviled to Critically Re-Evaluated

The final horror remake the studio put out wasn’t even for a Castle film but a very loose remake of the Vincent Price feature House of Wax. House of Wax holds some of my earliest memories of seeing critics rail on a film, partly because it is a very standard slasher with all the tropes it entails, and partly because of the kind of sexist media circus around Paris Hilton being in the film (the amount of men I’ve seen slip in nasty digs at her while trying to present their criticisms of the film seriously is about as gross as the films gnarliest effects).

Following the smash success of the trippy psychological thriller Gothika, the studio almost instantly went from being made for remakes to creaking brand new IPs. It also eventually produced films for many well-known horror directors like Simon Barret’s Séance, Vincenzo Natali’s Splice, and Jaume Collett-Serra’s Orphan.

All three of the remakes have seen some form of critical reevaluation in recent years, with video essays on Thirteen Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill finding an audience through bigger YouTubers like Ryan Hollinger and MistaGG. The democratization of media criticism through social platforms has definitely helped rehabilitate the reputation of these films, whether one finds it deserved or not.

The Castle Films That Could Have Been a Contender

And I don’t blame them, because House of Wax, House on Haunted Hill, and especially Thirteen Ghosts are fun films to watch. Thirteen is one of my favorite ghost films of all time because of the creative spark you can find burning inside each and every one of the ghost designs in it. Whether you were drawn to the phantasmagoric and flesh-warping design of The Hammer, or completely terrified of the Jackal barely contained in his scolds-bridle and strait jacket, you will leave the film with at least one new favorite horror villain.

Though I couldn’t appreciate it in the past, House of Wax is also a pretty impressive film for its effects. It fits nicely in that era of the grotesque that was the early 2000s, with a lot of nasty moments like the “peeling” scene. Which, if you haven’t seen it, is so much worse than it sounds! Not to mention, it makes interesting slashers in how it replaces Vincent Price’s spooky wax museum owner Henry Jarrod with the more brutal killers Vince and Bo Sinclair.

Modern Gimmicks and Remakes

While I enjoy Dark Castle Entertainment films like Orphan well enough, and especially enjoy its sequel Orphan: First Kill, I do mourn the many lost possibilities for the remakes that never made the cut. The Tingler and Dr. Sardonicus, in particular, strike me as if they would have some fantastic reinterpretations thanks to the special effects possibilities that lurked within them; they’re body horror spectacles just waiting in the wings for their time to shine. Though Guy Rolfe hated wearing the makeup in the original film, there is something in the Sardonicus smile prosthetics that has so much potential to creep you out on screen with the right people in charge of them, and I think about them quite a bit when people ask me if there’s any horror films that I think deserve a remake.

The potential for more modern gimmicks in theatres is still strong and alive, and in a time when horror movies are just feeling more fun and experimental in general, it’s a waste not to explore it. And as long as we’re doing as many reboots and requels and remakes as we are, we might as well give the campier horror of decades past a fighting chance like Dark Castle initially wanted to. And studios might as well do what remakes have always been meant to do: reimagine and revitalize tried and true stories for the next generation.

But until that strain of thought becomes more popular, we can always indulge in some classic William Castle schlock on the small screen while we wait. Happy watching horror fans!