Halloween DVD Pick: The William Castle Film Collection 

Perhaps Castle's most outrageous film, The Tingler (1959) also stands as one of his best. Vincent Price stars as a scientist who discovers that fear manifests itself as a physical creature that attaches itself to the frightened person's spinal cord, and that the only way to get rid of it is through screaming. Credit this picture for originality, but also give it props for smartly playing around with the conventions of cinema itself, as witnessed via one segment in which the blood in this otherwise black-and-white feature is presented in color, or in the climactic sequence in which "The Tingler" terrorizes a packed movie theater.

13 Ghosts (1960) is slender but fun, as mild-mannered museum guide Cyrus Zorba (Donald Woods), wife Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp), teenage daughter Medea (Jo Morrow) and young Buck (Charles Herbert) inherit a strange mansion bequeathed to them by Cyrus' late uncle, Plato Zorba (are these great character names or what?). It turns out that not only is the house haunted, it also contains a large fortune stashed away by the deceased, demented relative. Margaret Hamilton, The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West, appears as the estate's mysterious housekeeper; this is also the rare film to prominently feature a Ouija board.

Castle clearly was influenced by (and often mimicked) Alfred Hitchcock, and Homicidal (1961) is such a blatant rip-off of 1960's Psycho that a lawsuit probably wouldn't have been without merit. Yet while traveling along similar lines, Castle and scripter Robb White manage to include enough originality that the shock ending still has the power to catch many viewers off guard. Unlike Psycho, this film's central blonde (played by Joan Marshall) is villain rather than victim, yet there's still a squeaky-clean heroine, her dullard boyfriend, a crotchety old woman in a wheelchair, and a soft-spoken young man. To reveal more would be criminal.

The period tale Mr. Sardonicus (1961) relates how an Eastern European peasant (Guy Rolfe) is forced to dig up his late father's grave in order to retrieve a winning lottery ticket. The gruesome endeavor leads to fortune but also brings on a curse that leaves the man's face frozen in a permanent, grotesque grin. Now a baron, Sardonicus summons his wife's (Audrey Dalton) former lover, a renowned London doctor (Ronald Lewis), to cure him of his affliction ... or else. This handsome but occasionally meandering drama admittedly makes creative use of several nasty leeches.

Castle begins a drastic freefall with Zotz! (1962), a supernatural comedy in which a college professor (Tom Poston) discovers that an ancient coin in his possession gives him various powers (none too exciting). There's an uproarious scene involving an attempt by a rival instructor (a pre-Gilligan's Island Jim Backus, easily stealing the show) to deliver a speech, but other comic situations are frightfully anemic.

13 Frightened Girls (1963) actually reveals 14 girls in some group shots and 15 in others, but such sloppiness quickly becomes the norm in this daft espionage yarn that emerges as the worst film in the collection. A couple of decent actors (All About Eve's Hugh Marlowe and Jaws' Murray Hamilton) find themselves surrounded by rank amateurs in this story of a diplomat's perky teenage daughter (the dreadful Kathy Dunn) who uses her position of privilege to steal Cold War secrets in order to aid the U.S. This was originally set to be called The Candy Web (the heroine's name is Candy, you see), but it's a turkey under any moniker.

The Old Dark House (1963) was Castle's ill-fated attempt to remake the 1932 classic of the same name. Instead of the original's Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton, we now get Zotz!'s Tom Poston, hardly a fair trade-off. Poston plays an American car salesman who journeys to a remote English estate to meet its eccentric inhabitants. Upon arrival, he learns that a family fortune is at stake, and, not coincidentally, the members of the household start dropping like flies. As the most pompous of the clan, Robert Morley provides the only spice in this clumsy comedy-thriller.

Strait-Jacket (1964) finds Castle regaining much of his former luster by helming this hit about a woman (Joan Crawford) who hacks up her husband (yes, that's an unbilled Lee Majors) and his girlfriend with an axe in front of her young child. Twenty years later, Mom is released from the insane asylum and goes to live with her now-grown daughter (Diane Baker), but has she really been cured of her violent impulses? The twist ending is one of the most obvious ever put on film (the script is by Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel on which Psycho was based), but Crawford's campy histrionics and some neat stylistic flourishes make this worthy entertainment.

• William Castle (right) with Vincent Price (center)

Ever the consummate showman, Castle was known as much for his promotional gimmicks as for the movies themselves. For The Tingler, he had select theater seats wired to provide viewers with an electric jolt at crucial moments in the film, while the viewing of 13 Ghosts required special glasses for a process he termed "Illusion-O." These innovations and others are discussed in the documentary that's included in the set (Spine Tingler!: The William Castle Story) as well as in various retrospective featurettes. Other DVD extras include two episodes from the short-lived TV series Ghost Story (on which he served as executive producer); alternate sequences; and theatrical trailers.

The Tingler: ***

Extras: ***