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 ReFocus
The Films of
William Castle
EditEd by
Murray LEEdEr
ReFocus: The Films of William Castle
 ReFocus: The American Directors Series

Series Editors: Robert Singer and Gary D. Rhodes

Editorial Board: Kelly Basilio, Donna Campbell,

Claire Perkins, Christopher Sharrett, and Yannis
Tzioumakis

ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the

interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of neglected American directors, from
the once-famous to the ignored, in direct relationship to American culture—its myths,
values, and historical precepts. The series ignores no director who created a historical
space—either in or out of the studio system—beginning from the origins of American
cinema and up to the present. These directors produced film titles that appear in
university film history and genre courses across international boundaries, and their
work is often seen on television or available to download or purchase, but each suffers
from a form of “canon envy”; directors such as these, among other important figures in
the general history of American cinema, are underrepresented in the critical dialogue,
yet each has created American narratives, works of film art, that warrant attention.
ReFocus brings these American film directors to a new audience of scholars and general
readers of both American and Film Studies.

Available or forthcoming titles

ReFocus: The Films of Preston Sturges
Edited by Jeff Jaeckle and Sarah Kozloff
ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves
Edited by Matthew Carter and Andrew Patrick Nelson
ReFocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling
Edited by Frances Smith and Timothy Shary
ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher
Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer
ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt
E. Dawn Hall
ReFocus: The Films of William Castle
Edited by Murray Leeder
ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier
Edited by Missy Molloy, Mimi Nielsen, and Meryl Shriver-Rice

edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refoc
ReFocus:
The Films of William Castle
Edited by Murray Leeder
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the U.K. We publish
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to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
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© editorial matter and organization Murray Leeder, 2018

© the chapters their several authors, 2018

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted
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and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents

List of Figures vii

Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xii

Introduction: The Many Castles 1

Murray Leeder

Part 1 The Early Castle

1 When Strangers Marry: Film Noir as Mediated Gothic 21
Hugh S. Manon
2 Gender in William Castle’s Westerns 41
Zack Rearick

Part 2 The Gimmick Cycle

3 He Earned Our Forgiveness: William Castle and American Movie
Showmanship 57
A. T. McKenna
4 Collective Screams: William Castle and the Gimmick Film 76
Murray Leeder
5 Ghost Show Ballyhoo: Castle’s Macabre Will Scare You to Death 99
Beth Kattelman
6 How to View 13 Ghosts 115
Eliot Bessette
vi  c o nt e nts

7 Chaos Made Flesh: Mr. Sardonicus (1961) and the Mask as

Transformative Device 137
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Part 3 Castle, Authorship, and Genre

8 A Sick Mind in Search of a Monstrous Body: William Castle and
the Emergence of Psychological Horror in the 1960s 153
Steffen Hantke
9 “What a Wicked Game to Play?” Playfulness, Generic Hybridity,
and Cult Appeal in Castle’s 1960s Films 171
Michael Brodski and Caroline Langhorst
10 “Where Did Our Love Go?” The Case of William Castle’s The
Night Walker 189
Michael Petitti

Part 4 Castle’s Legacy

11 Homo/cidal: William Castle’s 1960s Killer Queers 219
Peter Marra
12 The Cinematic Pandemonium of William Castle and John Waters 237
Kate J. Russell

Index 255
Figures

I.1 William Castle makes a cameo on a 1973 episode of Circle of

Fear 2
I.2 Castle’s cameo in Rosemary’s Baby 4
I.3 Castle’s tombstone in Glendale, CA 14
1.1 Mildred Baxter, the Gothic/noir heroine of When Strangers
Marry 27
1.2 Mildred and Paul Baxter pay their fares at a New York ride-share
depot in When Strangers Marry 32
1.3 Lieutenant Blake confronts Fred Graham in front of a mail chute
in When Strangers Marry 38
4.1 William Castle introduces The Tingler 77
4.2 Direct address in the opening of House on Haunted Hill 83
4.3 The skeleton walks in House on Haunted Hill 85
4.4 Frederick Loren is revealed as the puppet-master in House on
Haunted Hill 86
4.5 Castle’s introduction to 13 Ghosts 87
4.6 Martha’s fake death certificate in The Tingler 89
4.7 Dr. Chapin extracts the tingler 90
4.8 The tingler is projected onto the screen 91
6.1 The lion ghost appears spatially incongruous in the black-and-
white version of 13 Ghosts 121
6.2 Buck and the goggles: Buck, avid ghost viewer 128
8.1 Jean Arless contemplating the fluidity of gender roles in
Homicidal 161
8.2 The power and terror of the disembodied voice on the phone in
I Saw What You Did 163
viii  f i g u r es

10.1 Howard Trent, the patriarchal figurehead, assumes his position of

power in The Night Walker 206
10.2 Irene Trent physically upsets the capitalist ideology underwriting
her marriage 206
10.3 Castle depicts the Trent house torn asunder by Irene’s
disturbance of the ideological order 207
10.4 Barbara Stanwyck, unlikely scream queen 209
Notes on Contributors

Eliot Bessette is a doctoral candidate in Film and Media at the University of

California, Berkeley, where he is writing a dissertation, “Thinking Through
Fear in Film and Haunts,” on the cognitive content of fear elicited by horror
films and haunted house attractions.

Michael Brodski is currently working on his Ph.D. thesis on cinematic rep-

resentations of childhood and child figures at the University of Mainz, where
he also works as an associate lecturer. His main research interests include
children’s film and intermedial representations of childhood and children’s
culture, cognitive film theory, Soviet and Russian cinema and culture as well
as cinematic portrayals of remembrance.

Steffen Hantke has edited Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004),
Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), and American
Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010). He is author of
Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America
after World War II (2016).

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an Australian film critic, broadcaster

and academic and an editor at the film journal Senses of Cinema. She has
written four books on cult, horror, and exploitation film, the most recent of
which is Ms. 45 for Wallflower/Columbia University Press’s Cultographies
series.

Beth Kattelman is an Associate Professor and Curator of Theatre at The

Ohio State University. She holds a Ph.D. in theatre from Ohio State. She
x  no t e s o n co ntributo rs

is co-editor, with Magdalena Hodalska, of Frightful Witnessing: The Rhetoric

and (Re)Presentation of Fear, Horror and Terror (2014). Her work has been
published in numerous academic journals.

Caroline Langhorst holds a B.A. in Film Studies and British Studies and a
M.A. in Film Studies. She is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis on rep-
resentations of sub- and countercultural tendencies in British culture (mainly
1960s to 1980s cinema and music) at the University of Mainz, Germany. Her
main research interests include British and American cinema, literature and
culture, Gender and Gothic Studies, popular music, and countercultural nar-
ratives, as well as youth and subcultures.

Murray Leeder is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary

and holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University. He is the author of Horror Film:
A Critical Introduction (2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of
Cinema (2017), and Halloween (Auteur Press, 2014), as well as the editor of
Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital
Era (2015).

Hugh S. Manon is Associate Professor and Director of the Screen Studies

Program at Clark University, where he specializes in Lacanian theory, film
noir, and digital aesthetics. He has published in Cinema Journal, Film Criticism,
Framework, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and numerous anthologies,
including articles on Tod Browning, Edgar G. Ulmer, George Romero, and
Michael Haneke.

Peter Marra is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media Studies at Wayne State
University. His dissertation argues the queer history and function of the U.S.
slasher film and its forebears. He is the author of “Strange Pleasure: 1940s
Proto-Slasher Cinema,” in Mario Degiglio-Bellemare et al., Recovering 1940s
Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (2015).

A. T. McKenna is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the

University of Derby. He is the author of Showman of the Screen: Joseph E.
Levine and his Revolutions in Film Promotion (2016), co-author of The Man
Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film
Industry 1960–1980 (2013), and co-editor of Beyond the Bottom Line: The Role
of the Producer in Film and Television Studies (2014).

Michael Petitti is faculty in the Thematic Option honours program at the

University of Southern California.
 n o te s on con tributors   xi

Zack Rearick is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at Georgia State

University and a First-Year Writing lecturer at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte, as well as a lecturer of Literature and Composition at
Catawba College. He received his Bachelors of Arts in English and Philosophy
from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and his Masters of Arts in
Literature from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is also
the author of a chapbook entitled Poems in Which I Am Chopped Up, Stepped
On, and Sleep Deprived (2012).

Kate J. Russell is a Ph.D. student in Cinema Studies at the University of

Toronto, where she also completed her Masters. Her work focuses on intersec-
tions of laughter, disgust, horror, and eroticism. She also holds a Masters in
History of Art from the University of Glasgow.
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank line editors Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer for their
enthusiastic support and assistance, as well as Gillian Leslie from Edinburgh
University Press and all of my contributors. Thanks go, too, to my family and
coworkers.
Murray Leeder’s “Collective Screams: William Castle and the Gimmick
Film” was originally printed in Journal of Popular Culture 44.4 (2011): 774–96.
Introduction: The Many Castles
Murray Leeder

“i’ m wi ll i a m c a st l e . . .”
“
T he Graveyard Shift” was the 19th episode of NBC’s Ghost Story/Circle
of Fear (1972–3), an anthology series that only lasted one season but
somehow managed to have two titles. In this episode, John Astin1 plays Fred
Colby, a night watchman at the fictional Fillmore Studios in Hollywood.
Colby was once an actor for the studio, appearing in its horror films. But
now the studio is closing down and Colby, whose wife (Patty Duke, Astin’s
real-life wife at the time) is late in her pregnancy, looks forward to changing
professions. At first it seems that the biggest problems of his last shifts relate
to a gang of teenagers sneaking onto the lot; however, it transpires that the
monsters of the studio’s heyday have a spectral existence on the grounds and
are scheming to reincarnate themselves through Colby’s unborn son. Colby
foils them by breaking into the vault and setting the master prints of the horror
films on fire, putting a stop to the cinematic monsters once and for all.
Except for making film preservationists weep, “The Graveyard Shift” is not
an exceptional example of a largely forgotten show. It has a special interest,
however, as the only episode of what was then called Circle of Fear to feature
a cameo by the show’s executive producer—the legendary showman, pro-
ducer, and director William Castle (Figure I.1). Castle’s plays the company’s
founder, J. B. Fillmore. Fillmore briefly appears at his old studio, full of
wistful nostalgia about what he has built on the edge of its destruction: “Forty
years, and soon it will all be dust.”2 Speaking to Colby, Fillmore reflects about
their successful horror films: “Nobody did any better than we did, and do you
know why? ’Cause I knew what the public wanted: to be scared out of their
wits. That’s why I gave them the most terrifying characters ever created: the
2  m u r r a y le e d e r

Figure I.1 William Castle makes a cameo on a 1973 episode of Circle of Fear.

Claw, the Wolf Man, Scarface, the Mummy, and Dr. Death.” There is a par-
ticular twinkle in Fillmore’s eye at the last name, which Colby has forgotten.
“He never caught on like the others,” says Fillmore. “An emissary of the Devil
who specialized in the taking over of human bodies. Once he got bored with
one, he’d move onto someone else. Men, women, even unborn children . . .”
Fillmore laughs. “He probably was way, way ahead of his time.”
It is at this moment that Colby realizes the nature of the threat against his
unborn son. But the moment provides a pleasure of another sort through the
presence of Castle, reprising a version of the perverse carnival barker/film
impresario persona from his first-person introductions to most of the films
of his gimmick cycle of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like Fillmore, Castle
was unapologetic about delivering “what the public wanted,” no matter how
direct, tasteless, and lowbrow. His cameo in “The Graveyard Shift” has the
same kind of surplus quality associated with movie stardom; he makes no
attempt to vanish into the character, but rather his appearance functions as an
attraction unto itself. When relatively few directors were household names,
Castle, like his sometime model Alfred Hitchcock, built himself into a pres-
ence, an icon, a brand.
Castle presents a potential a challenge for the auteur theory, both the strains
promoted in France by the critics at Cahiers du cinéma and in the United States
by Andrew Sarris,3 insofar as his authorial signatures are overt, at least where
his most famous films are concerned. It does not fall to a critic to “discover” an
 i n troduction   3

auteur in his case: he makes it abundantly clear, addressing his audience directly
in advertising and the films themselves with the directness of a pitchman or a
mountebank. It may be more useful to think of Castle as an early case of what
Timothy Corrigan has called the “commerce of auteurism”: “the author as a
commercial strategy . . . as a critical concept bound to distribution and market-
ing aims that identify and address the potential cult status of an auteur.”4
While Corrigan describes this strategy as emerging with the New Hollywood
generation of directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Stephen
Spielberg, and George Lucas, packaged and marketed as auteurs, Castle seems
like an ur-example, building himself into a larger-than-life attraction with
whose name a film can be marketed, much like that of a movie star.5
In the last years of his life, with directing largely behind him, Castle
maintained a sideline as an actor, playing, as in “The Graveyard Shift,” old
Hollywood types: a producer in Shampoo (1975), a director in Day of the Locust
(1975). Such roles fit him like a glove, and well they ought to have: he was a
Hollywood insider with decades of history. And yet his most memorable screen
appearance might be a brief and silent one: standing outside a phone booth
in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) near the end of a four-minute long take, stoking
Rosemary Wodehouse’s (Mia Farrow) growing paranoia even as he looks
benign and grandfatherly. To the audience, if not to Rosemary, he is highly
recognizable: he even sports his signature cigar (Figure I.2). The words “A
William Castle Production” appear in the opening seconds of Rosemary’s Baby,
so the cameo is an entirely appropriate gesture toward his authorial persona.
If Castle’s sole contribution to film history were as a producer (of Orson
Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Rosemary’s Baby, among less
remembered films), that alone would make for a remarkable career. Yet his
reputation truly rests on his status as “the Master” or “King of the Gimmicks,”
“the Abominable Showman,” or “the Living Trailer,” alluded to in “The
Graveyard Shift”: a larger-than-life figure whose authorial persona blurs with
his films in fascinating ways. And yet that identification obscures much of the
full sweep of his career.

“. . . the d i r e c t o r o f t h e mo t ion p ic t u r e
y o u ’ re a b o ut t o s e e . . . ”
So who was William Castle? He was born William Schloss Jr. in New York
City in 1914; his father was a German Jew. Schloss was orphaned by the age
of twelve and would later adopt the literally translated surname “Castle.” He
soon became a man of the theatre, operating as an assistant to Béla Lugosi
during a stage revival of Dracula and later staging a successful series of summer
stock plays at the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut in 1939. There he
4  m u r r a y le e d e r

Figure I.2 Castle’s cameo in Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

drew the attention of Columbia Pictures’ Samuel Marks, who recruited him
to Hollywood. Certain details of Castle’s biography are clouded by his own
penchant for self-aggrandizing confabulation. His memoir, Step Right Up! I’m
Gonna Scare the Pants Off America (1976), is full of entertaining but somewhat
suspect episodes. Early on, he describes bluffing his way into Orson Welles’
good graces to get access to the Stony Creek Theatre, where the Mercury
Theatre Company had held summer tryouts. With Welles and his company
relocating to Hollywood to take up an invitation from R.K.O., Stony Creek
was available, and Castle smelled an opportunity. Around the same time,
Castle met German actress Ellen Schwanneke, “the star of Mädchen in Uniform
(1931), a very successful film.”6 Schwanneke was in fact a supporting player in
Mädchen in Uniform, and had since relocated to the United States. When she
flouted a request to return to Nazi Germany, she was publicized as “The Girl
Who Turned Down Hitler”: an advertising ploy from which Castle surely ben-
efited (though he did not instigate it, as his memoirs imply). Castle describes
conceiving of Das ist Nicht für Kinder as the title of a non-existent German play
(to justify the casting of Schwanneke against Equity regulations)—translated
to English as Not for Children. He describes writing the play in two days
and bribing the son of his German-Jewish tailor to translate it into German.
He attributed the German version to “Ludwig von Herschfeld”—“the name
sounded as good as any. A new German playwright was born.”7
However, contemporary press for Not for Children lists it as adapted from
a script by “Ludwig Herschfield,” a real Austrian playwright who died in
1945 (his play Geschaft mit Amerika was adapted in Britain as Yes, Mr. Brown
(1933), a popular musical comedy). Further, consistently listed as the writer of
 i n troduction   5

Not for Children was playwright Wesley Towner, a name that does not appear
in Step Right Up!8 In fact, Not for Children was adapted in Hollywood as
The Mad Martindales (1942) a few years later, crediting Towner, Herschfeld,
and Edmund Wolf as authors of the source play. If Castle were in fact, as he
indicates, the author of this play, that would be notable information, yet Step
Right Up! makes no reference to it. Are these inconsistencies attributable to
Castle’s faulty memory as he wrote decades later? Perhaps.
However, the baldest claim follows. Castle claims that the controversy
around casting Schwanneke inspired death threats from the pro-Nazi German
American Bundists. At four a.m. the night before Not for Children opened,
he went to the theatre and, “With some lumber from backstage, I smashed
windows in the theatre and overturned the box office. Then, with red paint, I
drew swastikas on the walls.”9 Castle goes on to describe insisting that the play
will open as scheduled, and even calling the governor of Connecticut (while
posing as Orson Welles!) to demand protection from the national guard: “On
the opening night soldiers with helmets and guns surrounded the theatre.
Klieg lights flashed everywhere. Members of the audience arriving in formal
attire were carefully inspected. It was one hell of an opening.”10 But if this
were the case, the press seems to have overlooked it.
I raise these points not in the spirit of damning Castle’s tendency toward
self-serving deception (or even the understandable “print the legend” ten-
dency of so much writing on Castle), but rather to explore the authorial
persona Castle established for himself. Despite Castle’s profile as “a sort of
minor-league Alfred Hitchcock,”11 in certain respects he also parallels Welles;
the careers of the two men of theatre-turned-film entwined on a number of
occasions, and both carefully constructed and managed larger-than-life public
personas. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that, “For a figure with the theatricality
and imagination of Welles, exaggeration, hyperbole and flights of invention
often took the place of solid facts . . . Welles often told lies as a raconteur in
order to entertain.”12 Something similar can be said of Castle, who continually
frames himself in Step Right Up! as a benign trickster, again and again getting
ahead through his wits and his willingness to stretch the truth, while retaining
a core of decency. From the beginning of his “gimmick” period in 1958, his
films were not just pictures that happened to be directed by William Castle:
they were Castle films, replete with his directorial persona.
Castle’s reputation is so dominated by his gimmick films that we might think
of his career as roughly divided into three phases: pregimmick, gimmick, and
postgimmick. Of the three, the first is by far the most productive: between The
Chance of a Lifetime (1943) and Uranium Boom (1956), Castle made more than
three dozen B-movies, predominantly for Columbia. They included Westerns,
war films, and crime films, as well as a few historical adventure movies and the
like. He found work in the innumerable low-budget film series of the 1940s,
6  m u r r a y le e d e r

directing not only The Chance of a Lifetime (in the Boston Blackie series) but also
The Whistler (1944), the first feature based on the popular mystery radio serial
(1942–55), and three others of that series; plus four of the Crime Doctor series,
and The Return of Rusty (1946), the second of the children’s series starring Ace
the Wonder Dog. He would also work as a television director, including on ten
episodes of Men of Annapolis (1957), where he became acquainted with screen-
writer Robb White. The best remembered of Castle’s pregimmick features
is the crime thriller When Strangers Marry (1944), also released as Betrayed.
Welles himself praised it in his column in the New York Post, “Orson Welles’s
Almanac”: “Making allowances for its bargain-price budget, I think you’ll agree
with me that it’s one of the most gripping and effective pictures of the year.”13
So Castle was already an experienced director, a Hollywood insider who
even received a smattering of critical acclaim, when he reconceived himself as
the “King of the Gimmicks.” It is also when he fostered the identification as a
horror auteur. The gimmick cycle consists of six horror films, each of which has
a unique and highly marketable feature that altered the cinematic experience
either directly or indirectly.14 The first was Macabre (1958), in which Castle
claimed to have insured the audience against death by fright. He followed it in
1959 with two films starring Vincent Price: House on Haunted Hill15 and The
Tingler. In both cases, Price’s finely honed “male diva”16 persona, balancing
camp humor and credible menace, perfectly matched Castle’s productions
and gimmicks. House on Haunted Hill featured “Emergo,” a pop-out skeleton
that flew over the audience during the climax, while the latter had maybe the
most famous Castle gimmick, “Percepto,” where theatre seats were rigged to
vibrate at key moments. Next came 13 Ghosts (1960), with the color process
“Illusion-O” and its “ghost viewer”; the “fright break” in Homicidal (1961),
which allowed audience members the option of leaving if they were too scared
to see the ending and its shocking twist; and the “Punishment Poll” in Mr.
Sardonicus (1961), where the audience putatively decides the fate of the villain.
All but the last film had screenplays by Robb White, a prolific novelist as well
as a screenwriter, who did not recall their association fondly.17 White was
also Castle’s producing collaborator in Susina Associates, their independent
production company, which would ultimately be purchased by Columbia.
Part of Castle’s strategy was to elide the need for name-brand actors by
remaking himself into a name brand: “My name was now above the title
in every marquee.”18 Castle made himself into a “Living Trailer,” a larger-
than-life public persona who took charge of the marketing of his own films
with an unusual directness. His first-person trailers were lower-rent analogs
of Hitchcock’s celebrated trailers. Replacing Hitchcock’s dry British arch-
ness with an American carnival barker’s naked perversity, they promised the
unprecedented scares his pictures would deliver and warned off the faint of
heart. From The Tingler onwards, Castle did first-person introductions to his
 i n troduction   7

films from “inside” them, both building his authorial cult of personality and
blurring the line between diegetic and audience space in a way that paralleled
many of his gimmicks. The on-screen “William Castle” is uncontained by
diegetic coherence, casually breaks the fourth wall, and appears in various
locations: in front of a white cinema screen in The Tingler, in an office setting
that blends corporate banality and mad-scientist kitsch in 13 Ghosts, in a family
living room in Homicidal, on a foggy Victorian London street in Mr. Sardonicus.
The appearances become more reflexive over time—he shares the screen with
an animated skeleton in 13 Ghosts, and the opening to Homicidal is a litany of
self-referentiality: “The more adventurous among you remember our previous
excursions into the macabre, our visits to haunted hills and through tinglers
and to ghosts.” Likewise, in the opening of Mr. Sardonicus Castle greets the
audience as “My homicidal friends.” This “William Castle” is the same figure
who appeared outside theatres interviewing shocked patrons in the trailer for
Strait-Jacket (1964); and it was his distinctive silhouette, sitting a director’s
chair with a cigar between his teeth, that circulated in advertisements.
Rather like the skeleton in House on Haunted Hill, the “William Castle”
persona was by no means confined to the screen. At his frequent public promo-
tions, where he often arrived in a hearse or coffin, he made statements like,
“Ladies and gentlemen, please do not reveal the ending of Homicidal to your
friends, because if you do they will kill you, and if they don’t, I will.”19 His
films are laughed at now, as they were when first released, by design, much
in the manner of a carnival funhouse that combines giggles and screams. On
the commentary track for the documentary Spine Tingler! The William Castle
Story (2007), Castle’s daughter Terry Castle indicates that her father “didn’t
take these things seriously . . . The whole thing was done in a campy way
and he knew it was campy and he was having fun with it.”20 Castle recalls
touring Europe to promote Homicidal and spontaneously crying, “Jesus, I
speak German!” upon seeing his appearance in a dubbed version, to great
laughter. “My surprise was so spontaneous that we kept it in every perfor-
mance throughout Europe. I hadn’t realized my voice had been dubbed in
many languages—French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch.”21 As usual, Castle posi-
tions himself as both an authentic man having genuine reactions and as an
entertainer who dissembles and exaggerates for effect.22
But as much as Castle clearly enjoyed his own celebrity, uneasy lay the
head that wore the crown of King of the Gimmicks. He lamented that
“[h]aving to create a new, fresh gimmick for each picture was becoming tire-
some. Critics were now starting to attack, claiming the only reason my films
were successful was the gimmicks, and I was unable to make an important
thriller without one.”23 All the same, there is not a clear dividing line between
his gimmick and postgimmick films. His next two features were children’s
films of a more straightforward kind:24 Zotz! (1962) and then 13 Frightened
8  m u r r a y le e d e r

Girls (1963). Both had a gimmick of sorts: in the case of Zotz! moviegoers
received replicas of the magical amulet from the film, and 13 Frightened Girls,
also released as The Candy Web, featured actresses from different countries
so that each could be the focus of a local advertising campaign. Yet these
gimmicks are relatively extrinsic to the films themselves, and Zotz! and 13
Frightened Girls tend to be excluded from the “official” bounds of Castle’s
gimmick cycle, perhaps unjustly, for reasons of genre.25
Neither of the children’s films was particularly successful, and the key
film for transitioning away from gimmicks was Strait-Jacket. In fact, Step
Right Up! implies that it preceded the two children’s films.26 It was certainly
advertised with familiar exploitation film techniques, with “WARNING!
‘STRAIT-JACKET’ VIVIDLY DEPICTS AX MURDERS!” as its tagline,
but more than anything it was a star vehicle for Joan Crawford, newly aligned
with horror in the wake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Despite
the lack of gimmicks (give or take some cardboard axes distributed to patrons,
a nostalgic lark on Castle’s part), it feels like a Castle film through and through,
with Crawford’s over-the-top histrionics standing in for the sensational attrac-
tions of the earlier films. In a sense, however, the partial position of Strait-
Jacket within the Castle gimmick cycle speaks to the commensurability of
Castle’s style of gimmickry with Hollywood’s general production logic, with a
more traditional form of “stunt casting” substituting for the earlier gimmicks.
The late Castle is rather an odd beast. Strait-Jacket led to other, more
serious thrillers like I Saw What You Did (1965), also with Crawford in a small
part, and The Night Walker (1964). Castle later made broad comedies like Let’s
Kill Uncle (1966), The Spirit Is Willing (1967), and The Busy Body (1967), the
minor but interesting science fiction film Project X (1968), and what may be the
least classifiable film in his filmography, Shanks (1974). Some months after the
release of Macabre, it had been reported that Castle was planning a theatrical
adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis;27 this production was obviously
(and unfortunately) not to be, but Shanks may give us the clearest indication
of what an “artistic” Castle project would look like. This collaboration with
Marcel Marceau, a silent film pastiche with aspects of a pre-Night of the Living
Dead (1968) zombie film that also seems to be a children’s film, received a
DVD release in 2013 by Olive Films, but remains extremely obscure. Castle
was open about his disappointment with the project in Step Right Up! As
conceptually fascinating as it might be, Shanks plays more as a clumsy proto-
Guy Maddinesque curio than a forgotten classic, with Castle and Marceau’s
sensibilities stubbornly refusing to gel.28
Some years earlier Castle had purchased the rights to Ira Levin’s 1967
novel of New York maternity and witchcraft, Rosemary’s Baby, with the inten-
tion of directing it himself. Robert Evans at Paramount overruled him and
insisted on recruiting Roman Polanski to Hollywood to direct. Here again
 i n troduction   9

there exists another Rashomon (1950) of different tellings: Castle claims that he
met with Polanski and became convinced that Evans’s judgment was correct,29
while Evans describes silencing Castle by refusing to go forward with him
as a director and doubling his fee to act as producer, well before Castle ever
met Polanski personally.30 Where Castle depicts himself as a principled artist
willing to sacrifice his desires when he understood that the project was in
good creative hands, Evans frames him as a blusterer who was easily bought
off. But no matter; it is a fascinating irony that Castle’s greatest success as a
producer helped usher in the new golden age of American horror related to
the New Hollywood, a trend that more or less wiped away the kind of films he
was making scant years earlier (as alluded to in “The Graveyard Shift”). His
declining health and dwindling enthusiasm for directing led him to focus more
on producing in his last years. His last film as a producer, the killer cockroach
movie Bug (1975), had the misfortune to be released the same week as a much
more successful “revenge of nature” picture called Jaws (1975)—so often
spoken of as representing the moment when the exploitation marketing and
distribution techniques associated with independents like Castle and Roger
Corman were embraced by Hollywood as the “blockbuster mentality.” Castle
died of a heart attack in 1977 at the age of sixty-three.

cas t l e a f t e r c a st l e
It is perhaps appropriate that Castle’s authorial persona, always somewhat
unpinned from his personal identity, should have gone through a set of permu-
tations after his death. It should be noted that his were not the only gimmick
films; rather, his efforts revealed a new marketing strategy that would be eagerly
exploited by others. A notable example was The Hypnotic Eye (1960), which
purported to hypnotize its audience using “HypnoMagic.” Certain of Castle’s
gimmicks were appropriated early on: Macabre’s gimmick was egregiously bor-
rowed by The Screaming Skull (1958), which promised a free casket and burial
for anyone who died of fright. Later, the UK werewolf film The Beast Must Die
(1974) blatantly borrowed Homicidal’s Fright Break with a “Werewolf Break,”
where the film pauses for the viewers to contemplate which character is the
lycanthrope. Probably the second most famous “gimmick filmmaker” was Ray
Dennis Steckler, best known for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped
Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964). If Castle had been described
as a poor man’s Hitchcock, Steckler was a poor man’s Castle, a “zero budget”
auteur who acted in his films as “Cash Flagg” and reputedly lived out of his
car to cut down on production costs. The gimmick for The Incredibly Strange
Creatures was the bizarre “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision,” in which people in
masks would occasionally run through the theatre.
10  m u r r a y le e de r

Yet Castle’s larger legacy was less immediate. For within those crowds of
kids experiencing the bacchanal of the gimmick films were a host of future
directors who would later credit Castle as an important influence, like Robert
Zemeckis, John Landis, Sam Raimi, Joe Dante and John Waters.31 Waters has
spoken about the influence of Castle numerous times (see Kate J. Russell’s
essay in this volume) and more recently cameoed as Castle on the television
show Feud (2017–). Dante, a lifelong horror buff who in his youth served
as the reviews editor for the fan magazine Castle of Dracula, paid tribute to
Castle in Matinee (1993), in which Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) is
an amalgam of Castle and other independent horror/science fiction direc-
tors of the 1950s and 60s. A cuddly emblem of American capitalism’s most
benign aspects, Woolsey is a sort of huckster saint whose monsters and gim-
micks provide a paradoxical stability during the chaos of the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
Another, more official Castle legacy is managed by his daughter Terry.
Terry Castle had co-producer credits on remakes of House on Haunted Hill
(1999) and Thirteen Ghosts (2001; the title was stylized as Thir13en Ghosts),
produced through Dark Castle Pictures. Though these films are fairly generic
horror films of their era with only a smattering of Castle’s style, they serve
as evidence of a millennial Castle revival. Other remakes, as yet unreal-
ized, were announced (including Macabre, slated to be directed by Robert
Zemeckis,32 and The Tingler33). Terry Castle has also arranged a reprint of
her father’s long-unavailable autobiography and a published screenplay of
House on Haunted Hill with his notes intact;34 and she has established a website
intended to preserve his legacy (williamcastle.com), offering new fiction
inspired by her father’s works, including her loosely autobiographical novel
Fearmaker: Family Matters (2011).35 For a time, the williamcastle.com site
even hosted a blog written as if by Castle himself. Terry Castle participated in
Jeffrey Schwarz’s celebratory documentary Spine Tingler! The William Castle
Story, later to be included with Columbia’s five-disc The William Castle Film
Collection in 2010.
The Castle revival has penetrated the spaces of film art. La Cinémathèque
Française in Paris ran a Castle retrospective from June 19 to August 2, 2009, as
did New York’s Film Forum between August 27 and September 6 of that year.
A broader cultural appreciation for Castle developed at roughly the same time.
In 2013, the humor website Cracked.com declared him “the World’s Craziest
Filmmaker” in an article written by Chris Sims:

When you think about the filmmakers who have given us the greatest
spectacles of all time, you probably think of people like Steven Spielberg
or James Cameron. Hell, if you’ve recently been clocked upside the head
with a two-by-four, you might even think about Michael Bay. When it
 i n troduction   11

comes to pure, unadulterated, attention-grabbing stunts, though, there’s

one man who stands above all others: William Castle.36

Castle’s rising posthumous star is evidenced in the way his name is casually
cited in discussions of vibrating theatre chairs,37 and bloggers endorse him
as “a fucking visionary.”38 The aforementioned Cracked article opines, with
reference to The Tingler, “I don’t think anybody actually thought a crazy fear
monster was crushing their spine, but you can’t tell me that’s not a thousand
times more fun than, say, anything that happened in Avatar.”39 This new
adulation often positions Castle as a visionary auteur from a purer time, before
a jaded audience faced an endless slate of new cinematic advances that fail to
shake up the format as ostentatiously as something like The Tingler, leaving
it yearning for good old-fashioned low-tech gimmickry with a hint of danger
and transgression. As “kettlechips,” a commenter on the Cracked article,
states: “the ‘Tingler’ shtick sounds WAYY too fun for something that could
exist today . . . one complaint [about the physical buzzing] would ruin it for
everyone else.”40 The recent veneration of Castle stands in stark contrast to the
bemused dismissal his gimmicks received, for instance, in Michael and Harry
Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards (1980).41
Recognition of Castle in academia has grown steadily as well. While he
was not paid much attention during the formative phase of horror studies,
he is now a canonical figure. Scholarship on individual Castle films like The
Tingler,42 Strait-Jacket,43 and I Know What You Did44 coexist with broader
examinations of aspects of his career;45 outside of the academic publishing
establishment, two career-spanning books on Castle have appeared as well.46
Catherine Clepper notes that Castle’s relevance to the phenomenological
turn in film theory resides in the way his gimmick films are “indicative of
what cinematic embodiment can mean in a material, proximate, and shocking
sense, rather than as a mode of affective sympathy or reflexive mirroring.”47
Indeed, scholarship on film phenomenology and affect has referenced Castle
and his gimmicks with some regularity.48 Industrial and cultural treatments
of the horror film centering on the 1950s and 60s have examined Castle’s
career as well.49 On another register, the inclusion of a first-person trailer for
Castle’s Homicidal in the DVD collection Experiments in Terror (2005) reflects
an interesting attempt to draw him into the constellation of experimental
cinema. It sits alongside the trailers for The Nanny (1965), Cannibal Girls
(1973), Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), and Blacula (1972), unpinned from
their commercial function so that their unbridled strangeness is reconfigured
as avant-garde.
Castle has received references and homages in other places. Joe R. Lansdale,
the accomplished horror novelist best known to moviegoers for Bubba Ho-Tep
(2002), wrote a story called “Belly Laugh, or, The Joker’s Trick or Treat” for
12  m u r r a y le e de r

the 1990 print anthology The Further Adventures of the Joker, featuring the
Joker rigging a movie theatre with deadly traps for Batman inspired by House
on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, and Mr. Sardonicus.50 Appropriately enough,
the Joker says that he was among those few voting against Sardonicus’s dark
fate as a boy. Another homage to Castle appeared in a 1978 episode of the
great Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV (1976–1984), imagining a Castle-
directed adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express called
Death Takes No Holiday. Portrayed by Dave Thomas, Castle interrupts the
film to stage a Sardonicus-style poll on the film’s ending, only to be overruled
by Hercule Poirot (John Candy) and Agatha Christie (Andrea Martin) herself,
the latter writing the story from within it, who accost him in the non-diegetic
space of Castle’s first-person audience address and strangle him. What other
director could you simultaneously raise and refute the authorship of, while
depicting him on screen and “killing” him a mere year after his actual death,
and have this play as a gesture in relatively good taste?

“ . . . i f e e l o b l i ga t e d t o w a rn y ou . . .”
The word “unique” is often abused, and yet it seems rather unavoidable where
William Castle is concerned. Indeed, his Britannica entry declares, “A master
showman, he made a unique, if minor, contribution to American motion pic-
tures.”51 This collection hopes to show that, in the aggregate at least, his
contribution has been something more than minor. It is perhaps inevitable that
the essays collected here spend the most time on the gimmick films, but they
also excavate Castle’s earlier and later work, and contextualize the gimmick
films within his long career.
The first part of ReFocus: The Films of William Castle is entitled “The
Early Castle” and deals with his pregimmick days. Hugh S. Manon’s “When
Strangers Marry: Film Noir as Mediated Gothic” is a sustained analysis of
Castle’s early classic and how it uses generic noir tropes to transform the
Gothic tradition. Zack Rearick’s “Gender in William Castle’s Westerns”
focuses on an especially neglected facet of Castle’s career, his Westerns.
The following part, “The Gimmick Cycle,” deals with Castle’s most famous
films, most broadly and narratively. The first entry is Anthony Thomas
McKenna’s “He Earned Our Forgiveness: William Castle and American
Movie Showmanship,” which explores the industrial conditions of the 1950s
and 60s American film industry that allowed Castle’s brand of showmanship
to flourish. It is followed by a reprint of Murray Leeder’s “Collective Screams:
William Castle and the Gimmick Film,” which particularly examines House
on Haunted Hill and The Tingler as profoundly reflexive texts that not only
reflect but are about Castle’s own authority and showmanship. It describes the
 i n troduction   13

gimmick films as revivals of sorts of the mode of authorship associated with

early cinema’s trick films.
The next three chapters provide case studies of gimmick films. Beth
Kattelman offers a probing treatment of Macabre and its relationship to the
theatrical tradition of ballyhoo, also offering an exploration of the potential for
real-life “death by fright.” Eliot Bessette follows with an examination of 13
Ghosts and its themes of belief and disbelief, its links with Psycho (1960) and
elements of its reception. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas discusses Mr. Sardonicus
through the film’s central image of the mask.
Moving partly beyond the gimmick film, the part entitled “Castle,
Authorship, and Genre” assembles a series of chapters beginning with Steffen
Hantke’s “A Sick Mind in Search of a Monstrous Body: William Castle and
the Emergence of Psychological Horror in the 1960s.” Hantke examines both
gimmick and postgimmick to locate Castle within the emerging paradigm of the
psychological horror film, while also noting that Castle’s insistence on gruesome
imagery and embodied reactions somewhat distinguishes himself from other
figures such as Hitchcock. Michael Brodski and Caroline Langhorst’s “ ‘What
a Wicked Game to Play?’: Playfulness, Generic Hybridity, and Cult Appeal
in Castle’s 1960s Films” also sees continuities between Castle’s gimmick and
postgimmick films, finding engagement with postwar social issues precisely
through his playful approach to genre. Michael Petitti’s “ ‘Where Did Our
Love Go?’: The Case of William Castle’s Disintegration of the American
Marriage in The Night Walker,” takes one of Castle’s most satisfying and
fascinating films as a case study while connecting it with his gimmick and
postgimmick canons.
The final part chronicles dimensions of Castle’s influences. First, Peter
Marra traces the influence of Castle on the slasher film cycle of the late 1970s
and early 1980s. His “Homo/cidal: William Castle’s 1960s Killer Queers”
finds an intriguing presence of queerness in some of Castle’s films through
their very incoherence. The last chapter, Kate J. Russell’s “The Cinematic
Pandemonium of William Castle and John Waters,” explores Castle’s relation-
ship to perhaps his most vocal disciple, the iconic American independent
director John Waters. It chronicles the influence of Castle on Waters and the
relationship of shock, disgust, and gimmickry.

“. . . bu t d o n ’ t b e a l a r me d . . .”
Michael Petitti has kindly provided us with a photograph of Castle’s tomb-
stone in Glendale, California (Figure I.3).
When I first saw it, it was a clear disappointment: I had imagined it fes-
tooned with skeletons or axes or tinglers or severed heads, or maybe a Zotz
14  m u r r a y le e de r

Figure I.3 Castle’s tombstone in Glendale, CA.

amulet or two. Yet it is a reminder that there was so much more to him than
just the showman, both personally and professionally. And there is surely
something resonant in the simple inscription: “Forever.” This collection does
not and cannot cover all of Castle’s many facets, but it hopes to increase our
understanding of such a dynamic, provocative and, yes, unique filmmaker.
 i n troduction   15

no t e s
1. Astin previously acted in Castle’s film The Spirit is Willing (1967).
2. “The Graveyard Shift” echoes the collapse of the Hollywood studio system’s production
model in the 1960s, which led to much traditional studio space falling into disuse.
3. For useful overviews on critical and academic approaches to film authorship, see Stephen
Crofts, “Authorship and Hollywood,” in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), The
Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 310–24; Paul
Sellors, “Film Directors and Auteurs,” in Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths
(London: Wallflower, 2010), pp. 6–32.
4. Timothy Corrigan, Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 103 (original emphasis).
5. For a discussion of Castle and the auteur theory, see Ethan de Seife, “The Branding of an
Author: William Castle and the Auteur Theory,” 16:9 42 (2011): n.p.
6. William Castle, Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America: Memoirs of a
B-Movie Mogul (New York: Pharos, 1992), p. 17.
7. Ibid. p. 21.
8. My thanks to Jane Bouley for sharing with me her history of the Stony Creek Theatre.
9. Castle, Step Right Up!, p. 27.
10. Ibid.
11. Robert Bloch, Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography (New York: Tor,
1993), p. 294.
12. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007), p. 94.
13. Quoted in Castle, Step Right Up!, p. 95.
14. The costs of the gimmicks belonged to the theatres, so the more elaborate, like Emergo,
Percepto and Illusion-O, would frequently go unrealized.
15. While the film was advertised as The House on Haunted Hill and is referred to as such in
many other sources, including Step Right Up!, the title sequence within the film lacks a
definite article.
16. See Harry M. Benshoff, “Vincent Price and Me: Imagining the Queer Male Diva,”
Camera Obscura 23.1 (2008): 146–50.
17. Robb White interviewed by Tom Weaver, “An Outspoken Conversation with Robb
White,” Film Fax 18 (1990): 60–5, 94–5.
18. Castle, Step Right Up!, p. 159.
19. Quoted in Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, dir. Jeffrey Schwarz (U.S.A.: Automat
Pictures, 2007).
20. Quoted in ibid.
21. Castle, Step Right Up!, p. 160.
22. For a discussion of the interplay of comedy and horror in Castle’s films, see Murray
Leeder, “The Humor of William Castle’s Gimmick Films,” in Cynthia J. Miller and
A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds), The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from
Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016),
pp. 87–101.
23. Castle, Step Right Up!, p. 165.
24. The gimmick cycle was clearly targeted at young audiences, making the recurring themes
of adultery, disintegrating marriages, and spouse-murder all the more baffling.
25. More fully a postgimmick Castle film was The Old Dark House (1963), a reworking of the
1932 James Whale classic that anticipates Castle’s weak comedies of the later 1960s.
16  m u r r a y le e de r

26. In his own autobiography, Robert Bloch, screenwriter for Strait-Jacket, politely says of
Castle’s account of their first meeting with Crawford, “Actually, that’s not quite how it
really happened” (Once Around the Bloch, p. 298) and goes on to give a notably different
version.
27. Philip K. Scheuer, “Roland, Costars Have Cuban Date,” Los Angeles Times, August 29,
1958, p. 7.
28. Shanks is ironically the only film directed by Castle to have been nominated for an
Academy Award—for Alex North’s original score.
29. Castle, Step Right Up!, pp. 192–4.
30. Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture (Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix, 2002), p. 142. For
another account, see Jason Zinoman, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us
Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (New York: Penguin,
2011), pp. 11–17.
31. Stephen King recollects watching The Tingler in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (New
York: Gallery, 1981), pp. 196–7. It was clearly a unifying event for a generation of future
horror specialists.
32. Dana Harris, “Silver, Zemeckis go Dark in Castle ‘Macabre’ Redo,” Variety, May 10,
2000, <http://variety.com/2000/film/news/silver-zemeckis-go-dark-in-castle-macabre-
redo-1117781468/> (accessed June 1, 2017).
33. Brad Beveret, “ ‘Tingler’ to Scare Again,” Comingsoon.net, November 15, 2004, <http://
www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/502891-tingler_to_scare_again> (accessed June 1,
2017).
34. William Castle and Robb White, House on Haunted Hill: A William Castle Annotated
Screamplay (William Castle Productions, 2011).
35. Terry Castle, Fearmaker: Family Matters (William Castle Productions, 2011).
36. Chris Sims, “5 Great Moments from the World’s Craziest Filmmaker,” Cracked, January
27, 2013, <http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-great-moments-from-worlds-craziest-
filmmaker_p2/> (accessed November 26, 2013).
37. Mike Bracken, “Will These Home-Theater Chairs Change the Way You Watch Movies in
Your Living Room?” www.movies.com, October 2, 2013, <http://www.movies.com/
movie-news/tremor-fx-home-theater-chairs-vibrate-to-onscreen-action/13701>
(accessed November 8, 2013).
38. Will Millar, “William Castle, Part One,” In Advent of the Zombie Holocaust, June 24, 2012,
<http://www.movies.com/movie-news/tremor-fx-home-theater-chairs-vibrate-to-
onscreen-action/13701> (accessed February 26, 2013).
39. Sims, “5 Great Moments.”
40. Ibid.
41. The Medveds grant Percepto the prize of “Most Inane and Unwelcome ‘Technical Advance’
in Hollywood History,” with Emergo one of the runners up. Strikingly, the Medveds find
little to say about these gimmicks and what makes them so “inane” beyond simply describing
them. Harry Medved and Michael Medved, The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and
Winners—The Worst Achievements in Hollywood History (New York: Perigee, 1980), pp. 161–6.
42. Mikita Brottman, “Ritual, Tension and Relief: The Terror of ‘The Tingler’,” Film
Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 1997): 2–10; Kjetil Rødje, Images of Blood in American Cinema:
The Tingler to The Wild Bunch (New York: Routledge, 2016), esp. pp. 52–5.
43. David Sanjek, “The Doll and the Whip: Pathos and Ballyhoo in William Castle’s
Homicidal,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 20:4 (2003): 247–63.
44. Marc Olivier, “Gidget Goes Noir: William Castle and the Teenage Phone Fatale,” The
Journal of Popular Film and Television 41.2 (2013): 41–52.
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levinnyt satu, miten metsä taikomalla kaatuu ensi kirveeniskusta tai
vain huudon kajahtaessa. Kertomus, miten emäntä leipoi kiven
Kullervon leipään on ehkä ollut alkuaan lyhyt paimenlaulu.

Alkuaan ei ole arveltu Kullervorunoon kuuluneen kertomuksien

sisaren turmeluksesta. Se on Inkerissä ja Karjalan kannaksella aivan
itsenäisenä runona ja liittyy vasta Vienan läänissä Kullervo-
tarustoon. Eteläisellä laulualueella on sisaren turmelijana Turo,
Turon poika tai Tuiretuinen. Nimi Turo on ehkä laina
skandinavilaisesta Thor, Ture, josta on niinikään olemassa jonkun
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laulu papin pojasta Aljoshkasta, jonka aiheena niinikään on
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Kuvauksen Kullervon sodanhalusta on Lönnrot saanut alkuaan

aivan itsenäisistä runoista, joita jo laulajat kumminkin useissa
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jumalaistarustosta. Nimi Sampsa eli Sämpsä johtunee sämpsykkä-
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säkeellä: Anni tytti, aino tytti, muodosti Lönnrot aino-sanasta
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kotiin eikä ilmoita itkunsa todellista syytä muille kuin äidilleen. Äiti
lohduttelee tytärtään ja neuvoo häntä aitassa pukeutumaan
koristeihin ja helyihin. Mutta tyttö hirttäytyykin aittaan. Kun äiti itkee
tytärpoloistaan muodostuu kyyneleistä kolme jokea, jokiin luotoja ja
luodoille käkiä kukkumaan. Tämä vienankarjalainen runo taas on
kehittynyt kolmesta itsenäisestä laulusta, nimittäin runoista: Katri ja
Riion poika, Koristeensa kadottanut tyttö ja kyyneleiden vierinnästä
ynnä tytölle kukkuvasta kolmesta käestä. Eteläiseltä runoalueelta on
saatu kuvaukset että nuo kirstussa olevat koristeet, joihin Aino
pukeutuu ovat päivättären ja kuuttaren lahjoittamia, miten neito
riisuutuu rannalla ja että metsän eläimet vievät sanan
hukuttautumisesta tytön kotiin. Ainon aaltoihin hukuttautuminen on
Lönnrotin muovailema, hänestä tuntui aittaan hirttäytyminen liian
epärunolliselta.

Salaperäiseen Sampoon on Kalevalassa liittynyt niin suuri osa

toiminnasta, että sen ovat muutamat katsoneet olevan ikäänkuin
koko eepoksen koossapitävän keskuksen. Ja eniten kaikista
Kalevalan aiheista ovat tutkijainkin mielikuvitukset kiertyneet tämän
tarun ympärille. Minkäänlaista varmaa selitystä, jota yleiseen olisi
pidetty pätevänä, ei ole vielä olemassa. Itse runojen kokoonpanon
on Kaarle Krohnin kylläkin onnistunut osoittaa ja sampo-sanan on
hän johtanut sampi-kalasta, joka sittemmin olisi saanut hyvän saaliin
merkityksen. Nimityksestä ei ole päästy yksimielisyyteen, mutta
runojen kehityksen tutkimuksesta on käynyt selville, että runon
ytimenä on ollut legendan-tapainen Päivänpäästöruno.
 Krohn on huomauttanut laulajain selitysten, että ellei
Väinämöiseltä olisi hajotettu Sampoa, ei täällä olisi halloja eikä
Pohjan tuulia, eikä maa köyhä, meri pohatta, olevan »itse luonnon
opettamia Pohjan perän asukkaille. Kansamme kova kokemus, ettei
täyttä eheätä onnea täällä ei ole saavutettavissa, on Sampo-virteen
leimansa painanut. Onhan Suomen kansa kaikissa suhteissa saanut
tyytyä ikäänkuin Sammon muruihin. Mutta se on myös oppinut näistä
sirpaleista elämän mahdollisuutta luomaan.»

Ja sirpaleistahan kansamme on luonut merkillisen eepoksensakin.

Monesta on ehkä tuntunu ikävältä kun tutkijat ovat noista runoista ja
niiden sankareista poistaneet tarunomaisen muinaisuuden hohteen
osoittaessaan vain osan olevan puhdasta perua esi-isiemme
pakanallisesta jumalaistarustosta ja kotimaisista historiallisista
aiheista ja melkoisen osan olevan lainaa kristillisestä aatepiiristä
sekä muutamien naapurikansoilta. Mutta tulee ottaa huomioon, että
vaikkakin muutamat muilta lainatut tarut ovat olleet sinä alkuaiheena,
joka on saanut suomalaisen mielikuvituksen liikkeelle, niin on
tuloksena ollut aivan omintakeinen runous, jossa kansamme
omaperäisellä tavalla ja sävyllä, niinkuin mikään muu heimo
maailmassa ei olisi sitä tehnyt, on antanut kuvan itsestään, siitä
mitkä mielikuvitukset, haaveet, harhaluulot ja vaistot vuosituhansien
kuluessa ovat syöpyneet tämän mietiskelevän metsien heimon
veriin.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KALEVALA
SUOMEN KANSAN HENGENTUOTTEENA ***

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