Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [7]
These tactics brought the audience into the movie, gave them a role to play, made everyone a scream queen. Castle played a crucial part as one of the main attractions, putting himself in the ads just like Hitchcock did—a cigar-chomping, rotund ham who impersonated the role of a big-shot Hollywood producer that he never truly was. Castle started with an ingenious marketing campaign, but just as important was the appeal of being a part of a community of tremblers, sitting in a room with other people and freaking out together. His gimmicks turned the movies into interactive events but they also told you something about them. They were often not good enough to stand on their own. They needed something extra.
A publicist at heart, Castle knew enough about the power of image to understand that his could use some improvement. He made movies for excitable teenagers, but he yearned for the approval of critics and award committees and serious artists. That was not going to happen as long as his showman persona was more famous than his movies. Image matters, but when a new audience of serious-minded film buffs were flocking to new-wave cinema and daring counterculture fare, Castle could tell that he was becoming known as someone out of touch: Hitchcock without the talent. He was looking for a project that could deliver him an Oscar. So after some lobbying by its agent, he took a copy of Rosemary’s Baby home, because, well, he didn’t have any better options. When he started to sweat, he decided to take a risk.
After contacting the agent the next day, Castle bet everything on the book: he sold his house and bought the option himself for $100,000, plus another $50,000 if it became a bestseller, which it did, and 5 percent of the net profits. Since he had a contract with Paramount to make cheap shockers, he submitted the idea to an executive. In a few days, he received a phone call.
Speaking in smooth, dulcet tones, Robert Evans, the thirty-six-year-old vice president of production at the struggling studio, laid on the charm. Evans had never cared what Castle had done before. But Evans saw the same thing that Castle did. Rosemary’s Baby was a new spin on Old Horror. Looking beneath the surface, Evans noticed a movie about the perils of domesticity. Rosemary had made the choices of a very deferential good girl from the 1950s. She wants a child, stays at home, and defers to her husband’s career, follows the advice of her older neighbors and doctors even though it makes her unsure of herself. She’s polite, kind to friends, and hesitant about challenging her husband. When he rapes her in her sleep, she is shocked, but forgives him. And for all her attempts at being the perfect wife, what does that get her? The movie expressed an au courant attitude about the evils of conformity, youth culture, and the sexual revolution. Now that’s something you can sell. But Evans knew it wouldn’t work with Old Horror gimmicks.
The last time studios took a big chance on horror movies was during the Depression, when Universal Pictures produced its classic monster movies. The 1931 premiere of Frankenstein, the chilling story of the misunderstood monster based on Mary Shelley’s novel, was shot in an expressionist style that was in the same spirit of emerging surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí. Opening the same year, in the midst of a global economic collapse the depths of which had never been seen before, Dracula presented a vision of more uncompromising evil. Both stories exist in a world of shadows and odd sounds, strange creatures and flights of fancy. They transported audiences somewhere far away.
By the next decade, horror had been relegated to low-budget departments, given scant finances and little respect. Producer Val Lewton made the best horror films of the 1940s with modest Freudian films such as Cat People that turned the shadows on the wall of a room housing an empty pool into a terrifying hint of a monster. Lewton and