Audiences too stupid now?

[Svengoolie 3]

If you're here I assume you may have heard of William B. Castle, the director famous for gimmick movies in the 50's that tried to fight TV and it's cutting into the movie market.

He did a lot of gimmick movies that usually involved psychical props to attract moviegoers away from their TV sets, like "the tingler" with the joy buzzers rigged into seats, "the house on haunted hill" with the paper skeleton being pulled up on a string as te skeleton rose from the acid tank on the film, "Mr. Sandonicus" with the "mercy cards" and the non existent alternate ending, etc.

Now obviously it's been a looong time since anyone ever made a movie with gimmicks that went along with it.

I was wondering about that. Do you think that movie makers know modern audiences are so stupid they would do something stupid like run up and tear up a paper skeleton or file a lawsuit for being scared if a buzzer went off under their chair?

Is it because they fear being sued by some moron over something?

Are modern theaters too big to make such gimmicks feasible now?

I don't know, I suspect it's all of the above and more. Still, the gimmick movie was a brief but special period in b movie huistory, and to be fair if a movie had a gimmick it was a b movie, and i wanted to bring it up.

[Pacman000]

Probably not; new movies are released in too many theaters to make such ballyhoo feasible.

It's easy to set up a gag skeleton in a few dozen theaters. It's not to hard to move that set up from theater to theater for a year. It's hard to set up 2000 gag skeletons for 4-6 weeks.