Stiff Competitors

Monday, Aug. 04, 1958

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The lid of the coffin rises. Inside are five words: THIS IS RESERVED FOR YOU. The sound track takes over. "Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to see a motion picture that may kill you. We guarantee free burial service to anyone who dies of fright."

So begins the prologue to American International Pictures' The Screaming Skull—a sample of just the sort of thoughtful, steam-heated promotion that sucks the bloodthirsty into U.S. movie houses. Pushers of cinemonsters know that one ghoul is about as good as another, and so the proceeds of horror films must depend on eerie drumbeating.

The most attractive promotion bait offered this summer is a $1,000 life insurance policy, written by Lloyd's of London to cover "the death by fright of any member of the audience." The movie: Macabre, a pallor game played by a mad M.D. When Macabre's Producer William Castle first tried to insure every human being on earth, Lloyd's was chilly. Lloyd's dickered with Castle over an estimate of the number of deaths that would occur, finally settled for an actuarially comfortable eight, made the premium $15,000. No bereaved heir has yet made a claim.

Macabre's Castle has no monopoly on the city or the styx. All over the U.S., promoters last week were filling lobbies with coffins, skeletons, papier-mâché tombstones, skulls with blinking eyes. "Nurses" took patrons' blood pressure, gave them "Courage Cocktails" of tomato juice and Tabasco sauce. Red footprints led down sidewalks to theaters, and bloodstains decorated the walls.

"The Fly is open," said a trade paper ad (subject to other interpretations) by 20th Century-Fox that called attention to $472,000 worth of wide-screen science, filmed in "terror-color," concerning a fellow who has learned how to decompose and recompose matter electronically. Soon he has accidentally concocted two creatures consisting of parts of himself and parts of a horsefly. Fox, now that its Fly is open, offers a careful "$100 to the first person who can prove it can't happen."