Oh William Castle, I love you so. I cannot resist your theatrical gimmicks, even when they hopelessly slow the pacing of your movie. I adore your lengthy and unnecessarily elaborate introductions. I cherish your perfect jump scares. I want to snuggle your great big chin. How I wish to go back in time and see one of your movies on opening night with a big crowd. But I will take what I can get.

“13 Ghosts” (in Illusion-O!) is one of the gimmicky films for which Castle is famous, coming right on the heels of “The House on Haunted Hill” — with Emergo, a skeleton that swung out over the audience during the acid-bath climax — and “The Tingler” — with Percepto, a vibrating device rigged into theater seats. The next year, Castle released “Homicidal,” which had a 45-second “fright break” before the climax, in case anyone was too scared to continue watching. I just love how he doesn’t mind if you’re distracted from the movie – to him moviegoing is an interactive experience. However you feel about him as a filmmaker, you have to admire his showmanship.

Illusion-O! (it takes an exclamation point, like Yahoo!) consisted of a paper viewer with strips of red and blue cellophane. If you believe in ghosts, Castle explains in his charmingly earnest introduction, look through the red strip; if you don’t, look through the blue. The ghost scenes are all layered with blue and the ghosts appear in red, so I guess if you looked through the blue you’d see nothing, which of course nobody wants to do. It’s a completely goofy gimmick – you don’t even need a viewer to see the ghosts (whew) – but it would’ve been so much fun in a theater full of people. I felt sort of lame watching the movie at home.

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