John Waters and the Relativity of Shock Value

Amanda Maccagnan's stained glass window of John Waters, commissioned for the Academy Museum's "John Waters: Pope of Trash"

The first room of the Academy Museum's "John Waters: Pope of Trash" is a transgressive chapel. Visitors sit on pews to view a clip reel of Waters' films. They are surrounded by stained glass windows of Divine and other Waters superstars by Amanda Maccagnan. The chapel Gesamtkunstwerk alludes to Waters' Baltimore Catholic upbringing and to the fact that his early films debuted in what must have been Baltimore's most open-minded churches. The installation is also the set-up for a cheap trick. The pews contain buzzers to deliver literal "shock value" to visitors. It's an homage to B-movie maven William Castle and specifically to "Percepto," the insanely risky gimmick used to promote Castle's 1959 scarefest The Tingler.

Installation view of "John Waters: Pope of Trash," Academy Museum of Motion 
Pictures. Photo by Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation

William Castle at Columbia Pictures, 1946. Photo: Ralph Crane

William Castle (1914-1977) was the demented master of the publicity stunt. Queasy viewers of Castle's purportedly ultraviolent Homicidal (1961) could get their ticket price refunded by shaming themselves in the "Coward's Corner," installed in each theater.

Promotional material for William Castle's Homicidal, 1961. Collection of John Waters

Waters collects vintage promotional material and reprised a couple of mid-century gimmicks to promote his own films. One gimmick was Smell-o-Vision, used by Mike Todd Jr. for a minor 1960 film called Scent of Mystery. Though it starred Peter Lorre and Elizabeth Taylor (Todd Jr.'s stepmom), it was a flop. Smell-o-Vision required projectionists to pump scents into the theater on cue. For Polyester (1981) Waters streamlined the process by using hand-out scratch and sniff cards (dubbed "Odorama"). 

That brings us to Castle's The Tingler. Vincent Price plays a scientist who discovers a centipede-like parasite that feeds on fear. The only way to deter it is to scream. The film is notable as the first Hollywood production to offer a cinematic simulation of an LSD trip.

The Tingler came out as movie studios felt TV's breath down their collective necks. Castle promoted the film by saying that the Tingler would "break loose in the theatre while you are in the audience." Per Castle's instructions, projectionists were instructed to turn up the house lights at a certain point in the film. An audience member (a stooge) would stand up and faint from fright. The film broke, and a centipede's shadow wriggled across the light beam. Buzzers placed under some seats gave real audience members reason to scream.

In effect, Castle's business plan was to shout fire in a crowded theater. The buzzers weren't cheap. According to Variety ("Goosepimple Saga With Seats to Suit"), the production cost $400,000, while the buzzers added another $250,000. Sourced from army surplus, the buzzers had been designed to cool radar units on WWII planes. Because of the cost, only about a tenth of the seats got buzzers.

In his memoir, Castle claimed his buzzers supplied electrical shocks. (Nope.) Academy Museum curator Dara Jaffe pitched the buzzer idea to Waters, who approved. 

So I was watching the clip reel and buzz. I took out my cell phone, wondering how I'd put in on vibrate. Then I remembered, oh, the hidden buzzer. The effect is extremely subtle, like the Academy's attorneys had to sign off on it. Maybe that's a comment on the relativity of shock value. There was a time when Divine eating a dog turd was shocking while zapping unsuspecting movie patrons was good clean fun. Taboos and trigger warnings shift, and now Waters is part of the canon (in Blue states). As Waters has it: "I'm so respectable I might puke."

Fun fact: "Divine" Glenn Milstead's drag name, suggested by Waters, comes from a character in Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers (1943). Milstead (left) never heard of drag until he/they met David Lochary (center), often cast as a heterosexual pervert.