The 7 Most Disastrous Movie Gimmicks Of All Time

For as long as movies have existed, there have been a slew of gimmicks to lure audiences in. Audiences were drawn into 3D movies as early as the 1920s, and gimmick color effects existed even earlier. Some directors have even taken more clever approaches.

Alfred Hitchc*ck‘s insistence that no one would be allowed into Psycho late led to line stretching out onto the street. Oftentimes, however, gimmicks have less than desirable effects. Here’s a look at the ones that really blew up in the creator’s faces.

7. The original Wizard of Oz lead to financial ruin

1939’s The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland remains one of the most legendary films of all time. It’s well known that the film was based off the popular book by L. Frank Baum, but it’s lesser known that the 1939 film is actually a remake. In fact, by the time it came out, there were already nine other film adaptations or sequels. The reason why there were so many leads back to the very first one created by Baum itself. Its gimmick proved so financially difficult that it led to all the other adaptations.

By 1908, audiences were already enthralled by short films that contained fully realized stories. A few movies had already entered the world of color, by hand coloring prints of the film. But Baum wanted something bigger than just a color short film for his adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He wanted a full multimedia presentation.

Called The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, Baum created a full touring stage show. He personally introduced the show on stage, while live actors performed alongside the film. The show was even a hit with audiences and drew big crowds. There was just one problem: the show was far too expensive. The cost was so massive that even good crowds couldn’t save it. After a Grand Rapids, MI debut, it moved to New York City, where it was forced to close early due to the complete hemorrhaging of money.

The financial loss was so huge that it put Baum into bankruptcy and forced him to sell the rights to his beloved book. That meant all those numerous adaptations could be made without Baum‘s consent, no matter how weird they were. And some of them were indeed weird – a 1925 adaptation had the Tin Man as a villain, while the Scarecrow and Dorothy were explicitly romantically linked. Baum‘s family would eventually get the rights to the book back, but not until after his death.

6. A “colossal spectacle” bankrupted a whole studio

D.W. Griffith was one of the pioneers of early film, and was also one of the most successful directors of his day. His landmark film The Birth of a Nation was perhaps the most technically advanced film ever made when it came out in 1915. And although it was extremely successful at the box office, it also ran into the problem of being completely and totally racist. For his next film, Griffith sought to tell a story to respond to that, one talking about oppression through the ages.

That film was Intolerance, and Griffith went all out to tell this tale, an elaborate tale taking place over hundreds of years. In fact, the amount of money, time and people spent on the film ended up a the gimmick to draw in audiences. Advertisements proclaimed it as a “colossal spectacle,” and the “world’s mightiest spectacle.” Others even flaunted the $2 million budget and the cast of 67,000 actors.

It ended up being too lavish for Griffith. Spending millions on a film was unheard of at the time, and he simply couldn’t recoup the cost. Only a few years earlier, Griffith had created his own studio to give himself more creative control. But the complete financial failure of his massive project forced him to liquidate the studio.

5. An audience accidentally got poisoned

Most countries with their own film output have, at some point in time, a surge of cheap exploitation horror films. The Philippines was one of those countries, and American drive-in producer Sam Sherman decided to go to them for cheap films. He bought The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), adding a new prologue and gimmick before showing it to audiences.

As the film contains green monsters, Sherman added a prologue where a doctor informed the audience to “drink your sample of green blood and it is guaranteed that you can never turn into a green-blooded monster.” Audiences were indeed given a small package of a green liquid. They didn’t turn into monsters, but they were struck with something else– dysentery. Sherman himself became ill from drinking his concoction.

4. A war to create the first smelling film produced two failures

There have been tons of bitter feuds in film history, but the battle to create the first smelling film isn’t one that’s well remembered. But it did indeed happen, resulting in two huge failures.

Mike Todd Jr., son of producer and creator of Cinerama Mike Todd Sr., announced in 1959 that he would produce the first film using Smell-O-Vision, The Scent of Mystery. Upon hearing that, Walter Reade Jr. rushed to beat them to punch with his own smelling film.

Along the way, Reade designed his moves as a way to take shots at the Todd family. He dubbed it Aromarama, a takeoff on his Cinerama invention. In addition, he chose a travelogue for his film, which was the Todd family specialty. As it turned out, Reade‘s version was panned so badly that The Scent of Mystery was dead before it ever debuted. Even then, Todd‘s concept was completely unworkable. In some theaters, it would have cost as much as $1 million to install the technology.

3. Sensurround damaged movie theaters

It’s no surprise that a film named Earthquake got made, since practically every natural disaster has had a film made about it. But the makers of that film wanted to go a little beyond a typical disaster film, by creating a more realistic experience. With the creation of Sensurround, they sought to make the audience feel like they were actually in an earthquake.

This was accomplished through playing sound at extreme volumes, so to create vibrations. These special speakers weren’t just a little loud – the levels reached a 120 decibels. With that much noise and vibration, the problems that followed were obvious. For one, it caused so much noise and shaking that anyone in a theater next to it couldn’t watch their own movie. As a result, it quickly only became feasible in single screen theaters.

Hurting other showings were the least of their problems, though. The vibrations caused structural damage to theaters throughout the country. The Chinese Theater in Hollywood was forced to install netting at the ceiling of the theater, as plaster was constantly plunking audience members in the head. One Chicago public safety official had enough and shut down showings in his city altogether, as it the risk of damaging buildings was too high.

2. William Castle dared audiences to get a refund, and they did

William Castle was undoubtedly the king of movie gimmicks. Practically every one of his cheesy horror movies brought along a gimmick: a floating skeleton over the audience, buzzers in seats to shock audience members, voting on the fate of the main character etc. But in one situation, audiences got the better of Castle.

Castle‘s idea for his film Homicidal (1961) was the Fright Break. At a particularly frightening moment in the film, the movie just stopped, giving audience members a chance to leave and get a refund if they were too scared to see what happened. Much to Castle‘s dismay, most audience members did get a refund. They did so by finding a way to scam Castle. All they did was watch the film through the end, stay in the theater and then exit when the Fright Break came up a second time.

When Castle discovered it had backfired, he went ballistic and developed a way to make it impossible for people to get a refund. His strategy: shaming them out of doing it. Audience members who wanted to get a refund were forced to go through an embarrassing series of events. They needed to head to what was dubbed the Coward’s Corner, a path colored yellow. All while they walked, a voice from the film hurled insults for being a coward. Finally, the person had to sign a card that read “I am a bona fide coward.”

1. Director had his cast disappear to make it look like they were really killed, and he was arrested for their murder

Long before Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project brought shaky handheld camerawork to the masses, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was the landmark pseudo-documentary film. Ruggero Dedodato‘s found footage film took the approach many of its copycats later used: presenting it as if the people shooting the movie were actually killed. In the film, a group traveled to observe a cannibal tribe, and wound up brutally murdered. Due to some decisions made by Deodato, the film ended up causing quite a few problems.

Deodato got himself in hot water for killing animals on-screen in Cannibal Holocaust. That was enough to get the film banned in some places, but the graphic violence extended to humans as well. All of the characters were disposed of in very graphic and realistic looking fashion. To hammer home that this and the other murders in the film were legitimate, Deodato had each cast member sign a contract which stated they would not appear in anything else for a year. It was this disappearance of the cast combined with the realistic violence that led to Deodato being arrested for murder.

The murder charges were tacked on to an earlier obscenity charge. Although he claimed from the start that the actors were not murdered, it was not until he was able to produce them in public that the courts were convinced. After also demonstrating how the murders were done, the trial was dismissed after twenty days. Deodato didn’t get off completely free, though. He received a suspended sentence due to animal cruelty and the film was banned in Italy for four years.

These are just a few of the truly horrible film gimmicks that have plagued the industry. Many others were, at the very worst, only very boring, but these are the ones that caused actual damage.

Which one of these gimmicks do you think is the worst? What are other crazy movie gimmicks you’ve heard of?

(top image source: Homicidal – Columbia Pictures)