- Threaten to kill the audience – The same William Castle is the protagonist of another gimmick on our list. In the movie “Macabre”, which was basically only a ripoff of French classic “Les Diaboliques”, Castle came up with a brilliant idea. He thought of taking out an insurance policy that, in the even anyone died, he and their interests would be insured by Lloyd’s of London.
- Hire protesters for your fake snuff – In 1972, Mr Allan Shackleton bought the rights to distribute a South American film called “Slaughter”. The thing is, the film was so bad that he had to come up with other gimmicks to allure the audience. Funnily enough, he kept on trying and trying until he succeeded with a bunch of protesters, that got the attention of organizations like Women Against Pornography to protest the film. Like this, he cemented the idea of snuff films.
- Signoscope – We covered all dwarf films, now we have to mention an all deaf cast. It happened in the movie “Deafula” (really?!), where Peter Weschberg came up with the idea of a movie made entirely in sign language.
- Eating worms – At the Cannes Film Festival, in 1977, the makers of “The Worm Eaters” did the only unbearable thing someone can do for advertising such a bad movie: they ate worms.
- Eating a shoe – Talk about eating, do you remember that time Werner Herzog ate his shoe because he lost a bet?
- Hypnotism – In 1976, the same Werner Herzog released a film about a sixteenth-century Bavarian glass-blowing community’s disintegration, because the best glass blower had died. To make things even better, Herzog says he personally hypnotized everybody in the cast. On top of that, he designed the movie’s opening to put the audience in a hypnotic trance, using time-lapse photography, ambient music, poetic narration, and subliminal text. SWEET!
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