Cinema: The Unquiet Grave

SHANKS Directed by WILLIAM CASTLE Screenplay by RANALD GRAHAM

In all the shellbursts of nostalgia for the 1950s, there ought to be at least one small report for William Castle, a producer and director of low-budget horror films. Castle fashioned a personality for himself—a sort of little-theater Hitchcock—and assaulted audiences with gimmicks that never really succeeded in disguising the abject sleaziness of his movies. In The House on Haunted Hill, he announced a new process called "Emerge," which turned out to be a phosphorescent skeleton strung on wires and sent scurrying over...