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William Castle was the kind of a guy who could make the girls scream for more. And the guys, too. Forget Silicon Valley folklore that gives Atari credit for the idea that people would spend money to interact with a story on a screen, even if that story was titled “How Much I Suck At Pong.” The little-known truth is that the genesis of “audiences want to be part of the action,” dates back to the late 1950s and the man Hollywood fondly called the Abominable Showman.

Probably because The Demon Spawn of Alfred Hitchcock and P.T. Barnum wouldn’t fit across a page in Variety.

Castle began his career working for Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures. Cohn nurtured Castle’s talent and six years later Castle was a successful B-film director. After another decade of work, Castle found his calling. He churned out cheesy horror film after cheesy horror film, none of which should have sold a dozen tickets, let alone become box office hits. But what Castle had, and what his contemporaries—including Hitchcock—lacked, was the understanding that film audiences wanted to be conned. And, they didn’t want to sit back and watch it happen. They wanted to be part of the action.

Castle gave no quarter in delivering what his fans wanted. Even if that meant serving up fear so real patrons could feel it.

The hero, or villain, of Castle’s arguably quintessential film, The Tingler, was a lobster-like parasite that crawled into its victims’ spines and treated them to a tingling sensation before killing them. In the whole world—and this was a time when science was so popular nearly every spokesperson in a television commercial wore a white lab coat—scientists could find only one defense against the Tingler.

Prolonged, out-loud screaming.

Castle knew audiences screamed during horror films, but that wasn’t enough. “I want to scare the pants off America…only I want louder screams, more horror, more excitement,” Castle wrote in his autobiography. He wanted patrons screaming at the Tingler not because they were afraid of what was on the screen, but because they were afraid they were going to die.

About halfway through the film, star Vincent Price informed the audience that the Tingler was loose in the theater. But, not to worry. Simply scream to chase the Tingler away—especially if you felt it crawling up your spine.

And many patrons did. Feel it, that is.

Castle drove his audience to the edge with cheap, surplus air-plane de-icers attached to randomly-chosen seats**. They were switched on at the end of Price’s speech and their vibrations gave a smattering of lucky patrons the feeling that something was loose in their shorts or panties.

A gimmick? Sure. But it also marked the first time in modern cinema that a mass audience was made to feel a film.* More than thirty years would elapse between Atari’s Pong and the debut of sophisticated home video games, with their array of pricey, external devices, such as special gloves, that provided players with what game designers call “tactile feedback.” And few, if any, of those games crippled you with fear (unless you were overly sensitive to your golf or tennis score).

Castle’s list of gimmicks that involved the audience included Emergo, in which an on-screen skeleton raced toward the audience—and continued going, flying out of the picture and over the heads of unsuspecting patrons (defined as those who hadn’t seen the film a dozen times before). This was no cheap 3-D effect. This was a 100-percent genuinely cheap plastic skeleton that rattled along a wire above the patrons’ heads.

(The idea had its limits. Patrons willing to participate in the show discovered that, unlike a 3-D effect, a plastic skeleton was vulnerable to flying Milk Duds and other assorted goodies from the concession stand.)

Presaging the days of first-shooter games, Castle made theater-goers stars another picture, Homicidal. Patrons who had all the fear they could take were eligible for a full refund before the final 15 minutes of the film—as long as they were willing to follow a yellow line—in full view of the other patrons— to the “Coward’s Corner,” where they received their refunds—and made their show business debuts—to chants of “coward, coward.”

Almost 60 years later, we’ve yet to catch up with Castle. Your X-Box or Playstation still can’t shock you.*** Nor can your Wii shoot real tennis balls out of the screen.

And if, one day there, someone markets DOOM: The William Castle Version,  I’d play it standing up, away from any electrical outlets, and only while wearing a Kevlar vest.