I’m a huge William Castle fan.
13 Ghosts and The Tingler are up there, but House on Haunted Hill is probably my favorite. Give me Vincent Price inviting a bunch of strangers into a creepy house for ten grand, a skeleton flying over an audience and William Castle turning the whole thing into a carnival attraction, and I’m happy.
If you don’t know who William Castle is, you should.
Castle was the king of the gimmick, a B-movie showman who understood something that sometimes gets lost in all the serious discussion about horror: this shit is supposed to be fun.
He insured audiences against death by fright for Macabre. He sent a skeleton flying over theaters during House on Haunted Hill. He put vibrating motors under seats for The Tingler.
And for Homicidal, he gave terrified moviegoers a chance to leave before the ending and get their money back.
Naturally, people figured out how to scam him.
We’ll get to that because the entire story is so perfectly William Castle that it deserves its own discussion.
But first, the movie.
When Homicidal popped up while I was poking around Tubi, I knew I had to watch it again.
Yes, it’s been called a Psycho knockoff. Yes, Castle was clearly having some fun with Alfred Hitchcock. And yes, the similarities start almost immediately.
Who cares?
Welcome to Bizarro Psycho
After a strange little opening involving a creepy kid named Warren, we meet a beautiful blonde named Miriam Webster checking into a hotel.
She’s carrying a pile of cash. She changes clothes while the handsome bellboy, Jim, brings her ice. She flirts with him.
Miriam Webster. Marion Crane. Come on.
Except this isn’t Psycho.
It’s more like negative Psycho. Bizarro Psycho. Castle grabs pieces that feel familiar and starts rearranging them into something increasingly ridiculous.
Miriam offers Jim $2,000 to marry her on one very specific night in September. The marriage will be annulled the next day.
Does Jim think this sounds insane? Of course. Does Jim do it anyway? Of course.
That’s how we eventually end up at a justice of the peace’s house in the middle of the night, where the poor bastard is apparently willing to perform a wedding in his robe while his wife plays the wedding march.
It’s ludicrous.
And then Miriam pulls a butcher knife out of her purse and stabs him to death.
Well. Congratulations on the marriage, Jim.
“She Appears to Be… Homicidal”
Miriam calmly drives away while a radio bulletin describes the murderer and warns listeners to approach her with extreme caution because she appears to be…
Homicidal.
I’m sorry. That makes me laugh every time.
She heads back to the house where she apparently lives with Helga, an older woman in a wheelchair who can’t speak and is clearly terrified of her.
Miriam washes the knife. She torments Helga. She puts warm milk in a bowl for her like she’s a cat.
And the entire setup starts feeling suspiciously familiar again. There’s even a staircase that looks like it wandered over from the Bates house.
If Helga is our Mother figure, though, Castle isn’t going to play this exactly the way Hitchcock did.
Because then another woman arrives. Her name is Miriam Webster.
Wait. What?
The blonde murderer we’ve been following isn’t Miriam at all. She’s Emily. And the actual Miriam is Warren’s half-sister.
Remember Warren? That weird little kid from the beginning?
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Castle Keeps Leaving Breadcrumbs Everywhere
This is where Homicidal becomes a lot more fun than simply calling it a Psycho ripoff gives it credit for.
Emily hates Miriam.
She’s supposedly connected to Warren, who is conveniently away in San Diego.
She carries around a briefcase filled with all kinds of suspicious shit, including knives. She schemes. She lies. She manipulates Miriam’s boyfriend Karl. She gets a prescription for strychnine.
Then she walks into Miriam’s flower shop and absolutely loses her shit.
Wedding flowers get destroyed. Displays get trashed. And when Emily spots a photograph of Warren?
That gets destroyed too.
Why? That’s the game Castle is playing.
The first time through, you’re trying to figure out what the hell Emily is doing. The second time, you’re watching everything she does and thinking: Oh, you sneaky bastard.
There are clues everywhere.
Helga’s history with Warren matters. Warren’s inheritance matters. His father’s obsession with having a son matters. Emily’s hatred of Miriam matters. Even the way people talk about Warren when he isn’t around matters.
Castle isn’t hiding the answer so much as waving pieces of it in your face and betting that you’re looking in the wrong direction.
Yes, Psycho Is All Over This Thing
There’s no point pretending otherwise.
The blonde woman. The money. The identity games. The isolated house. The staircase. The controlling family history. The murder mystery. The gender disguise at the center of the final reveal.
Castle knew exactly what movie audiences were going to be thinking about.
But here’s what makes the whole thing funnier: Hitchcock himself had been paying attention to what filmmakers like Castle and Roger Corman were doing with cheap horror movies.
Then Hitchcock makes Psycho.
Then Castle essentially responds with: Oh yeah? Watch this.
That’s horror eating its own tail, and I love it.
Castle even borrowed some of Hitchcock’s showman persona, appearing himself and turning the theatrical presentation into part of the experience.
But Castle was never Hitchcock. Thank God.
Hitchcock wanted control. Castle wanted a f*ucking circus.
The Fright Break Might Be Better Than the Movie
Just before Homicidal reaches its climax, Castle stops everything for his famous Fright Break.
Can’t handle what you’re about to see? Leave. Get your money back.
It sounds generous until audiences discovered an obvious loophole: watch the movie, sit through another showing, then walk out during the Fright Break and collect your refund.
Castle was horrified. Not by the movie, but by people taking his money.
So the promotion evolved into something much more humiliating. Anyone too frightened to finish the movie could be marched out in front of everybody and publicly identified as a coward.
That is so William Castle.
He didn’t merely sell you a movie ticket. He made watching the movie an event. Unfortunately, you don’t get that sitting on your couch with a remote control.
I genuinely wish I could have experienced House on Haunted Hill with a skeleton flying over my head or The Tingler with the theater seats buzzing underneath people.
And I absolutely would have stayed through the end of Homicidal. Because that’s where Castle finally shows you what all those breadcrumbs were leading toward.
About That Ending…
I’m not going to give the entire thing away here because if you’ve never seen Homicidal, the reveal is half the fun.
But Warren’s mother desperately wanted to give her husband a so badly that the identity of the child she gave him became the foundation for everything that follows.
Emily. Warren. The inheritance. Helga. The resentment. All of it comes crashing together.
Joan Marshall plays the dual role under the name Jean Arless, a credit Castle deliberately chose because it could plausibly belong to either a man or a woman.
Think about that playing in a theater in 1961.
Audiences had already seen Norman Bates become Mother in Psycho, but Castle isn’t simply repeating that trick. He’s screwing around with identity in a different way, and the reveal forces you to rethink practically everything you’ve been watching.
Then Helga’s wheelchair comes flying down the stairs because apparently William Castle decided subtlety could go fuck itself.
Perfect.
William Castle Was Never Trying to Be Respectable
That’s ultimately why I don’t care whether somebody wants to call Homicidal a Psycho knockoff. Castle wasn’t trying to win a comparison with Hitchcock.
He wanted people in the theater. He wanted them screaming. He wanted them laughing. He wanted them talking about what the hell they’d just seen when they walked outside.
And more than 60 years later, I’m sitting here doing exactly that.
Homicidal is weird, twisty, occasionally ridiculous and much more intense than some of Castle’s other movies. It’s also one of those films that’s even more fun when you already know the ending because you can see exactly where Castle was screwing with you.
Is Psycho the better movie? Sure.
Would I sometimes rather spend 87 minutes watching William Castle’s lunatic evil twin version of it? Absolutely.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE
Homicidal wears its Psycho influence proudly, but William Castle’s fingerprints are all over it. The murder is nastier, the plotting is stranger, the final reveal is a doozy and the whole thing comes wrapped in the kind of shameless showmanship that made Castle Castle.
Don’t watch it because it’s an important piece of horror history. Watch it because it’s fun as hell.
And if William Castle gives you a Fright Break? Don’t you dare walk out.
