Kitchen nightmares ... William Castle's 13 Ghosts

Fifty years ago this month, journeyman director William Castle took out an insurance policy in case anyone died of fright during his first independent production, Macabre. Over the next seven years, Castle became the king of the gimmicks, as he promoted his pictures with hokey processes like Emergo, Percepto and Illusion-O, which appalled the critics yet earned him the undying gratitude of such teenage horror fans as Joe Dante, John Landis, Robert Zemeckis and John Waters.

In many ways, the plastic skeletons that whizzed on wires across the auditorium during House on Haunted Hill (1958), the seat buzzers that shocked viewers of The Tingler (1959) and the spectres in 13 Ghosts (1960) that were only visible through tinted lenses were an extension of technical advances like CinemaScope, 3-D and stereophonic sound that Hollywood had introduced in the early 1950s to lure people away from their monochrome TV sets.

But Castle's periodic departures from the linear structure that had epitomised American film-making since the 1920s landed him, more by default than design, in the same camp as such nouvelle vague auteurs as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose jump cuts, in-jokes and self-reflexive references similarly emphasised the filmicness of the images on the screen.

Fittingly, Castle's inspiration to break out of the B-hive in which he had laboured for 15 years was a French film, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955). But he seems to have been unaware of Truffaut's Cahiers du Cinema tirades against impersonal and uncinematic films when he began producing generic pictures that bore the unmistakable stamp of their maker.

Reflecting his own difficult childhood, Castle's features frequently concerned characters who had lost a parent, while other recurring tropes included disability, locked rooms, inheritances and decapitation. But what made his often gruesome, but rarely frightening films so distinctive were the stunts that once prompted him to proclaim: "There is no God but gimmick. And Castle is his prophet."

However, Castle was more than a mere showman. He actively sought to deconstruct the essential elements of screen storytelling. In Homicidal (1961), he paused the action for a two-minute Fright Break, during which those of a nervous disposition could claim a refund by standing in Coward's Corner, while Mr Sardonicus (1961) halted altogether while theatre staff took a Punishment Poll to decide the culprit's fate. Castle also delighted in blurring the line between the mise-en-scène and extra-frame space, most notably in The Tingler having Vincent Price's voice boom out through a movie-house screen to warn patrons that the only way they could resist the slithering entity that could potentially break their spines was by screaming with all their might. And Castle even anticipated Godard's trademark sloganeering by flashing up captions during 13 Ghosts to alert the audience to don their Ghost Viewers.

If Castle was an accidental auteur, he certainly recognised that Hollywood's new juvenile demographic demanded something more than a well-told story enlivened by a few jolts, twists and gouts of gore. He realised that kids wanted pictures to be more visceral and even if they spent Strait-Jacket (1964) hitting each other with the complimentary cardboard axes they would return to be strapped into the back-row seats of the Shock Section for I Saw What You Did (1965), as no one else could guarantee them such unique movie-going experiences.

Castle was, therefore, the godfather of interactive cinema. Boffins insist that digital headsets and option pads will eventually allow audiences to participate in exclusive versions of the same film. So, if you're ever trapped in a virtual reality old dark house, you know who to thank or blame.

• William Castle's The Crime Doctor's Warning (1948) and The Tingler (1959) and Jeremy Schwartz's documentary, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story (2007) are showing at BFI Southbank on 24-25 July