Castle's most polished film - and retroactively influential (Hitchcock)

Of all William Castle's little B-movie thrillers from this era, HOMICIDAL is the most professional in tone. It lacks most of that clunky, wrongly-scripted, poorly-edited flavor of most of his low-budget works from HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL to STRAIT-JACKET.

Well, that makes some sense. Because Castle was compelled to make HOMICIDAL after seeing Hitchcock's PSYCHO -- with HOMICIDAL winding up an obvious homage (as it's not discreet enough to be a 'rip-off').

But what most people don't know is that Hitchcock made PSYCHO, the most influential horror film of its time and probably ever, based on the downmarket works of William Castle. Hitch was aware that Castle's films were doing quite well at the box office but that they weren't really very good, so Hitch wondered how one of those films would turn out if made by somebody more talented (i.e., himself, Hitch).

The result was PSYCHO and then that inspired Castle to make HOMICIDAL, probably completely unaware what had inspired Hitch to make PSYCHO to begin with.

So, in HOMICIDAL, you had the imitator imitating the imitation from the man he'd imitated.

Which is almost as scary as the movies in question.

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LBJ's mistress on JFK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcXeutDmuRA