of Macabre (1958), an $86,000 production distributed by Allied Artists, were invited to take out insurance policies to cover potential death from fright. With this film and his next collaboration with White, House on Haunted Hill (1958), another Allied release, Castle "combine[d] the saturation advertising campaign perfected by Columbia and Universal in their Sam Katzman and William Alland packages with centralized and standardized publicity stunts and gimmicks that had previously been the purview of the local exhibitor." Castle and White's 1959 creature feature The Tingler, distributed by Columbia, featured his most famous gimmick, Percepto: at the film's climax, buzzers attached to select theater seats would unexpectedly rattle a few audience members, prompting either appropriate screams or even more appropriate laughter. The growth of the drive-in theater market was one of the major spurs to the expansion of the independent low-budget film industry. As of January 1, 1945, there were 96 drive-ins in the United States; a decade later, the number had passed 3,700. Unpretentious pictures with simple, familiar plots and reliable shock effects—that is, B pictures in both production values and aesthetic spirit if not by the older, more precise industrial definition—were ideally suited for auto-based film viewing, with all its attendant distractions. The phenomenon of the drive-in movie became one of the defining symbols of American popular culture in the 1950s. Over the course of the decade, many local television stations began showing B genre films in late-night slots, popularizing the notion of the midnight movie. In the spring of 1954, Los Angeles TV station KABC expanded on the concept by having an appropriately offbeat host introduce the films: on Saturday nights, The Vampira Show, with Maila Nurmi as the titular MC, screened low-budget horror and suspense movies, including at least one that would become a cult classic—Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour, produced in 1945 for $117,000. Variations on the Vampira format were soon running at stations around the country. Increasingly, American-made genre films were being joined by overseas movies acquired cheaply and, in the case of foreign-language films, dubbed for the U.S. market. Between 1951 and 1955, small Lippert Pictures and low-budget British studio Hammer Film Productions had a distribution deal that brought such pictures as Stolen Face (1952) and Spaceways (1953) across the Atlantic to a few American screens. In 1957, Hammer initiated its trademark star pairing of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee with The Curse of Frankenstein,