A history of hypnotic movies just appeared on the fun We Are the Mutants site.
Here's one description:
The Hypnotic Eye boasted a “new audience participation thrill” dubbed “HypnoMagic,” and enlisted real-life celebrity hypnotherapist Gil Boyne as technical consultant to lend an air of credibility to the hokum. In several scenes we see the murderous hypnotist Desmond (Jacques Bergerac) perform his act in its entirety, wherein he hypnotizes both on-stage volunteers and the entire seated audience, while his focus gradually orients towards the camera and directly at the viewer. When the electric eye gadget is introduced, its flashing concentric rings fill the frame in several shots, suggesting its influence is working directly through the screen and on the viewer, as well as the on-screen audience.
And a trailer boasting of its movie's hypnotic effects, while reassuring you they're just for fun:
This is just delightful:
In 1962, K. Gordon Murray, an American producer who built a career on redubbing and repackaging foreign B movies for American matinee audiences, rereleased two 1958 Spanish horror films, The Vampire’s Coffin and The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy, as a double-feature entry in his “Young America Horror Club” series. The films were presented with a new innovation added by Murray called “Hypnoscope,” a gimmick in which costumed crew entered the theater at some point during the film to menace the audience, their presence explained as “a trance of hallucinations” caused by mass hypnosis. In a four-minute filmed introduction preceding the show, a disembodied voice speaking over an endlessly looping hypnotic spiral explains that “you may feel yourself changing from the gentle person you are, to a monster, with dark green blood running through its veins… or you may become a vampire, with a deep urge within you for a refreshing drink of blood. Of course, these changes will happen to only a few of you, while others will remain as themselves.”
Remember: worship Infocult.
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