The Tingler.

Review #2436: The Tingler.

Cast: 

Vincent Price (Dr. Warren Chapin), Judith Evelyn (Mrs. Martha Ryerson Higgins), Darryl Hickman (Dave Morris), Patricia Cutts (Isabel Stevens Chapin), Pamela Lincoln (Lucy Stevens), Philip Coolidge (Oliver 'Ollie' Higgins)

Produced and Directed by William Castle (#369 - House on Haunted Hill (1959), #1071 - 13 Ghosts, #1418 - The Night Walker, #1703 - Undertow, #2261 - Macabre, #2300 - Homicidal, #2301 - Strait-Jacket)

Review: 

Well, if you are going to try and give audiences a bit of a scare, you might as well try to make it a whole show of gimmicks to grab attention, I suppose. William Castle's Macabre (1958) had the life insurance policy for anyone dying of fright while House on Haunted Hill (released in January 1959) had an "Emergo" gimmick where a pulley system was rigged so a plastic skeleton could be flown over the audience at a certain point in the film.* Anyway, with The Tingler, released in July of 1959, Castle came up with a couple of ideas: Percepto, in which the underside of select seats would have electrical buzzers attached to try and provide a tingling sensation for moments (as one does when having surplus airplane wing dicing motors from the World War II days). As noted in the opening, said by none other than Castle himself, only certain members would get the shock because "some people are more sensitive to these mysterious electronic impulses than others." And then of course there is the other idea, which involves planted members of the audience for a certain moment in the climax. As with Castle's two previous horror movies, it was written by Robb White, who did two further scripts for him. It was the second and last time that Vincent Price was the star of a William Castle movie. Obviously, the movie was enough of a hit for Castle to continue on with gimmicks: his next film in 13 Ghosts had a gimmick where you could see the ghosts in "Illusion-O" (a trick involving red and blue filters applied to the footage when dealing with the ghosts).

Really if you accept the premise as, well, with tingling curiosity, you already are half-way to having some enjoyment with the film. You've got a guy thinking he can find a creature that looks like a (big) centipede all in the name of science, at least if one doesn't scream about it first. I suppose the real thing about the tingler is that it could be represented as anything that makes us shudder and how we try to cope with apparent fears ahead of us. It has a small cast that naturally is highlighted by Price, who glides through the movie in making you go for the material in a movie that is actually kind of weird. You have a small ensemble, a few weird relationship dynamics being explored for a bit and the use of lysergic acid, or, well, LSD. Since Price looks committed to the material (as opposed to eyerolling it or just playing to scream scream scream), we find ourselves gravitating to the 82-minute runtime as well. The most interesting sequence could be the bathtub sequence (as acted by Evelyn in her final film role - she actually was brought in at the request of Price, who worked with her on Broadway), since it was shot in color that saw the set painted white/black/gray to go along with gray makeup so that way you could see the blood stick out from an otherwise monochrome background. What is particularly strange is that it comes not too long after Price's character tries out some LSD (in an attempt to spook himself without screaming), but one really wonders if he also gave it to someone else, because where else would a scene of red blood in otherwise monochrome stuff come into play? The movie just plays it as he just gave someone barbiturates for a prescription and then they just happen to see weird stuff but really if this had been made a few years later, it probably could've actually implied more that it was really LSD that did her in more than "oh, scared to death" for a trigger to die. Of course, the mystery of the film is where the tingler is going to end up, since it only can reside in folks that are alive. This is where the climax aims for the astounding: the movie actually stops in the guise of the tingler "being loose" and you have to wonder just how it felt with audience plants being around to pretend the thing was around them, although it should be mentioned that for most of the film, all it really does is get set to choke just one person, and the end goal for our hero is...to sew it back into a dead body. Yep, the thing is just going to go right back in, one can't just shoot it but it will slip right in a corpse fine. At any rate, it is an interesting experience to get wrapped in, if you allow it to do so. I don't think it is better than say, House on Haunted Hill, but you can see where Castle could take showmanship a bit further down the road. As a whole, The Tingler is moderately interesting when it truly kicks into gear for the fun that comes out in remembering just what it means to scream, which may or may not make for one heck of a climax if one finds themselves in the mood for what it is selling in the overall experience. If you like the Castle strategy of playing to the horror audience, you've got a winner here.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

*Evidently, Alfred Hitchcock certainly took notice of the low-budget success of Castle's films prior to making Psycho (1960).