The Tingler is a film that was primarily used as a gimmick to fight the emergence of television popularity in the 50's. Released in 1959, it was produced and directed by the infamous William Castle. It was one of the last films Castle would make with Vincent Price; it also stars Judith Evelyn, Daryl Hickman and Patricia Cutts. It is the story about a pathologist Dr. Warren Chapin (Price) who discovers that when a person is genuinely scared, a parasite named the 'Tingler' will begin to grow on the person's spine and eventually strangle them from the inside.Dr.Warren's partner, whose wife is a mute and thus cannot scream, uses this discovery to frighten his wife to death. In an autopsy, Dr. Chapin removes the Tingler from the wife's spine causing the creature to escape. The rest of the film is about their pursuit of the tingler. William Castle has been no stranger to gimmicktry in his films;he's been using techniques to scare theatre going audiences since the early 50's. The Tingler is no different. William Castle used parts from World War 2 airplanes to devise a gimmick called "Percepto". These little devices cost Castle $250,000 to manufacture-almost the entire budget of The Tingler! Percepto would wait until specific scenes in the movie and then shock the unsuspecting seat occupant into a frenzy. Only a few seats were equipped with percepto however. In conjunction with percepto, Castle also hired audience members to faint and then be taken out by nurses. These were just two techniques devised to get a maximum scare from the audience. They were only used in larger theatres however. The last technique in The Tingler worth mentioning would be the infamous colour scene. The entire movie was shown to audiences in black and white except for one scene. In this particular scene everything is still black and white except for a bathtub full of blood with an arm reaching out to kill a woman! Their aren't very many redeeming features for a movie such as this. It's my least favourite Vincent Price film which I've seen. His acting is very average in the picture and many of the supporting actors don't contribute much at all. Again, I's hard to discuss anything else about The Tingler since everything is so average! The camera-work,lighting and set design; everything is just so monochrome and plain. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you try and keep an open mind and remember that this is 1959, you'll enjoy the movie a lot better. Just an odd bit of trivia: this could very well be the first film to contain the drug LSD. Apparently screenwriter Robb White had tried the drug at a university and decided to toss it into the script. Overall, The Tingler isn't horrible. It is definitely one of the flat out weirdest films I've ever seen which earns it some points. It's not a movie that you can watch a million times over; but if your looking for a summer afternoon kind of movie, The Tingler could be it.
Review of The Tingler
