The Tingler

It isn't Hallowe'en month unless we put in a mention of a William Castle production—and we'll actually have a couple of them this month. The producer of low-budget—high concept "stunt" movies (aided by little tricks he'd add at theater showings) were nobody's conception of "art", but there was something altogether entertaining about the lengths (and depths) he'd go to put patrons into seats—and attempt to scare them OUT of them.

Today's movie may be a high-water mark for the tricks he'd play on the audience...and the movie he built around it may be the campiest, goofiest film he ever made. Of course, it has to be presented on "Take Out the Trash" Day.

The Tingler (William Castle, 1959)

 

I am William Castle, the director of the motion picture you are about to see. 

 

I feel obligated to warn you that some of the sensations—some of the physical reactions which the actors on the screen will feel—will also be experienced, for the first time in motion picture history, by certain members of this audience. 

 

I say 'certain members' because some people are more sensitive to these mysterious electronic impulses than others. These unfortunate, sensitive people will at times feel a strange, tingling sensation; other people will feel it less strongly.

But don't be alarmed—you can protect yourself. At any time you are conscious of a tingling sensation, you may obtain immediate relief by screaming. Don't be embarrassed about opening your mouth and letting rip with all you've got, because the person in the seat right next to you will probably be screaming too. 

 

And remember this—a scream at the right time may save your life.

What might have caused that mentioned "strange, tingling sensation" was not the titular "Tingler"—the microbial life-form that the movie makes pains to inform us lives in all of us, only to grow into a large pinching life-form that can crush your spine in moments of terror—so much as the WWII surplus airplane de-icing motors that Castle had strategically wired under certain seats in the major theaters where he was showing The Tingler. Basically, he spent $250,000 of the film's budget to plant industrial "joy-buzzers" under the keisters of his audience—a process (along the lines of past years' 3-D craze) that he dubbed "Percepto!"

Sure, it was cheesy, but Castle was a cheesy film-maker with the heart of an eccentric carny-barker. A cut-rate Hitchcock* who wasn't satisfied with keeping his thrills on the screen, he delighted in breaking the fourth wall separating film and audience and violating his paying customers' safe-space. Nothing may have delighted him more than seeing explosions of popcorn.

And The Tingler may have been his presentational masterpiece. The movie follows a prison pathologist, Warren Chapin (Vincent Price, delightfully straight), who, when performing autopsies on executed convicts, notices a spine-encrusting form on their X-rays that he reasons is a microbial life-form mutated by the fear of its hosts. He makes this disturbing assumption while performing an autopsy on a former prisoner in front of the guy's brother-in-law, "Ollie" Higgins (Philip Coolidge), who had just been hanging around after witnessing the guy's execution. Chapin speculates to this guy he just met that, evidently, screaming will negate the effects of what he dubs "The Tingler."

Chapin offers Higgins a ride from the prison to the revival-house movie theater run by him and his deaf-mute wife Martha (Judith Evelyn)—they only show silent pictures (naturally) and live in the flat above the auditorium. Martha is an over-excitable type and when Chapin cuts himself on an offered cup of coffee—the guy's an expert surgeon, after all—she has a reaction that causes her to faint dead-away. Chapin treats her for her nervous condition ("barbituates"), but she wakes up to nightmarish hallucinations: opening windows, zombie creatures coming alive, thrown axes, even red blood coming out of the tap...in a black-and-white movie!

Poor woman dies of fright. Ollie calls Chapin for help and rather than call the police, they take Martha to Chapin's home-autopsy room (he takes his work home evidently), where—in the cleanest medical procedure in the movies—he removes the fully-grown "tingler" from her spine—because she couldn't scream, the thing stayed full-size...and alive!

"It's IN the theater?"

There's an awful lot of unnecessary travel going on merely so that director Castle can make sure that the "tingler" ends up back in the movie theater, where it will escape and he can pull a meta-switcheroo, showing us the silent movie the audience is watching, so that the "tingler" can interrupt the movie-movie, plunge the real theater into darkness, and set up a panic in both fictional and real movie theaters. 

Castle did this with those "joy-buzzers" under the seats, and "planted" patrons who would scream on-cue in the dark, only to have them on stretchers (with EMT's) when the black-screen stopped and the movie once again began...in the movie and in real-life.

Sound confusing? Sure, but, Castle does it so fast, with the deliberate technical issues of a broken film and a purposely black-screen that audiences are "primed" for an unexpected jolt—which will be coming from a place they least expect it. And this was "back-in-the-day" where theaters weren't required to have aisle-lights for safety—you'd have a theater plunged into absolute blackness with only a glowing "EXIT" sign for comfort. Considering the number of "feints" and tricks that Castle had already pulled off in the film, the transposition of movie-audience with movie audience was just a third-act topper.

Castle fills the film with goofy conjecture, duplicitous wives, duplicitous husbands, even an early experiment with LSD—"the walls, the walls!" yells Chapin, tripping under the effects only to be weirded out by a skeleton in his lab. Then, during the freak-out sequence with Higgins' wife, Castle suddenly changes expectations with the black-and-white film itself, by incorporating color into the sequence—a combination of using color film into a scene where the bathroom scene is painted in shades of gray, even the actress was made up with gray make-up. By the time, the rubber "tingler" creature is brought into the film, you're not sure what to expect. Frankly, given the nature of what is ultimately presented on screen, the most effective way to show it is to turn the lights out and not show it at all.

All movies manipulate. We're shown only what the director wants us to see, cut in a way to jolt our expectations and sell the illusion. Castle, however, wasn't satisfied with that, given his limited budgets and his unlimited imagination. Mise en scène and montage weren't enough for him. Not when he could move the manipulation out into the audience and play more tricks with an audience's complacency. And he did it with a con-man's cunning and a prankster's glee. How do you get a horror-movie crowd into a theater? You tell them not even the theater is safe. That's something you can't get at home from television.

"The walls! The walls!"

* I'm reading Laurence Leamer's rather tawdry collection of mini-biographies, "Hitchcock's Blondes" right now and there's a pull-quote of a conversation Hitchcock has with writer Ernest Lehman after they'd worked together on North By Northwest that sounds a lot like Castle: 

"After a number of martinis sufficient to limber up his vocal chords and open up his emotions, he put his hand on Lehman's. 'Ernie, do you realize what we're doing in this picture?' he said in a whisper, announcing that what he was about to say was only for the screenwriter's ears. 'The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment, we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord, and they react that way. And someday, we won't even have to make a movie—there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we'll just press different buttons, and they'll go 'ooooh' and 'aaaah' and we'll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won't that be wonderful?'"

Leamer, Laurence. Hitchcock's Blondes. Penguin Random House, 2023