Horror icon Vincent Price stars in director William Castle's The Tingler, a very Lovecraftian tale of weird science and creatures that feed on fear inside the human body.
The movie opens with Castle addressing the audience, warning them that some will feel similar effects to those experienced by the characters on the screen and the only way to shake this off is to scream!
What he doesn't mention is that when this delightful B-movie was first being shown in the 1950s some seats in the auditoriums were wired up with electrical buzzers to give anyone sitting in them "the tingles" at key moments in the film.
Price plays pathologist Dr Warren Chapin, whose experiments into the nature of fear reveal a parasite growing inside every human being - a tingler - that feeds off a person's fear until it grows strong enough to kill them (i.e. dying of fright).
Because he devotes all his time to his research, his wife, Isabel Stevens Chapin (Patricia Cutts), a rich heiress that he suspects of poisoning her father, is blantantly cheating on him, but the doctor draws her into a cruel experiment which helps him prove the existence of the tingler.
Through his work, he has befriended Oliver Higgins (Philip Coolidge), who operates a silent movie theatre with his deaf and mute wife, Martha (a stellar performance from Judith Evelyn).
The tingler's only weakness is the sound of a human scream, but Dr Chapin realises that because Martha cannot scream she would make a great test subject for his experiments.
After conducting a failed test on himself, with a shot of LSD (the drug's first depiction in a major motion picture) to induce fearful hallucinations, Chapin then turns his attention to Martha - little realising that the creepy vibes her husband is always giving off isn't just because he's a lush.
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| Dr Chapin trippin' on LSD |
For an 82-minute weird science and monster movie from master showman William Castle - penned by his frequent collaborator Robb White - the story of The Tingler is surprisingly layered, and elements that could easily be dismissed as "that's just because it's a B-movie" are actually justified and explained in the script.
Other exquisite Castle touches include an unexpected splash of colour in this otherwise black and white movie and some delightfully meta sequences during the movie's climax in the auditorium of Oliver and Martha's movie theatre.
The cinema is screening an old silent movie, but every so often Dr Chapin has to stop the film - turning the screen we are watching black - and announcing in voice-over that there is a tingler on the loose. I can only imagine what a hit this trick was watching it all unfold in an actual cinema in the 1950s.
As to the tingler itself, it's a two-foot long, bulky, rubbery centipede creature with a pair of enormous pincers at its head, very similar to an enlarged version of the parasites that tried to take over Star Fleet in the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Conspiracy (and were never mentioned ever again!)
Yes, The Tingler is cheesy by modern standards and the monster effects quite basic, yet it still sits comfortably in the ranks of movies that feel like they were based upon the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft (like In The Mouth of Madness and The Thing) but have, in fact, tapped into their own, very similar, vein of horror.
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| The tingler in all its rubbery glory |
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