The Tingler (1959)

Somewhat, okay, majorly obsessed pathologist Dr Warren Chapin (Vincent Price) and his assistant David Morris (Darryl Hickman) are, when they aren’t just doing autopsies, hot on the heels of Chapin’s weird pet theory about something that grows along a person’s spine when they are in the grip of pure terror. In fact, Chapin is convinced that whatever this force - let’s call it “The Tingler”, why don’t we – may be, it can actually crack one’s spine quite easily.

We will soon enough learn the Tingler is some earworm-like thing that lives inside of every human body and grows to rather unpleasant size when a person is in terrible fear. The only thing that can loosen its grip around your spine is screaming. So, PSA: please scream a lot.

Complicating Chapin’s research and the plot is the William Castle typical hate/hate relationship between the scientist and his wife Isabel (Patricia Cutts), including the expected murder attempts, for in Castle movies marriage is the kind of hell that turns even the mild-mannered into wise-cracking murderers. Not helping anything is Chapin’s willingness to test his theories by dosing himself with that new-fangled drug known as LSD. Our protagonist’s acquaintance with a silent movie retro cinema owner named Ollie (Philip Coolidge) and his mute wife Martha (Judith Evelyn), the latter of which rather tempts the good Doctor with her horrible aversion to blood and her inability…to scream, keep things even more lively.

The Tingler is certainly the goofiest of William Castle’s sort-of adult oriented features. This is after all the film that sees Vincent Price injecting himself with LSD and mugging himself adorably and admirably (as always) through a very bad trip, and that features an underarm-long big rubber earworm as its monster (of course to be wrestled by Price at one point). On the Castle gimmick front, it’s the movie where Castle apparently (or not) did some electrifying things to some cinema seats and that features a couple of scenes where the screen turns black and Price and a bunch of screamers encourage the audience to do the same, for the Tingler is right in the cinema with them.

Like most Castle films, inside of these parameters, this is actually a very well done low budget movie that zips along wonderfully from one scene to the next, and where every single scene contains at least one fun thing. As usual with the director The Tingler also looks rather great. Castle, at this point already an experienced hand who had learned his craft making studio films like the Whistler movies, is just very good at staging theoretically preposterous scenes of the macabre, using all the tricks German expressionism via noir had taught him while adding a sense of sardonic humour to the proceedings. So a scene like the murder of Martha which should be patently ridiculous is just great fun to watch, feeling, as does Ollie’s final fate, a bit like an EC comic come to life without the ultra violence. Castle is often a genuinely imaginative and clever director too, in the finale creatively intercutting the silent movie Tol’able David (I have no idea) with the Tingler business going on in the cinema.


Plus, one has to admire the pure chutzpa with which Castle integrates a movie theatre into the plot so to be better able to sell his gimmick. But then, I cannot believe anyone could watch this and not love Castle at least a little bit for it.