DIRECTED BY- William Castle~ STARRING- Vincent Price, Judith Evelyn, Darryl Hickman, Patricia Cutts
Vincent Price plays a doctor in the "Tingler" He performs autopsies for a prison and the County. He is studying the effect of fear on people. Vincent meets a man named Ollie druing an autopsy at the prison. He drives Ollie home and meets his wife.
While there he slices his finger, only to find she is terrified at the sight of blood. Also she can not scream to release the tension she feels. He decides to experiment on himself using a new drug.
Ollie's wife has a run in with a experiment in fear as well. The problem she had with being unable to scream caused her untimely death by fear. Screaming appears to be the only way to combat the Tingler. When the victim screams, the Tingler falls off. Vincent decides to do an autopsy to determine the cause of death, he finds a strange ugly creature named the Tingler.
Vincent finds out just how strong the Tingler can be as it jumps at him and attacks his arm. Of course the Tingler gets lose and there is chaos and pandemonium. The Tingler is set loose in a dark movie theatre in one of the scenes.
The Tingler is an exellent 50's horror movie by the master William Castle. It is definately a must see because it is so funny.
Final Verdict- 9/10
The original title for the "Tingler" was "The Chiller". White came up with the idea during production of yet another Castle film "House on Haunted Hill" The idea came to him after seeing one of Jack Dusick's rubber worms he made for "House on Haunted Hill" As you may noticed the Tingler does resemble a large rubber worm with legs!
The scene when Vincent Price is injecting himself with Acid is rumoured to be the first time use of LSD on screen. White heard about the drug from a fellow colleague. He experienced the hallucinogen for himself at UCLA. This was before the drug was illegal. He decided to use this in the movie. He had also decided to have Vincent use a needle instead of a pill or other form. This made the movie much more shocking.
The $250,000 Precepto gimmick was used in the larger theaters one out of every ten seats has small war surplus motors. These seats were wired up to the projection room. The film had several cue marks at tense moments. When the projectionist saw these cues he would throw the switch to the the Precepto seats. The person sitting in the seats would get a small electric charge that was suppose to give them a tingle!
Another "Gimmick" that they used during the movie was that they would turn the lights on during the movie while one seen was on when the screen was blacked out. The audience would here Vincent Price saying not to worry and that someone had fainted. Then a real life victim (someone planted in the audience) would be carried out of the theater.
When filming the Tingler William Castle only had enough money to by a couple of cans of Color film. Cans are what they refer to as the tin storage cans that the raw film used to come in. They decided to put the limited amount of color film to good use. One scene is split between color, and black and white. Even a film overlay in one section of the B&W film stock for the background and the colour blood filled bathtub in the foreground (see above).
