Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 25: The Tingler

Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 25: The Tingler

Filmmaker William Castle was notorious for selling his movies with fun gimmicks that you had to go to the theater to experience. For House on Haunted Hill there was a skeleton on a zip-line that would fly out at the audience, and for The Tingler there were select seats in the theater that would shock the audience member during certain points in the movie, a plant in the audience who would pretend to faint and a fake nurse who would take her away, and at the end Vincent Price literally demands the audience to scream. It's a lot of fun.

Castle's intro to the film is reminiscent to the opening of James Whale's Frankenstein, warning the audience about how scared they're going to be, which I love. Then there's a bunch of screaming floating heads, which I also love.

Vincent Price plays a doctor who has discovered some sort of thing that allows fear to kill people, a thing he calls "the tingler." He then goes home where we discover he has a shockingly bitter relationship with his wife, which sort of comes in and out of the plot. This happens with a few characters in the movie (including Price's), where they seem to bounce around with either being evil or normal, depending on what the plot needs. But it's The Tingler, so that's not really important.

There's a genuine scare in the movie that's still effective today, and it's part of a wild sequence that makes the whole movie worth watching. There's also a wonderful meta ending in a movie theater that would probably be even better with the gimmicks, but it's still delightful.

Sure it's clearly cheaply made, but it's quick, it gets the job done, it's got real scares, and at one point Vincent Price says: "This gun can put a hole in you the size of a medium grapefruit.", and if that's not worth the price of admission I don't know what is.