Warren Chapin is a pathologist who performs the state-required autopsies on the bodies of criminals who are sentenced to death in the electric chair. He's also been studying the power of fear within people and, while performing an autopsy on a man who was sentenced to death for murder, he finds that hos vertebrae are basically shattered, though it wasn't caused by the electricity. It's a phenomena he's seen before in people who experienced extreme fear before their deaths and believes that it's the end result of a force that, unless relieved somehow, becomes powerful enough to kill. Thinking it may be tied in with the well-known tingling of the spine, he dubs it "the Tingler." While performing the autopsy, Chapin becomes acquainted with the deceased's brother-in-law, Ollie Higgins, and afterward, he visits him at his home, which is above a theater run by him and his wife that specializes in showing old, silent movies. Ollie's wife, Martha, is a deaf-mute who, it turns out, has a severe aversion to the sight of blood. When Chapin accidentally cuts himself on a broken saucer, Martha is so horrified by it that her body becomes rigid and she appears to faint. Chapin theorizes that her inability to scream caused the tension to build and that her blackout was a type of psychosomatic escape her body brought on. This leads him to believe that the Tingler is not just a force but something tangible and solid that actually exists within the human body. His theory is proven when, during an argument with his unfaithful wife, Isabel, about her refusing to allow her sister, Lucy, who's also her legal ward, to marry Chapin's assistant, David Morris, he shoots her with a blank gun. When she faints from utter fear, Chapin uses the x-ray machine in his lab to take three images of her spine, before he wakes her up. The next day, he shows the results to Morris: the pictures show a solid mass, denser than bone, attached to Isabel's spine. Chapin is sure that this is the Tingler and that it could possibly be a living being, separate from its human carrier. Now, Chapin is intent upon getting a specimen for study, but when he does, he may find that he's unleashed a deadly creature he should have left alone.
In some ways, The Tingler brought William Castle full-circle in his career, as it was his return to Columbia Pictures, the studio where he'd started out in the business, before leaving to pursue his own career and make his films independently. This had led to his first couple of gimmicky horror films, Macabre and House on Haunted Hill, and when Columbia saw how successful these films, particularly the latter, had been, they jumped at the chance to produce Castle's next film. While his previous two gimmicks had been interesting, Castle seemed to be trying to outdo himself with "Percepto," as it could arguably have been his most elaborate gimmick and, along with "Illusion-O" in 13 Ghosts, his next film, the one that most involved the audience. This was also when Castle began to assert himself as a real showman with a personal connection to his audience, as it's the first of his films where he actually appears to lay out exactly what their involvement in it would be. Critics may not have been too keen on it in general but its success ensured that Castle would have a home at Columbia for the better part of the following decade. There, he would produce more of his most well-known films, like the aforementioned 13 Ghosts, Homicidal, Mr. Sardonicus, and Straight-Jacket.
Chapin is not as menacing a character as Frederik Loren, Price's character in House on Haunted Hill, and actually comes off as a nice guy, for the most part, but as you can see, his scientific curiosity leads him to do so some dubious things in the name of his research and, very possibly, not just to himself. That's not his only flaw, though. He has a very antagonistic and openly loathsome relationship with his estranged wife, Isabel, whose infidelity is actually a result of him never being around for her to do his work. But, that said, Isabel is far from a sympathetic person, given how she refuses to let her sister, Lucy, have the inheritance that is rightfully hers so she can be financially set after marrying David Morris. Chapin despises her for that bit of selfishness and, early in the film, pulls a gun on her, telling her that she if doesn't let Lucy live her own life, he'll kill her and make it look as if she committed suicide. The gun turns out to be loaded with blanks and his firing it at Isabel when she refuses to give Lucy any money causes her to pass out, giving him the opportunity to take x-rays of her spine in order to get some images of the Tingler in action. Now, this does show some moral restraint on Chapin's part, more so when you remember that he did have an alley-cat to fall back on for his experiments if Isabel had given in. But, given the ambiguity of whether or not he gives Martha the LSD and his occasional chiding of Morris for his lack of an "all for science" mindset, adding at one point that they would eventually find "someone else who's willing to die for science," it's possible that he might do what he must for his research. It's only when he extracts the Tingler from Martha and realizes firsthand how strong and dangerous it is that he realizes he's gone too far, saying, "To break the laws of nature is always a dangerous thing and we've not only broken laws, we've violated some basic principles. We had to, but now we're gonna stop." This leads to him discovering that Ollie had a hand in Martha's death but, before he can return the Tingler to her spine, it gets loose in the theater Ollie and Martha operated and the two of them rush to find it before it can kill anyone else. They eventually do and, after returning it to Martha's body, Chapin tells Ollie that he's going to turn him over to the police, saying that it's murder if you kill someone in any way. It's quite possible that someone is being a bit of hypocrite, you know? And what's more, Chapin simply leaves Ollie's apartment at the movie in order to fetch the police, probably getting away with some crimes of his own.
The young, engaged couple of Lucy Stevens (Pamela Lincoln) and David Morris (Darryl Hickman) are the characters who are the least nuanced and have very little screentime but, regardless, as still memorable in their own ways. The two of them are quite happy with each other, save for Lucy sometimes getting annoyed with how Morris' working with Chapin causes him to be late for their dates and she admits that she sometimes wish he had a regular job. That said, she says that she really has no intention of making Morris change his line of work, saying she loves him just the way he is, and she's obviously quite fond of Chapin himself. Isabel is the only sore spot in her life, as she hates her unfaithfulness to Chapin and the way she uses the fact that she's her legal guardian as a way to keep her from marrying Morris, refusing to give her the share of the inheritance that's rightfully hers. Morris is similarly depicted as a happy-go-lucky guy, one who loves Lucy and has a good mind for pathology, although he's more cautious in his approach to science than Chapin is. He not only fetches an alley-cat for them to use in their experiments but also brings Chapin some LSD for it as well, warning him to avoid doing any foolish with it. Morris is just as fascinated by the Tingler as Chapin but he's not so sure if there's any viable way for them to get one, considering they'd have to remove it from the body of someone who died of fright. Knowing Chapin the way he does, he figures that he's going to do something ill-advised with the LSD after he mentions he's unable to scare himself in order to experience the Tingler personally. Instead of going on a date with Lucy like he insisted they do, the two of them stay behind and watch him through the window of the laboratory door. Morris tells Lucy that the acid has to wear off naturally but, as Chapin's trip gets worse and worse, they try to find another key in order to get to him. After this, when Chapin recovers and mentions that he doesn't think anyone would be able to resist screaming in that situation before suddenly leaving, Morris remembers what he'd told him about Martha and the effect intense fear had on her. However, neither of them are seen again until after Chapin has removed the Tingler from Martha's body. When Isabel tries to use it to kill him, Lucy walks in just in time and her screams force the Tingler to stop its attack. The next day, Morris surprised when Chapin tells him he's not going to reveal the Tingler to the medical world in any way but doesn't try to stop him and does what he says, calling Ollie to find which funeral home he took Martha's body to. Lucy then tells Chapin that Isabel has left, while Morris learns that there's no report of Martha's death at all. That's when Chapin leaves to confront Ollie, and Lucy and Morris are never seen again.
William Castle may not have been the greatest cinematic storyteller ever but when it came to the technical side of things, he was more than competent. Despite being made on small budgets, his films tend to look quite good and The Tingler is no exception. The black-and-white cinematography looks quite lovely and the sets, as simple as they are, save for the interiors of the large, lavish house where Dr. Chapin lives and Chapin's laboratory therein, are made to work well (given that it's a Columbia production, I'm sure these sets were already standing from past movies). Furthermore, his showman sensibilities are very present here in his filmmaking, from the opening where he himself walks out in front of a movie screen to warn the audience that some of them will have the same physical reactions as the actors in the movie (Alfred Hitchcock may have had a cameo in many of his movies and appeared in their trailers in the way Castle often did but he only ever opened one of his films in this manner) to the screaming faces that come floating in afterward, dissolving into the terrified face of Ollie's brother-in-law as he's led to his execution. His most innovative piece of direction is the way in which he got bright-red blood to appear in a movie that itself is still black-and-white. You'd think it was a complex optical process but it was actually very simple: that scene was shot on color film but in a room that was painted to look like it was black-and-white and with Judith Evelyn wearing wardrobe and makeup that further replicated the illusion. (That's probably why the quality of the monochrome doesn't look as stark there. Either that or the copy of the film available on home video has that scene taken from an old, degraded print, possibly the only way it survived. The real answer to this question is up in the air.) Quite ingenious. I really like the way he gradually introduces the Tingler: first giving us a general idea about it, then showing us some x-rays of it in action, and, when he removes it from Martha's spine, showing it in silhouette before finally revealing it. And at the end of the movie, when Martha suddenly rises up and stares at Ollie, the camera does a sudden zoom-in on her lifeless, staring eyes that's actually quite startling, as is a big close shot on Ollie's face as he lets out a silent scream.
Surprisingly, the film has more substance to it than being a gimmicky fright film with a hokey plot. One is that notion of the theater that Ollie and Martha run, which specializes in the niche market of old silent movies. There were a number of small, discount theaters that showed older movies like this around the country at the time and it wasn't a ritzy, high-paying job by any means. Ollie tells Chapin about how much work it is for just the two of them to run the theater, particularly the cleaning part of it: "Mopping, sweeping, vacuuming the seats and the rugs. Once a week, we go over everything. We even do the ceiling! We even do behind the screens and under the seats. Eh, I tell you, it takes a lot of work." That was not an exaggeration of what real-life owners of these cheap theaters often went through. It also embodies nostalgia for a time long past, as older generations often have, with Ollie saying, "Some of these old silents are just as good as the movies they make nowadays, even with the sound and the color and the screens a block wide," and Chapin adding that he'd like to see some of the old Charlie Chaplin films. The apartment that Ollie and Martha live in is quite old-fashioned and Ollie alludes to it being by her design and, in fact, as Tim Lucas describes, Martha, being mute, can be seen as an out-of-place silent film character.
There's also the notion of the movie dealing with broken marriages, particularly that of Chapin and Isabel. Both of them are to blame, with Chapin even admitting that her infidelity is a result of his constant working, as well as that he's not into cocktail parties at all, and with Isabel not being shy of flaunting it. When Chapin sees her kissing her lover after staying out with him until 1:00 in the morning, she doesn't deny it when he confronts her and he goes as far as to accuse her of simply playing the field, adding that the man she was with is doing the same. In a later scene, Chapin arrives home to find two nearly glasses of booze on the table, telling Isabel, "Did you hear what the little husband said to the big wife?... He said, 'Why does the back door slam every time I come in the front door?'" Isabel accuses him of being jealous but Chapin then finds a golden tiepin on the floor, which he knows isn't his. And then, their marriage almost ends in murder, just as it does when Ollie frightens Martha to death, claiming that he needed to get out and that she would have done the same to him. When Ollie tells Chapin about what kind of life he had with Martha, he tells him that he does know how he feels.
Nowadays, it may be shocking to see LSD featured in a movie from the 50's but, back then, it was still legal and being used in research, so its appearance here wouldn't have been that radical at the time. That said, though, The Tingler is likely the first movie to ever feature the drug and depict a bad "trip." Despite David Morris warning him not to fool around with it while he's alone, as it can produce some bizarre effects, Chapin does just that in his efforts to experience the effects of the Tingler personally. He locks himself in his laboratory, securing both the front and back door, as well as the windows, and then gives himself an injection of the acid, doubling the average dosage when he does so. Documenting its effects as he does so, he sits down in the chair and notes blurring of vision, then a rocking and tilting sensation, and finally a feeling of uneasiness. That's when things really go downhill, as he stands up, starts glancing around the room in a panic, and says that the room is calling in on him. He paces back and forth in the lab, yelling, "The walls!", and fumbles with his necktie and collar, saying he can't breathe. He runs to a window and opens it (despite his having turned the bolt before taking the acid) but in his mind, it not only doesn't open but is barred. Panicking, he backs into a fake skeleton he has in there and the sight of it terrifies him even more, as he backs into the window. Morris and Lucy, who've been watching from outside the lab door the whole time, try to find a way to get to him, while Chapin tries to keep from screaming for the sake of his experiment. But, despite his efforts, biting the back of his wrist, he can't hold it in and lets out a very over-the-top, pained wail before collapsing on top of his examination table.
An even trippier and more terrifying scene happens later on with Martha Higgins, after Chapin pays a visit to her following his ill-fated experiment. She wakes up from a restless sleep to a bunch of bizarre happenings: the lamp by her bed turns off by itself, the window shuts on its own, an empty rocking chair starts moving by itself, and a door shuts itself. Martha looks at Ollie's bed across from hers and sees that it looks like somebody is underneath the covers. Thinking it's Ollie, she pulls the cover back, only for a hideous ghoul wearing a black robe to rise up and menace her with a knife. She runs out the door, into the kitchen, and walks into the living room, only for another lamp to go off by itself. A floor lamp across from her does the same and she tries to open up a pair of double-doors next to it but is unable to get it to move. She leans up against it, when one part of it opens up and a hairy, clawed hand wielding a hatchet appears before her. She runs for the window, only for the hand to throw the hatchet and bury it in the table next to her. More frightened than ever, Martha runs and sees the bathroom door open by itself. She goes in and sees blood running out of the sink. The door closes, trapping her in there, and she finds herself unable to open it. Stumbling away from it, she sees that the bathtub is now filled with blood, and if that weren't enough, a hand slowly emerges from the liquid. Martha's back begins to arch, and when she sees the medicine cabinet open, revealing her own death certificate on the inside of the door, that's all she can stand. She attempts to scream but can't and then collapses to the floor, dead.
A lot of this is later revealed to have been the handiwork of Ollie in his plot to scare Martha to death, as you see him with the mask of the ghoul's face, the knife he used, and he then goes into the bathroom and removes from it the hand that was in the blood and an oxygen tank, which he used to breathe under there. But, in spite of this, I can't help but feel that some of the stuff scene in that sequence was the result of another bad LSD trip, courtesy of Chapin. For one, his interest in Martha's reaction to fear due to her inability to scream and his passing thought about her following his own failed experiment with the acid (a thought which Morris spells out to Lucy), which is right before he suddenly goes to "check on her," all but telegraphs it. For another, it doesn't seem physically possible that Ollie could have pulled off some of the stuff she was seeing, like the lights turning off and objects moving by themselves, not to mention blood running out of the faucet and filling up the tub. It's much more likely that this was only in her mind because of the LSD and that Ollie just happened to attempt his plan when she was suffering from these effects. Of course, we're talking about a William Castle movie, where nothing is all that logical (look at some of the outlandish stuff in House on Haunted Hill that we're meant to believe was a result of Annabelle and Dr. Trent's plan to kill Frederik Loren, as well as the stuff that was never explained at all), and one that has an inexplicable, almost supernatural, ending, so what do I know?
Remember, the first time I read up on this movie, I came away with no idea about what the Tingler itself was, exactly; all I knew was that it was some kind of monster that you could only save yourself from by screaming. Again, it wasn't until I saw the movie featured on the first CineMassacre Monster Madness that I learned what it was and, when I saw it, I didn't have a clue what to make of it. I was expecting some kind of creature but not a bizarre mixture of a centipede, an earwig, and a lobster. On the one hand, its look is a bit unsettling, especially if you're afraid of any kind of creepy-crawlies (writer Robb White said he did base it on how unnerved he was after an encounter with a centipede), as is the heartbeat-like sound it emits, and, as absurd as it is, the idea of it being something that comes from the human body, a physical manifestation of human fear, could make your skin crawl. But, what kills it is how utterly flimsy the actual prop is. It may be able to pulsate a little bit, as if it's breathing, but when it "moves," you can tell it's a lifeless, rubber thing, with stiff, immovable legs, that's being pulled along by and raised up on a wire, which you can make out in some shots. As much as they try to make it out as this deadly creature with a grip akin to the crushing force of an electronic press, it's only through the actors' performances, especially through that of Vincent Price, that the Tingler's "attacks" have any kind of effect. Their struggles with the prop are far more effective than anything involving the octopus back in Bride of the Monster but they could be a lot more horrifying.
Again, the notion that the Tingler is something inside every human being, a living thing that randomly materializes and attaches to the spine whenever we're afraid, can become strong and large enough to break our vertebrae, and can only be stopped if the person releases the tension of fear is a bit creepy but also has to be one of the most outlandish and ridiculous ideas for a plot that's ever been thought up. Ignoring the scientific logic, or lack thereof, surrounding it, you also have to take into account the fact that the rules with this thing are very inconsistent. They establish from the beginning that the Tingler can only be stopped from becoming deadly to the human host by the host's screaming but, when Chapin frightens Isabel when he shoots her with a blank and then takes x-rays of her spine, she never screams, save for when she yells that she's going to call the police before the shot. Why didn't the Tingler kill her? If she didn't scream, why did it slowly dissipate, as the x-rays later show? By that logic, it should have done the same when Martha keeled over in the bathroom. Furthermore, why didn't she go into psychosomatic shock in the bathroom like she did before? And if she is literally unable to scream, which, again, is said to be the only thing that can stop the Tingler, why didn't it kill her when she freaked out upon seeing Chapin's cut? Granted, the screaming part of the equation is something that Chapin and Morris admit early is only a suggestion but, when the Tingler is removed from Martha's body and begins attacking people, it becomes clear that screaming does temporarily neutralize it, so these questions still stand. Morris suggests that any sort of fearful sound a person makes could have an effect on it and Isabel does gasp a little bit before Chapin shoots her but, again, he's still able to get an x-ray of the Tingler in an advanced stage after she faints. After it's removed, Chapin finds that nothing can destroy it and he theorizes it's because he's removed it from its "natural place," i.e. the human body; so, why does screaming still affect it? Also, why isn't it completely immobilized by the screaming of the young woman in the theater when it crawls up her leg, allowing Chapin and Ollie to catch it before it does any more harm? Finally, what makes Chapin think putting the Tingler back into Martha's corpse will make it dissipate, seeing as how its host was long dead when he removed it to begin with? I'm not saying that, just because the "science" of the Tingler doesn't follow a logical mandate, that automatically means the movie sucks. I know this stuff was the farthest thing from William Castle's mind when he made this film. I'm just having fun in discussing the campy nature of this enjoyable flick.
The film's most famous scene, the one where the gimmick comes into play, happens near the end, when Chapin, suspecting Ollie's part in what happened to Martha, heads over to the apartment with the Tingler, which he's keeping in a container. As they're talking in the room where he's keeping Martha's body, the Tingler manages to break out of its container, which Chapin discovers when he walks back into the living room to get it. He then spies a loose board in the flooring and, when Ollie tells him that the theater is right below them, they realize that the Tingler has made its way down there. Ollie decides to warn the audience but Chapin stops him, saying that he'd cause a panic and that they have to find it quietly and carefully. Down in the auditorium, while the audience watches a silent movie, the Tingler is shown finding its way to the seats and to the floor. It scuttles around, approaching a young woman who put a seat between her and her date when he got a little too clingy, while Chapin and Ollie search for it. It reaches the woman and starts crawling up her leg, prompting her to scream. Hearing this, Chapin turns off the lights, the screen goes black, and his voice comes over the speakers, telling the audience there's no cause for alarm, that a young woman has merely fainted, is being attended to, and the movie will start up again presently (during a showings of the movie, there was a woman in the audience who would pretend to faint at this point and Price was referring to her as well as the woman in the film). The lights come back up, the movie resumes, and he and Ollie begin searching again, entering the auditorium. Unbeknownst to them, the Tingler has made its way into the projection booth. It crawls towards the front of the projector, causing the film to break, and its silhouette is seen crawling along the blank, white screen. The film goes dark again and that's when we get the famous audio of Vincent Price's voice saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic! But scream! Scream for your lives! The Tingler is loose in this theater, and if you don't scream, it may kill you! Scream! Scream! Keep screaming! Scream for your lives!" You then hear people doing just that, with a woman yelling that it's on her, while a man says that it's over by him, and another one says it's under the seat. It's during this pandemonium when some of the seats in the actual auditorium would have started buzzing in order to enhance the effect. Price's voice then comes back on, saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, the Tingler has been paralyzed by your screaming. There is no more danger. We will now resume the showing of the movie."
This wasn't the first instance of a monster getting loose in a theater, as The Blob, with its iconic theater scene, was released the previous year, but this had to have been the first time where such a scene was constructed in order to involve the real-life audience watching the movie. When you had the real voice of Vincent Price telling you that the Tingler is in the theater with you, accompanied by the sounds of people screaming, it no doubt added some weight to when the buzzers started going off. Though, you have to wonder what exactly is going on in the context of the movie itself. When Price's voice is heard during those blackouts, is it also meant to be Chapin saying this to the audience watching the silent movie? That appears to be the case the first time, as you see him reach for the main control box before the screen goes black, but the second time seems to have been made purely for the real-life audience, as it flies in the face of Chapin's wish not to start a panic. Plus, when the movie begins again, the audience looks awfully calm and the story is back to where it left off, with Chapin and Ollie seeing that the Tingler is in the projection booth and rush to stop it. And going back to the first blackout, that crisis got resolved quite easily, considering that when the woman was screaming, everybody was looking at her and over the seats from behind, wondering what was going on. Despite what Chapin said, some of them had to have seen the Tingler themselves. There was an alternate version of this sequence made for when the film was played at drive-ins: it was basically the same, exact people could now be heard screaming that the Tingler was in the backseat of their cars, and the warning voice was that of William Castle rather than Price. I have to say that, as iconic as Price's reading of those lines are, using Castle during the second blackout probably made the transition from what's happening in the film to the real-life audience smoother.
Once the movie restarts, Chapin and Ollie run to the projection booth, where the Tingler has latched onto the projectionist's throat. Struggling to rip it loose, the man screams and it lets go, just before Chapin and Ollie burst in. They use a film can to contain the Tingler as they take it back up to Ollie's apartment, where Chapin returns it to Martha's body. He then tries to force Ollie to come with him to the police station but Ollie isn't having it and pulls a gun on him. Seeing that there's no reasoning with him, Chapin heads out to the police, leaving Ollie alone with his wife's body. And then, things inexplicably turn supernatural, as the door closes and locks itself, trapping Ollie in, and the window does the same. Martha's body rises up underneath the sheet covering her on the bed and when it slips off of her, she turns and looks at Ollie, with freakish, dead eyes, him being so frightened that he finds himself unable to scream, suggesting that he may become a victim of his own Tingler. This ending shows why, despite the picking apart I've done here, you shouldn't think too hard when watching a Castle film, as he was a showman more interested in making a fun ride for an audience rather than crafting a story that had any sort of logic. (It was hinted at earlier, before the autopsy scene, that Martha's body rose up after death there because of the Tingler, so you could say that the same happens here because it's now in her body again, but that doesn't explain the door and window closing by themselves.) Just like those instances in the theater scene, this ending has no purpose besides giving you one last jolt before the movie's over, as does a closing line of narration from Price: "Ladies and gentlemen, just a word of warning. If any of you are not convinced that you have a Tingler of your own, the next time you are frightened in the dark ... don't scream."
Like screenwriter Robb White, composer Von Dexter was a frequent collaborator of Castle's during this period, having already worked with him on House on Haunted Hill and he would go on to score 13 Ghosts and Mr. Sardonicus, before a hand condition forced him into early retirement. His score for The Tingler is very similar in flavor for what he did for House on Haunted Hill, in that it's simple and very overt when it's trying to be creepy or scary, but it works for this kind of campy film. The music for the opening is kind of creepy, with a tinkling melody leading into a piece that manages to be both somber and morbid. The theme Dexter comes up with for the Tingler itself is that of a constant, high-pitched tone accompanied by building music that crescendos when it attacks (the same sort of thing is heard during the ending), and the scene where he first removes it from Martha's body is scored very memorably: light, tinkling keys, like those heard in the opening, accompanied by harsh, unnerving sounds, leading into low piano keys that build in harshness, and with a horn blasting a very nasty piece when you see the silhouette of him pulling it out of her. And the character of Isabel has a traditional sexy-sounding horn piece that alludes to her infidelity, partying ways. In short, the score for the film is nothing earth-shattering but it gets the job done and, as you've seen and will continue to see, is more memorable than those of some of the other movies we'll be looking at this month.
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