‘The Tingler’ frightens NYC into bouts of laughter
William Castle’s exquisitely campy The Tingler makes for a tremendously entertaining midnight movie experience. The folks at Film Forum in New York City are showing the Vincent Price horror flick as part of its Summer Festival of Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction. Simply watching the 1959 cult classic in a movie packed with a 2013 crowd is cause enough for celebration, but Film Forum’s Bruce Goldstein has added a few in-theater effects to heighten the humor and scares.
Price plays Dr. Warren Chapin, a mysterious doctor who examines dead bodies, always looking for evidence of how fear and death are connected. His hypothesis is a strange one: There’s something in every human body that tingles the spine when fear is induced. By screaming, we scare away this so-called tingler and live to see another day. When Chapin meets a woman who is deaf and cannot speak, he sees a gold mine for scientific research. With no functional vocal cords, the doctor wants to see what would happen if the tingler attacked her and she never had any screams to scare it away.
Castle, who directed the feature and introduces the film to the audience, must have known it was a movie that would bring both laughs and screams. The plot is absurd, and yet there are sequences throughout the horror feature that do tingle the spine. When the doctor’s subject is finally faced with a night of terror, I was surprised how many of the visuals were unexpected and somewhat creepy. Castle and Price, always buying into their cinematic product, made me believe the tingler was a possible reality.
There’s also no denying that the actual “tingler,” a centipede-like bug with terribly sharp pincers, elicits gross-out faces from the audience. Even though a not-too-well-placed string moves the tingler from left to right across the screen, the big bug achieves its intended effect.
It would be wrong to ruin the additional scares that Film Forum injects into the screening (The Tingler plays Sunday, Aug. 18 on a double bill with Castle’s Homicidal), but here are a few hints. The Tingler is known for its “Percepto” and “Pscyhedel-O-Rama” gimmicks, so be prepared to view a “trippy” film that might “buzz” you into fright.
Price, easily the greatest horror actor of his time, made a lot of films, many of them deemed sub-par by audience members and critics. Watching The Tingler doesn’t feel like a so-bad-it’s-good experience. Because Price creates a fully human character out of the doctor, and because he tries with all of his pencil-thin mustache to keep us energized, the movie comes off as an enjoyable horror flick — one to be appreciated rather than vilified. Watching The Tingler in an interactive experience is not exploitation of Castle’s original techniques; it’s a celebration of how a community can form on a nightly basis at the local movie theater. Plus, Castle created these gimmicks in the first place. He is the true father of the tingler.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
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The Tingler
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1959
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Directed by William Castle
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Written by Robb White
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Starring Vincent Price, Judith Evelyn and Philip Coolidge
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Running time: 82 minutes
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Rating:
