The Tingler

A pathologist, Dr. Warren Chapin (Price), discovers that the tingling of the spine in states of extreme fear is due to the growth of a creature that every human being seems to have, called a "tingler", a parasite attached to the human spine. It curls up, feeds and grows stronger when its host is afraid, effectively crushing the person's spine if curled up long enough. The host can weaken the creature and stop its curling by screaming.

Movie theater owner Oliver Higgins (Coolidge), who shows exclusively silent films, is an acquaintance of Dr. Chapin. Higgins's wife Martha (Evelyn), is deaf and mute, and therefore cannot scream. She dies of fright after weird, apparently supernatural events appear in her room. During her autopsy, Chapin removes a tingler from her spine.

After they contain the tingler and return to Higgins' house, it is revealed that Higgins is the murderer; he frightened his wife to death knowing that she could not scream because she was mute. The centipede-like creature eventually breaks free from the container that held it and is released into Higgins' theater. The tingler latches onto a woman's leg, and she screams until it releases its grip. Chapin controls the situation by shutting off the lights and telling everyone in the theater to scream. When the tingler has left the showing room, they resume the movie and go to the projection room, where they find the tingler and capture it.

Guessing that the only way to neutralize the tingler is to reinsert it inside Martha's body, Chapin does so. After he leaves, Higgins, who has admitted his guilt to Chapin, is alone in the room. As if by supernatural forces, the door slams shut and locks itself and the window closes, echoing what happened just before Martha was frightened to death. The tingler causes the body of Martha to rise from the bed, staring at her husband. Higgins is so terrified that he is unable to scream. The screen fades, and Dr. Chapin's voice says, "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".

• Vincent Price as Dr. Warren Chapin
• Judith Evelyn as Mrs. Martha Ryerson Higgins
• Darryl Hickman as Dave Morris
• Patricia Cutts as Isabel Stevens Chapin
• Pamela Lincoln as Lucy Stevens
• Philip Coolidge as Oliver "Ollie" Higgins

After the financial success of House on Haunted Hill, Castle moved his independent production unit from Allied Artists to Columbia to produce The Tingler.[6] Price was on board again, with Hickman playing his assistant and newcomer Lincoln playing his sister-in-law. Cutts played Price's unfaithful wife Isabel. The Tingler was Price's second and final film with Castle and the fifth performance that would ultimately brand him as "The Master of Menace".

Castle convinced Hickman, who was Lincoln's real-life fiancé, to join the cast as her fiancé in the film. At first Hickman declined, but agreed after Castle convinced him it would help Lincoln's career. According to Hickman, Castle did such a good job of convincing him it would help Lincoln that he worked for no salary. Hickman, who was 5'10", was required to wear lifts for the scenes with 6'4" Vincent Price to offset the disparity of their heights.

Evelyn was hired at the request of Price, who had worked with her on Broadway. She also received attention in another prominent "non-speaking role" as the suicidal "Miss Lonelyhearts" in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). Dal McKennon, the projectionist (uncredited in the film), had a successful career as the voice of many screen and TV characters, including "Buzz Buzzard" in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons and "Gumby" in the TV clay animation series. Jack Dusick, make-up artist for The Tingler, was the father of singer/actress Michele Lee.

White, the story author, was partly inspired by his encounter with a centipede while living in the British Virgin Islands.[7]

White had experimented with LSD at UCLA after hearing about it from Aldous Huxley and decided to work it into the script.[8] It is the first depiction of LSD use in a major motion picture.[5] At the time, the drug was legal. The title of the book that Vincent Price's character reads before taking LSD—Fright Effects Induced by Injection of Lysergic Acid LSD25—is printed on the back of the book, not the front. This was done for a better shot of the expositional title of the book, explaining the effects of LSD to the audience.

Location shots were filmed at the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, California.[9]

The movie playing in the theater when the tingler escapes was the 1921 silent film Tol'able David.[9]

A subplot of the film involves the fates of a movie theater specializing in silent films and its owners. According to Kevin Heffernan, this reflects the conditions of the movie theater industry in the late 1950s. There were many discount theaters trying to establish their own market niche by showing older films. For the owners of these small theaters, it was a thankless and poorly paid job, as described in the trade journals of this period. When Ollie describes at length the work load involved in cleaning the building, he echoes real-life complaints.[10] This provides the motive for his murder, as he is trying to escape a hopeless life.[10]

Another subplot involves dysfunctional married lives. Most prominent is that of Warren to Isabelle, who is clearly unfaithful to him. She stays out until the early hours of the morning and is seen giving her lover a farewell kiss. In another scene, Warren enters through the front door of his house and hears the back door slam. He then discovers two used glasses of wine and a forgotten tie clip.[11] In an argument between them, she does not deny her unfaithfulness, but counters by accusing her husband of neglecting her. While spending so many hours in his laboratory, he has lost contact with living people, leaving her no choice but to seek human affection elsewhere.[11] The marriage of Ollie and Martha is also an unhappy one. He claims that Martha would have killed him if she could.[11]

Martha is depicted as a woman with a whole range of obsessive and phobic traits. She even communicates in a neurotic pantomime. Tim Lucas has described her as a silent film character in a sound film.[10] The idea of a terrified, mute woman was not fully original. According to Heffernan, it was probably inspired by The Spiral Staircase (1946).[10]

The scene with the LSD trip offers a display of "stylized and exaggerated performance". The eyes of Warren shift from side to side, gazing suspiciously at his environment, while describing feelings of unease and apprehension. He loosens his tie, when he thinks himself unable to breathe. He opens a window while insisting that it is nailed shut. He sees a hanging skeleton as a moving figure, and describes the walls of the room as closing in on him. Finally he visibly struggles with the urge to scream, and succumbs to it.[10]

William Castle was famous for his movie gimmicks, and The Tingler featured one of his best: "Percepto!". Previously, he had offered a $1,000 life insurance policy against "Death by Fright" for Macabre (1958) and sent a skeleton flying above the audiences' heads in the auditorium in House on Haunted Hill (1959). The gimmicks for The Tingler increased the film's cost from $400,000 to $1 million.[1]

Test engagements started in Detroit on August 5, 1959 with further engagements in Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco.[1]

Reviews of The Tingler were mixed. Howard Thompson of The New York Times said, "William Castle has been serving some of the worst, dullest little horror entries ever to snake into movie houses".[17] "Ron." of Variety called it "highly entertaining" and thought that "Percepto" was "effective, not so much because of the "tingle" but because it "menancingly" moves closer and close in waves and, coupled with a whirring noise and sound-track heartbeats and screams, puts the filmgoer in the midst of the horror."[6]

It has since been praised for its camp qualities, with Time Out London calling the plot "ingeniously ludicrous".[18] Lyz Kingsley of And You Call Yourself a Scientist! pointed out that "no film made before or after it quite matches it for its mix of the imaginative, the creepy, the funny, and the downright weird".[19]

Slant Magazine said, "Ludicrousness aside, Tingler is still one of the more confident Castle pictures: a well paced, at times intentionally, funny parody of 1950s domestication, with every couple in the story trying to off one another for a variety of amusingly convoluted reasons. Think Burn After Reading with dime store production values and a plastic spinal cord at its center."[20]

Dread Central called the film Castle's "magnum opus",[21] while Nerdist singled out Price's performance, saying, "Vincent Price is typically great and as always commits himself fully to the proceedings, even if it’s utterly absurd."[22]

Classic-Horror.com said "the acting is fine, the direction is among Castle's best, and the script is semi-brilliant for the time",[23] and Harvey O'Brien of Harvey's Movie Review stated that "for all its flaws, The Tingler is very watchable and has been put together with enough canniness to be enjoyable on its own terms".[24]

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film on DVD for its 40th anniversary in 1999.[25] The film was later included on the William Castle Film Collection DVD set, released on October 20, 2009.[26]

Scream Factory (under Sony license) released a Blu-ray edition of the film in August 2018.

• List of American films of 1959
• List of films featuring hallucinogens

• Brottman, Mikita (2004). "Ritual, Tension, and Relief: The Terror or The Tingler". In Grant, Barry Keith; Sharrett, Christopher (eds.). Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-810850132.
• Browne, Pat (2001). The Guide to United States Popular Culture. Popular Press. ISBN 0-87972-821-3.
• Castle, William (1976). Step Right Up!: I'm Gonna Scare the Pants off America. New York: Putnam. ISBN 978-0-578066820.
• Heffernan, Kevin (2004). "'A Sissified Bela Lugosi': Vincent Price, William Castle, and AIP's Poe Adaptations". Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-822332152.

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Tingler.

• The Tingler at the American Film Institute Catalog
• The Tingler at AllMovie
• The Tingler at IMDb
• The Tingler at the TCM Movie Database
• Review of The Tingler by James Rolfe on YouTube