Possibly William Castle’s most famous and well-regarded film, at least from amongst the fruits of the heyday of his faux-Hitchcockian huckstering, it’s rather more confidently essayed than Castle’s immediate predecessor and companion piece, House on Haunted Hill. Both films sport star Vincent Price, then fast entrenching himself as the great American ghoul-movie star, subplots involving marital monstrosity, and gaudily tacky fairground fright effects. It’s also more polished and poised, if far less sly and uniquely neo-realist, than Roger Corman’s near-simultaneous excursions into low-budget, high-concept fare, such as Little Shop of Horrors (1960), just before Price found a home with Corman for his epochal series of Poe adaptations. Castle’s earnest, and yet somehow hilarious, appearance at the outset promises a thoroughly good time, but The Tingler is chiefly sustained by a smart script with some wonderful animating ideas, courtesy of Robb White.
The notion that a monster grows in centipede-like form up the length of one’s spine, feeding on fear like a parasite, is an irresistible starting point for a genre work from a man entirely dedicated to finding the soft spots of his audience. Not that anyone was every likely to die of terror at a Castle film, in spite of his Lloyd’s insurance policy, but few works even in the symbol-laden horror genre have ever quite embraced such a keen figurative idea as the Tingler itself. Research pathologist Dr. Warren Chapin (Price) develops his theory based on signs of spinal damage he detects in executed prisoners, and explores the notion with the aid of his talented research assistant David Morris (Darryl Hickman). He also shares his ideas with a chance acquaintance, Ollie Higgins (Philip Coolidge), a mousy man married to a deaf-mute, Martha (Judith Evelyn), who owns a silent film revival theatre. She presents a perfect vehicle for experimenting with the Tingler, which can only be robbed of strength by the psychic release valve of screaming, but having no vocal chords she cannot make any sound at all.
Both men have an epiphany that leads to diverse, and yet linked, responses. Warren, tired of his obnoxious, unfaithful, rich wife Isabel (Patricia Cutts) disrespecting him and trying bully her younger sister, Lucy (Pamela Lincoln) into ceasing to date David, scares her into fainting with a faked shooting that enables him to take an x-ray of a Tingler. Ollie, on the other hand, hungry for his wife’s money and fed up with living in a sickly, combative environment, begins providing gruesome apparitions to provoke the Tingler’s growth until it kills her. His plan works, and he brings her to Warren to confirm she’s dead, but she continues to move in spite of being stone cold: Warren realises the full-grown Tingler is still alive inside her and cuts out the ugly creature for study. But the Tingler proves a troublesome little critter, all too capable of existing outside the body when fully formed, and a handy tool in Isabel’s revenge on her husband, before going on a little walk to the chagrin of some movie theatre patrons.
The interweaving of family conflict and bizarro psychosomatic manifestation makes for a fascinating mixture, anticipating, in a cheerfully unpretentious fashion, the likes of Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1979) and Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), in exploring psychological concepts, like the primal scream and the collective unconscious, through literalised nightmare figures. The exploitation of then-nascent concepts in therapy like the primal scream as release valve and the use of LSD as exploratory vehicle – as Price does in one sequence – was cutting-edge as story material on the movie screen. The Tingler also repeats the marital-war motif of Haunted Hill and raises the interesting spectre of Castle’s curious misanthropic fascination with husbands and wives trying to murder each other as a driving plot device. The swankiness of Warren
Such motifs were possibly trying to channel some of the emotional brutality and intensity of Castle’s models, Hitchcock and H.G. Clouzot, whose Les Diaboliques (1956) seems to have particularly influenced his rather cheesier gimmicks involving fake bodies in bath-tubs, and his three-card monte plots. That Castle definitely wasn’t Hitchcock or Clouzot is self-evident; in truth he was perhaps not even on a par with other journeymen dabbling in fantastic cinema at the time, such as Arthur Crabtree and Gene Fowler Jnr: his camera set-ups are generally merely dutiful and the action set-bound, even though his careful framing of actors betrays an eye trained by the exigencies of the old studio style. Stunt effects, like isolated colour as Martha is frightened by visions of vivid red blood, and half-hearted lens distortions to reproduce Warren’s LSD trip, are crude, and yet have a kind of pop-art delight to them.
The limited camerawork and the cheap settings reflect more the cramped budgets of Castle’s independent work than any lack of technical chops on his part (the photography, by Wilfred M. Cline, and the lighting, are quality work in their way). But his showmanship, beloved in popular memory thanks to its innately tacky humour value and notion of chiller cinema as a kind of audience-participation game that looked forward to the Rocky Horror Show, actually often hurt the integrity of his films, sacrificing a complete and logical feel to contingency, as the significant subplot of Warren’s increasingly deadly conflict with Isabel goes nowhere and leaves story issues dangling, and the finale is perforated by silly time-outs and a “shock” finish that’s merely irritating and disappointing. Like Haunted Hill, The Tingler stops rather than finishes, and to this extent Castle
But Castle’s approach is an indicator, just as much as the more inflated paraphernalia such as Cinerama, of an American film industry searching for new ways to galvanise its waning patronage, and represents a bracing by-product of the loosening bonds of that industry: Castle perhaps helped prove that an independent director could make his own films successful with a strong sense of his intended audience. Castle probably in this way helped pave the way for rather more volatile, boundary-pushing talents such as Herschel Gordon Lewis and George Romero to wow midnight matinee audiences with their sick visions, even if Castle’s own talent was far more clean-cut and retrograde. The Tingler itself, once seen, though clumsily animated, is fascinatingly designed, with a look that made have influenced future generations of body-invading organisms in horror and sci-fi films, immediately putting into my mind the brain slugs of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Price, playing a more sympathetic character than usual, in spite of Warren’s willingness to indulge a little play-act murder, is slick and remarkably free of any hint of ham or tongue-in-cheek; Cutts, as his laughingly self-satisfied, icicle-hearted spouse, is both memorably nasty and sexy; and Evelyn memorable in her soundless anxiety and final desperation. The music, by Von Dexter, consciously apes Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo. Most delightful, although a little fudged in the pay-off, is the great touch of having the Tingler escape into the theatre, tickling the shins of viewers engrossed in the 1921 Henry King film Tol’able David, a scene that plays as meta without any self-consciousness, much like the similar sequence in The Blob (1958), but with an added dimension of delighted movie buff indulgence of a kind that was still relatively rare in cinema at the time. Even the choice of silent movies accords neatly with Evelyn’s disability and denies the handy pleasure that The Tingler indulges: the healing power of good noisy scream.
