The Tingler

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William Castle was the King of Movie Gimmicks. He would crank out horror films with skeletons that floated over the audience, smoke machines, planted moviegoers that screamed, and buzzers installed in random seats to zap people during the scary parts.

Vincent Price was one of the most beloved horror icons ever. His gentlemanly appearance, calm delivery, and unnerving laugh made him a staple of the early horror genre, as well as the occasional pop music video or Scooby-Doo episode. Quite a resume.

So it only seems that these two masters of their art would work together several times during the late fifties and early sixties. One such project was today's movie, 1959's The Tingler.

It literally starts with people screaming in your face, so strap in.

Price plays pathologist Dr. Warren Chapin, a guy who performs what he deems to be unnecessary autopsies on prisoners who have been executed by the state. After one such autopsy, a man walks into his autopsy room, introduces himself as Oliver Higgins (Philip Coolidge), announces he watched the execution, and then starts asking Chapin all kinds of questions about his job. Chapin seems unconcerned about the surprising lack of security in the building, and starts explaining his theories about fear and what causes it. The two become fast friends, and Chapin offers Ollie a ride home.

When they arrive at Ollie's residence, it is above a silent movie theater that Ollie owns and runs with his "deaf and dumb" (Ollie's words; not our) wife, Martha (Judith Evelyn). They go upstairs to the apartment to have tea, but butterfingers Chapin, who is, we remind you, a doctor, drops the saucer to his teacup and cuts his hand, causing Martha to freak out and faint. After making sure Martha is not actually injured and will be okay, Chapin heads home to his wife, Isabela (Patricia Cutts), only to find his sister-in-law, Lucy (Pamela Lincoln) getting ready for a date with her fiancee, David (Lincoln's real-life fiancee, Darryl Hickman), who also happens to be Chapin's assistant when he does his fear experiments. Lucy tells Chapin that Isabela is out doing errands.

When Lucy goes upstairs to finish getting ready, Chapin looks outside to see his wife kissing some guy in the driveway that is not him, which seems wrong. She comes in and the two of them snipe at each other until David shows up, at which point Lucy comes downstairs, and she and David leave, giving Chapin and Isabela some space to argue properly.

There. That's better.

Chapin fires a gun at Isabela, and she drops to the floor. He picks her up and takes her to his office, where he happens to have an x-ray machine, and takes several x-rays of her. When she comes to, he explains to her that there were only blanks in the gun, and she unknowingly helped him with a hypothesis concerning a parasite he believes every human hosts: A "tingler".

A tingler, Chapin explains, is the cause of that tingling sensation down a person's spine when they experience fear. It feeds on that fear, and if it gets enough, it can kill the  host and crush their spine. Pretty nasty stuff. Even more disturbing, the only way to weaken the creature is to scream. It is never explained why. And the x-rays he took of Isabela show something on her spine. He believes he found it.

And he's, uh...pretty "excited" by the idea...

The next step in Chapin's experiment is to create some fear for himself and, as he claims to fear nothing, the only obvious option for him is to inject himself with a buttload of lysergic acid and see what happens. You read that right: He mainlines some LSD "for science." And it goes about as well as you might expect; first he opens a window and claims it is locked, and then he sees wavy lines when he looks at a skeleton. Then he screams and everything is okay. Just like when someone really takes LSD.

Obviously, the next step is to go see Ollie and Martha, and load Martha up to see what happens when someone who is tripping balls and has to deal with their own tingler but cannot scream. (It sounds dirty, but it's not.) Then Chapin prescribes barbiturates for when she comes down and leaves. Weird guy.But then shit gets weird.

Color? In a black-and-white movie? Madness!

Martha dies of fright, and Ollie throws her body in the trunk of his car to take it to Chapin, wants to hack her back open and see if he was right about this whole "tingler" thing. Lo-and-behold, it turns out he was, which seems logical only because this would have been an even worse movie had he turned out to have been completely wrong. ("Huh. Weird. There's just gooey stuff around her spine. My bad. Throw her on the pile with the others, I guess.")

He removes the tingler and examines it before putting it in a box to take...well, we're not sure where. Maybe back to the morgue. He also tells Ollie to toss Martha back into the car trunk and take her to the police, who will handle it? Somehow? It's a little hazy because Derek and Jake had pretty much lost interest by this point.

But they remained fixated on the tingler's ability to hump
anything with which it came into contact.

Ollie leaves, and Chapin takes a nap, only to wake up with the tingler humping his chest.His wife had put it there while he was sleeping, in the hopes that he would get all kinds of dead from it. Fortunately for him, he wakes up in time and puts it back in its box. He then receives a call from the police wondering where the body was that he had promised them. Chapin realizes that something is up, and he heads to Ollie's place.

Meanwhile, Ollie is at home, packing like he's planning to take a vacation.We also discover that he took Martha home and just flopped her on her bed and covered her. When Chapin arrives and confronts him, Ollie pulls a gun, but Chapin is having none of that; he's going to the police. At least, he was, until he notices that the tingler, which he had brought with him for some reason, has escaped from its box and slithered down into the ventilation, which leads to the packed theater downstairs!

Will Chapin and Ollie let bygones be bygones and team up to find the little critter? Or will it escape after humping an unsuspecting moviegoer's leg? Or will we get an unsatisfying ending where nothing is really resolved because there wasn't a decent ending written? Or could it be all three? You'll have to listen to find out!

Jake did not like this movie, and really, who could blame him? The plot was almost non-existent, and what little bit there was appeared to have been cobbled together from leftovers and half-ideas from other movies. But Vicent Price sure was creepy!

Derek disagrees wholeheartedly. The movie was garbage, but it seems pretty clear that the gimmick came well before the story was conceived, and only the bare minimum of effort was put into constructing a plot to justify it. Also, the tingler looks like the ear creatures from Wrath of Khan.

So scream...SCREAM FOR YOUR LIFE (or just to make sure everyone around you is still awake) and check out the latest episode!