The Tingler

Call it a bad movie worthy of many chuckles (with its own red carpet rolled out in Golden Razzie fandom) or a cheap way to get audiences in seats with a device that buzzes patrons in theatres, I positively adore The Tingler.

Whether it’s the LSD acid trip which has Vincent Price mimicking real anxiety and fear-stricken panic from its supposed effects (although such reactions vary), the creation of the enlarged microscopic organism which grows when a person is unable to scream from their fear (looking like a rubber centipede (how it seems to break from a steel cage is hilarious considering it doesn’t have hands) crawling about verrrrrrrrryyyyyy slowly), a supposed hallucination of a killer in a deaf-and-dumb mute with particular use of blood to frighten her to death (complete with a cabinet door which opens to reveal her death certificate, a cool color sequence where blood comes from a sink faucet and pools in a bathtub, with a rising hand for added affect!), the zany idea that a creature exists in all of us and can only be kept at bay by screaming (a release of fear needed in order to survive it), or how the movie requests we, the audience, to scream when the screen goes black (and when the silhouette of the creature appears on the theater screen during the showing of a silent film playing in a movie house operated by Ollie and his mute wife Martha) in order to keep from being harmed by the creature, The Tingler just provides gratifying entertainment value for me time and again.

Like in The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler provides Price’s scientist/pathologist with a miserable marriage to a wife that hates him. This time it is the delicious Patricia Cutts who likes to mock and provoke her husband, blatantly showing her adulterous transgressions and nightly escapades, unapologetically antagonizing him. It is mentioned in a conversation between Price and Cutts that she possibly poisoned her wealthy father for the inheritance! Price’s knowledge in “organic poisons” and how the body doesn’t get rid of any poison exposed after death certainly shakes Cutts’ resolve. The little details in a William Castle script go a long way. I’m surprised the interactions in some of Castle’s films often go so unnoticed while the campier aspects take such center stage. Well, I guess I can considering the campier aspects are so popular and recognized. Like the whole deal with Cutts and the money of her possibly murdered father’s held in abeyance so that her sister (played by Pamela Lincoln) would not have access to it (for reason being Lincoln’s boyfriend in the film, played by Darryl Hickman, is a pathologist similar to Price; not to mention, Hickman is Price’s assistant and confidante). How Cutts would manipulatively gain Price’s good graces, seize upon his surgical removal of the monster, drug Price, and let loose the creature to kill him while he is unconscious; the campy details of Castle’s movies often take precedence over the salacious side of a character (or characters) who wish to kill and get away with murder.

Then there’s Oliver “Ollie” Higgins, the partial owner of a movie theater with his frustratingly neurotic wife, Martha. We get glimpses into their relationship when Price visits, but it isn’t until the very end that Ollie reveals that she tried to kill him several times in a way to justify his murdering her! Martha’s reaction to Price’s cut hand, and the way she washes her hands so much (and her obsession with her safe and the money collected from the movie house); she’s a character that could very well drive many a person crazy with her mental hang-ups. No excuse to drive her to die from fright, though. I love the closing scene prior to the creature loose in the theatre, where Ollie attempts woefully to explain his case to Price, but these excuses fall on deaf ears: Price’s defiance to each excuse by rationalizing them away leaves Ollie unable to talk his way out of a guilty verdict and possible execution. Price will call the police and let them put Ollie away for murder. However, the police will not be needed as the closing moment allows the wife to get her revenge (yes, campy, but so much fun!) when the creature’s surgical appliance to Martha’s spine causes a reaction that convinces Ollie she’s returned from the dead…scaring him to death! Haha. Too good.