I grew up with a copy of the Cinemania 97 CD-ROM as a kid, which featured a John Waters commentary all about 1950s filmmaker William Castle who was a great influence on Waters and other filmmakers (including Joe Dante who made a fictional tribute to the guy in the John Goodman comedy, Matinee). A sort of bargain basement Alfred Hitchcock, Castle was known for his sense of showmanship and applying gimmicks to the low-budget horror and thriller B-movies he made. Watching The Tingler (1959) now, one of his most notorious horror movie gimmicks, there are obvious markers of its original cinema context; from Castle’s own intro to the camera at the start where he explains to audiences that screaming is the only defence against the titular monster (it feeds on fear, yet is released by screams) – to the ‘interactive’ scenes where the screen goes dark and we hear Vincent Price yell at us i.e. the cinema audience in the movie (one of the major suspense set pieces takes place in a repertory cinema) to “keep screaming!” I found all of this to be a lot of kooky fun, even divorced from its original context, which was for The Tingler to be viewed in a cinema of kids with rigged seats zapping them into believing The Tingler was on the loose. Yes, cinemas showing The Tingler would have cinema seats adjusted with a buzzer, which was promoted as the ‘Percepto!’ and involving an audience plant – a screaming woman – to get everyone on edge and ready to join in. Talk about participatory cinema! This doesn’t even cover the wacky concept of the movie, which is about an undiscovered creature that lives inside all of us and seeks to grip the spine when the body is experiencing waves of fear, or how many times people say the phrase “The Tingler” (which becomes the defacto name for this scientific discovery), or Vincent Price’s vindictive wife who is constantly two-timing him and they seem to be a film noir subplot of their own, just with a squid-like monster in the mix, or the hapless cinema owner and his deaf-mute wife, or the use of colour within a black-and-white film in one memorable sequence (recently quoted in the Ethan Hawke movie The Black Phone). Or my favourite part when Vincent Price wants to experience fear, tells his colleagues that nothing scares him, and then proceeds to lock himself into his lab in order to self-dose on medical ‘acid’ and freaks the hell out (“The walls!! The walls!!”). In conclusion: I love Vincent Price! Available to stream on Tubi in Australia. Recommended.
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