The Tingler

William Castle's barely suppressed grin in front of a blank screen as he warns "those unfortunate, sensitive people" in the audience is Nabokov's, surely (cp. Lolita's "John Ray Jr., Ph.D"). The shape of fear is the joke, the set up is Vincent Price in the autopsy room. His treatise on "fright effects" leads to a breakthrough in ghoulish medicine, the discovery of a rubbery crustacean that materializes to hug the human spine during moments of terror and can only be vanquished by the sound of a scream. Experiments include shooting blanks at the unfaithful wife (Patricia Cutts) and feeling the walls closing in following a dose of LSD, though the ideal subject is the mute woman (Judith Evelyn) whose silence prevents her from dissolving the creature. Is it just a coincidence that a tale of a germophobe who gives birth to a quivering liver with pincers of steel came out in the year of Naked Lunch? "Working for the advancement of science is fine, but dying for it..." Like any great pitchman, Castle straddles the line between carnival barker and conceptual artist—the victim faints at the sight of a drop of blood so he tints the celluloid crimson for a full bathtub, and filches Herrmann's first seven bars from the Vertigo score before letting the electric organ take over. Weird science ultimately can't compete with the nastiness married people do to each other, Cronenberg (Shivers) and Russell (Altered States) adduce a detail or two. The climax is set in a silent-film revival house, so that the Griffithian montage of Tol'able David can yield to the shadow puppetry of a creepy-crawly before the projector. "The theater! The tingler is in the theater!" With Darryl Hickman, Philip Coolidge, and Pamela Lincoln. In black and white.