Evolution of Horror presents The Tingler! Details on getting tickets + pre drinks below.
REVIEW
I am in a state of total and utter shock! Why? What did I witness last night to induce such a intense sensation?!
I was hoping I’d find William Castle’s ‘The Tingler’ (1959) fun. What I was not expecting was to be sitting for 80 minutes with tears running down my face and thinking that the script to ‘The Tingler’ might be greatest script of any movie I’ve seen so far this year and a legitimately insane masterpiece. Where to even begin?
The film functions on the premise that not screaming when in a state of fear can be fatal. This is because there is a creature that lives at the base of everyone’s spine called the “tingler”. William Castle, whose films ran on gimmicks, added to the sense of terror by using a device called ‘Percepto’, which consisted of putting electric buzzers under selected seats in the cinema giving certain members of the audience a shock at the base of their spines at specific points in the movie. There was also a plant in the audience who would faint from fright and would be taken out the cinema by nurses.
So, essentially, it’s a fair-ground ride, a ghost-train, a rollercoaster. But here’s the thing — to be really effective rollercoasters have to be very well constructed and ‘The Tingler’ is most certainly that. It knows exactly what it is and what it needs to do which it does and then some. Every single moment, every single beat is designed to sell the gag, the sensation of needing to scream, and the more it does so the more hysterical it becomes. I think I might have underestimated just how silly this movie might get.
And talking of silly this movie might have the finest silly script ever written as it is a near constant stream of gloriously demented dialogue that completely boggles the mind. There were many moments where I was catching my breath from laughter after a relentless delivery of some bizarre slice of pseudo-scientific word-play I’d have killed to have written. Here’s just a brief example - “We now know that at the peak of terror the tingler is a solid mass extending from the coccyx to the cervicals. If someone could stand the intense pain, without screaming or otherwise releasing their tension until they die, then I think an autopsy would give us a tingler we could work with.”
or
“Remember this too, darling: organic poisons are like old soldiers — they never die, they just lie smouldering in the grave… and I’m not bad at autopsies either.”
The script is RAMMED with lines like these and with monologues so spectacularly bonkers in their jaw-dropping insanity that they would make many postmodernist authors green with envy at the ecstatic flights of linguistic fancy. Or how about this line from Vincent about half-way through — “I want to personally sense the power of the tingler in a genuine fear situation.” How does he achieve this? He takes LSD and I get to personally sense that I have completely and utterly underestimated just how silly this movie could get.
What also makes ‘The Tingler’ work is the supporting cast, all of whom know exactly what they need to bring to their role and all of which are brilliantly written. It’s a real surprise. So Price has a wife, a role that could easily be a throw-away part. Yet Patricia Cutts gives it everything she has, helping to add to the insanity and this applies to all the cast. This is a film made by people behind and in front of the camera that know precisely what they’re doing.
‘The Tingler’ is my first exposure to William Castle but I have already fallen completely in love with the man. Sure, it’s a movie about screaming and fear but it’s a work of unalloyed laughter and joy. (https://colinedwards.medium.com/the-tingler-or-scream-or-die-laughing-d78636416aac)
TRAILER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NvfUFHJk_M
CINEMA TICKETS
I am in seat H13. Book here https://www.regentstreetcinema.com/checkout/showing/the-tingler-1959-evolution-of-horror-live/148180
DRINKS
We can have a drink before the movie at the Regent Street Cinema bar
SCHEDULE BREAKDOWN
7.00pm Regent Street Cinema bar
8.00pm Movie
ADDRESS AND DETAILS
Regent Street Cinema, 307 REGENT ST, LONDON, W1B 2HW