By Jonathan Wojcik
ENTRY 25: THE TINGLER
Long before my time, the 50's were truly the age of the Creature Feature, occupying a sweet spot in American history when a whole lot of the general public still believed in the supernatural, the concept of the extraterrestrial was still tantalizingly fresh, and broader but highly limited knowledge of radiation even fresher still. It was a decade marked by a veritable monsoon of speculative sci-fi horror and so much monster media I'm still not familiar with all of it myself, and it's possible I never will be, but I can still guarantee there were few ideas - then or now - approaching the absurd imagination of The Tingler's premise.
Castle would continue with these gimmicks throughout his career, but The Tingler remains one of his best known, and we'll be explaining how when we get there...
He believes there is an as-yet undocumented mechanism by which fear alone can kill, and for whatever reason, he has come to the conclusion that specifically screaming is what halts this process. If this doesn't make any sense for anybody to conclude, well, it's a horror movie from 1959. Roll with it.
When she threatens to cut him off, he holds her at gunpoint, demands she give half her fortune to her sister, and finally shoots her in the stomach when she tries to leave...but it's all a ruse. It was a blank cartridge, and he simply wanted to test if he could get her to faint in a state of fear. He hauls her to an examination table and takes multiple x-rays before she awakens, screaming, and he admits that he was only using her as an experimental subject. She only keeps cool from there, insulting him and implying she'll get back at him when he least expects it, something he laughs off as if they routinely go through this kind of menacing banter.
How in the world has no one, anywhere, ever noticed one of these things before? I suppose it is an awfully specific set of circumstances that someone's lower back would ever be x-rayed, or operated on, after they experienced intense fear without ever screaming. Warren even posits that any loud enough noise reverses the growth or outright destroys the object. I suppose that helps suspend a little more disbelief.
Determined to get an intact specimen of a Tingler, Warren attempts to scare himself in what is interestingly enough the first use of LSD ever depicted in a mainstream film, but he ultimately fails to resist screaming. I suppose he gets some points for the attempted sacrifice, but he still puts into motion the much darker, crueler plan we've all suspected by now, offering to "help" Oliver with his wife Martha. He treats her with sleeping pills, or what he says are sleeping pills, only for her to reawaken that night to eerie hallucinations of lights flickering and doors opening on their own.
There, she's met with what must have been a thrillingly grotesque surprise for the audience: while full color productions had existed for some time, it still wasn't the standard, and The Tingler's patrons by this point had spent about an hour watching what they thought was an ordinary, fully black and white picture.
As a blood-soaked arm and hand rises from the tub, grasping at Martha, she finally collapses, and is subsequently declared dead by Warren himself, when Oliver brings him her body for examination...though Oliver swears he felt movement while he carried her.
We next cut to the following day, Warren in the midst of ambiguous experimentation with the creature. David and Lucy arrive to report that Isabel has skipped town, but that's not important anymore to the doctor; he's more concerned that the screaming only briefly stunned the Tingler, and apparently, nothing he has done has caused any apparent harm to it, as though it's now invincible and quite possibly growing in power. He no longer even wishes to share its existence with the scientific world, too disturbed by the possibility of an indestructible and violent creature loose upon the world.
He has decided that he wants to put the Tingler back where it came from; that perhaps it would die if returned to its original body, where the "fear" that created it has already faded. Somehow this still isn't the most insane guess this man has ever made.
Warren calls around to find out where Martha's body was taken after his examination...but discovers that her husband never relinquished a body or even reported her death at all.
Oliver murdered his wife, having long considered her a burden and even feared that she might harm him first in her "madness." He even argues that he got to the idea to scare her to death from Warren's theory, and did it in part to help him. Warren is disgusted by the murder all the same, and intends to turn his friend in to the police after finishing one final operation on Martha's body. Unfortunately, the Tingler chooses this moment to escape its box and crawl down a ventilation duct to the lower floor.
As we mentioned earlier, Oliver runs a movie theater. It so happens that he also lives above it.
Had you been watching this at the cinema yourself, of course, the scene would be visually indistinguishable from this movie, The Tingler, breaking for real. Finding yourself in pitch darkness, you would then hear the audio of various people shrieking and yelping, while Oliver and Warren burst in warning everyone to scream, loud as they can, to fight back against the monster!
The immersive prank was met with mixed reception. Castle's introduction already warns people that they may feel a "tingling" sensation during the movie, which spoiled the shock for some if word of mouth already hadn't, and many reportedly found the prank underwhelming or obnoxious. I'm sure there must have been people with health issues that didn't play kindly with the funny joke, either, which is something we might have (rightfully) heard more about had it happened today. Still, there had to be plenty of people in that sweet spot to have an absolute blast, right? Engrossed enough to believe for at least one brief, unforgettable little moment, not only once in a lifetime but only once in human history, that a weird bug from a Vincent Price movie was really, actually attacking their spinal column. What a time to be alive!
But even after we've watched the doctor disappear down the street...the door and window to the room slam shut, locking Oliver inside with the corpse...
MONSTER ANALYSIS: THE TINGLER
![](tingler-tingler5.png)
This is a story I've told once before on this website, but most of my childhood was completely pre-internet, but even in the days before Wikipedia, IMDB, TVtropes, blogs and vlogs, you could still learn just as much about movies from printed literature alone. Not having immediate access to all that many films, I'd amassed quite a collection of books specifically on the subject of monster movies, ranging from dictionary-thick A-to-Z encyclopedias of sci-fi horror to colorful and gimmicky kid's books showcasing select creatures in pretty much the same spirit as this very website! If you've enjoyed reading these reviews with no ability (or in some cases intention) to actually watch these movies, then you know exactly what it was like for me to read synopses, reviews and trivia for cinematic works either too obscure for me to find or too grotesque for my tiny mind to dare fathom.
Many of these books brought up the Tingler at least in passing, especially for the theater seat gag, but none of them ever actually bothered to go into much detail or share any actual pictures of the titular creature. Only one book offered passing description of it, and to this day, I can't think of The Tingler without remembering that this book called it "spider-like." SPIDER-like!? Did this author ever actually see this movie? Did they ever actually see a spider? Alternatively did they never see anything other than a spider in their entire life until they watched this movie so they just assumed everything in the world is some kind of spider? Was that it? Was that what happened? I've decided that it was. What an incredible life. I'm kind of jealous now, actually. I wish I never saw anything but spiders until one day I saw "The Tingler" and was immediately paid to describe it in a book, and then maybe go on to have a more normal life but still mistake a whole lot of other things for spiders.
The whole concept of the monster is obviously built around the goofy question of what "really" causes the "spine-tingling" associated with fear, and it's not a big leap from there to come up with a creature that lives in or on the spine itself and kind of visually evokes one. The fact that it dies and disappears without a trace as soon as you scream sells the idea that we've never had the chance to discover it before, and the fact that it remains so small yet so dangerous powerful sells that it can sneak up behind you to creep up your back and potentially murder you even in a cramped little theater. So, was the entire idea borne out of Castle's seat-buzzer prank, or vice-versa? I lean towards the former, having played enough video games to feel like I can spot those creatures designed entirely around an oddly-specific gimmick.
Whatever the order of operations, the Tingler remains one of the most far-fetched creatures horror audiences were possibly ever asked to take even half-seriously from a "science fiction" angle, an idea that is arguably completely, utterly stupid for the same reasons that it's also ingeniously clever and even effectively disturbing, especially if you're willing to view that "stupidity" through more of a "tasteful surrealism" lens, which is another opportunity to cite Junji Ito as a frame of reference.
I'm also happy to say that I did not miss my chance to purchase a limited edition, fully painted, life-sized Tingler model when they were produced way, way back when they were first produced between, I think, 1999 and 2001, though I'm pretty sure the one in the film didn't really have this silly little face on it. I've had this one for over 20 years, decorating every single home I've had from my teens to today, and it's actually right behind my head while I write this: