Movie review – “The Tingler” (1960) ***1/2

Enormous fun courtesy of William Castle. A lot of it is straight up melodrama, kind of filmed in the style of something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents - TV acting and simple direction with a melodramatic plot (eg Vincent Price's scenes with his unfaithful wife, the ingenue couple who want to get married, the stylised black and white photography on TV sets). But when it gets going it's great; the initial idea is a good one - Vincent Price is a scientist who believes there's a creature in our spine with causes the tingling, and tries to extract it - and the creature may be a bit fake looking but I think it's really effective.

And there's a great deal of imagination throughout: a man kills his deaf mute wife through her inability to scream (played by Judith Evelyn who, in a nice touch of film irony, was tormented by Vincent Price on stage in Angel Street); there's a running bath tub where we see blood coloured red in an otherwise black and white movie (a body emerges from the bed - like Hitchcock and Jimmy Sangster, Castle had obviously seen Les Diabolique); Castle at the beginning and Price during the film encourages the audience to scream to survive the tingler; Price takes an LSD trip; the tingler attacks a movie theatre at the end, and the movie theatre plunges into darkness and climbs under chairs (what showmanship!); the shock ending. You want to see it in a cinema with electrocuted chairs but it's still pretty fun.