I don’t remember in which magazine where I saw the still, but I was immediately intrigued. I didn’t know the movie it was from and in the days before the internet, when you live in a small town, avenues for finding the answer were few. I just knew it was a photo of a woman in a bathrobe next to a bathtub filled with some opaque fluid (presumably blood), from which a hand was reaching out to her. Or at her. I don’t even recall when or how I learned that the scene was from the gimmick-driven William Castle film, The Tingler. I’d heard of the movie before, but I hadn’t connected the scene with it. No matter how you slice it, the story of the movie makes no sense. That doesn’t stop it from being fun. I’ve seen it before but had to refresh my memory.
I hadn’t recalled, for example, that Dr. Chapin (Vincent Price) uses LSD to try to get scared. While the dialog isn’t great, there are many observations on fear and how adults outgrow it. Chapin wants to find the physical root of fear and drops some acid (apparently the first cinematic depiction of LSD use) to enhance the experience. Although it’s crucial to the plot, I also didn’t remember that Martha Higgins can’t hear or speak. Interestingly, she co-owns a silent movie theater and she’s a silent character in a sound movie. She’s also the only character involved in the two color shots in a black-and-white film. She remains in grayscale herself in these scenes. In other words, there is some sophistication here. And of course, Vincent Price was always classy.
Camp is an aesthetic that I appreciate but, like a tone-deaf person, don’t always recognize. The Tingler has become a camp classic. Many people know that Castle had vibrators installed in select theater seats so that some audience members would “tingle” at appropriate places. This was the “Percepto” advertised with the movie. Having himself introduce the film as too terrifying—echoing back to Frankenstein in 1931—Castle guaranteed the movie wouldn’t be taken seriously. There’s nothing scary about this horror film. Speaking for myself, I spent too much time trying to figure out what happened to poor Mrs. Higgins—yes, her husband’s trying to scare her to death but then she has hallucinations as if Dr. Chapin gave her the LSD instead of taking it himself. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s fun. I guess that’s the definition of camp.
