The Tingler (1959)
Vincent Price plays a pathologist that has this cockamamie idea that when a
person feels fear, it is actually a physical thing inside the body that can
kill you. The rest of his theory goes like this: if you scream you kill the
parasite, but if you don't, it will kill you by screwing up your spine. You
might be wondering where he ever came up with such a stupid idea. The movie
never says, probably because there is no logical way to explain why a guy who
made it through medical school would ever study fear and screaming and come up
with the bright idea that it all must be caused by a giant parasite. Does he
also
drill holes in patient's heads to let the evil spirits out?
Despite the
completely ludicrous premise of the movie, it's an okay affair that doesn't
really
generate much in the way of thrills or excitement, but doesn't really stink the
joint entirely up either. It doesn't aim for much and it doesn't achieve much.
The movie opens with Price conducting an autopsy on a dude who's just had a
session with Old Sparky. The dead guy's brother-in-law shows up and
starts to chit chat with Price. Price, like most pathologists,
doesn't really mind having this guy in their blabbing his arm off while he
slices and dices this corpse and they start to talk about fear.
Price drops his theory on the guy and the guy swallows it hook, line, and
sinker. Price also comes up with the name "the Tingler" to describe the parasite that causes fear. 
Once Vincent gets done dissecting the brother-in-law, the guy asks him for a
ride back to town. They arrive at this old movie theatre that only shows
silent films. This guy and his wife run this place together and live upstairs
from the theatre. His wife is also a deaf mute. She is also some kind of neat
freak who cleans up really fast and refuses to shake Vince's hand because of
her fear of germs.
So let me get this straight. This guy has married a woman
who can't speak and can't hear and who cleans up all the time. I'm starting to
see why this relationship works.
Of course there's a hitch. We see her
putting money into a safe and she seems pretty attached to it. Just think what
you could do if she wasn't there keeping an eye on the money, dude...
In any
event, Vincent breaks a saucer while he's over there having coffee and that
provides us with the information that this deaf mute is deathly afraid of blood
and faints whenever she says it. Vincent says it's not just a normal faint
(he's an expert in fear after all) and that it's something more powerful than
that. Then he starts to wonder about her and the Tingler when she's scared.
You see, she can't speak, so she can't scream! Thus, if she were scared
enough, the Tingler could really grow and kill her since she can't defend
herself by screaming and then Vinny could gut her and pull out his prized
Tingler and march over to Sweden and pick up the Nobel Prize in Farfetched
Pseudoscience!
But he just checks on her and he leaves. Of course he comes
home to his shrewish wife who's always stepping out on him. Making matters even worse she wears really ugly and ill-fitting gold lame off-the-shoulder
dresses.
As I've mentioned, Vincent is not just a world famous scientist obsessed with
dopey ideas. He is also embroiled in a nasty domestic situation. One night
he's waiting up for his wife to come home from her tomcatting around and when
she finally comes back he does what any of us would do in that situation - he
uses it to help him prove the existence of the Tingler!
See, Vincent is one of
those research scientists that keeps guns around his house/secret lab and
decides that enough is enough. He gets in her slutty face and demands that she
quit harassing her sister about her boyfriend and that she should hand over her sis's half of the family
inheritance or else! I'm not sure what that had to do with her skanky behavior, but Vince is holding the gun on her and she's pretty much
laughing in his face, so he shoots her.
She falls to the floor and Vincent goes
into action. He gets her up on an examining table and takes a bunch of x-rays
of her back. Eventually she comes to and it turns out he was using blanks and
was just trying to scare her. What jolly good fun!
Later he proudly shows
off the x-rays to his assistant as proof that the Tingler really exists. Now,
Vincent isn't just content to experiment on his no account wife. He's willing
to do it on himself, too. He gets the assistant to provide him with LSD and
the next scene shows Price reading a pamphlet entitled something like "How To
Drop Acid In Your Secret Lab."
He locks himself up in the lab, shoots up
full of the stuff, and has a pretty tame experience as acid trips go. The room
swirls a bit, he complains the walls are closing in on him, and then he gets
real scared, but tries not to scream. Why is he trying not to scream? What is
it he wants the Tingler to do? Kill him? What does any of this prove? We
need a real live Tingler to look at man! 
Eventually Price comes down off his acid trip and gets a call from the guy he
met at the beginning of the film. Something about his wife having problems.
So Vincent goes over there and gives her a shot of something to help her
"relax."
After Vincent leaves strange things begin to occur! This deaf mute starts to
see weird events in her apartment! Doors and windows open and close, something
with a hairy hand throws a hatchet at her, a creature with a real scary face
shows up with a butcher knife and the bathtub has problems too!
What sort of
problems does the bathtub have? Well, it seems to be filled with blood and there is a hand rising
out of all that red goo. And it is red. Even though this film was in black
and white, the parts with the blood in this scene were tinted red. It's an
interesting effect and somewhat jarring. I'm not sure that it's entirely
successful though, as it seems to call attention to the fact that the movie was
shot in black and white when it could have been done in color (as Vincent
Price's The Fly was done the same year). Interesting experiment, don't bother to repeat it.
Eventually she croaks from fear (she can't scream remember?) Vincent returns
and he and the now widowed husband take the body back to his lab, so Vince can fill out a death
certificate.
While there, Vince decides the husband wouldn't mind if he opened
up her back to look for the Tingler that must be there. He starts to do this
while the husband is still in the room! Admittedly, he was doing it behind a
screen, but that was only done so that the first glimpse of the Tingler we have
would be in dramatic shadow form. Once he extracts the Tingler, we see that it looks like a big caterpillar with pincers on his head! Vincent puts it in this Tingler cage he built which is basically a cat carrier. The rest of the movie
the Tingler periodically causes trouble, escaping every now and again to try
and do whatever it is that Tinglers do.
The movie is professionally shot and
doesn't look at all shoddy like say, The Hideous Sun Demon, but the whole thing
just seems so pedestrian. There's nothing gloriously bad or good about it, it
sets up its ridiculous premise and plays it out steadily. The ending made no
sense and is another one of those things where they tried to get one more
undeserved jolt from the crowd. It turns out the deaf mute's husband had done
all those things in the apartment to scare her to death (how he did all that
was never explained) and the body of the wife is still under a sheet in the
apartment at the end of the movie. The guy looks at it and she starts to rise
up and the sheet comes off and she turns to face him. He is too scared to
scream!
Huh? Was she dead or not? Doesn't anyone wonder why these things
they film make no sense? Isn't there a cameraman or a grip or somebody who
says to the director, "I thought the deaf mute was scared to death in the last
reel. Why is she alive again?" Memo to moviemakers: nonsensical scenes do
not equal scares.
|