The Dark Séance: Scream! Scream for Your Life!

Released later the same year as House on Haunted Hill, and also starring the inimitable Vincent Price, The Tingler boasts what is probably the most ambitious, most famous, and most misunderstood of all William Castle’s many theatrical gimmicks.

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!

“I was now becoming known as ‘The Master of Gimmicks,’” Castle writes in his memoir. “Exhibitors were inquiring what my gimmick for The Tingler would be. After the insurance policy and “Emergo,” they wanted something bigger – more exciting.”

This gimmick was dubbed “Percepto!” and to get an idea of what people think it was like, one need look no further than the 1991 film Popcorn, which follows a group of film students who are hosting a film festival celebrating gimmick pictures of exactly the kind William Castle specialized in.

In fact, two of the three fictional movies shown at the film festival incorporate gimmicks pulled straight from Castle’s playbook. The first is Mosquito, an homage to ‘50s big bug movies but featuring a giant mosquito prop on a wire that flies above the audience, an obvious nod to Castle’s “Emergo” from House on Haunted Hill.

The next film in the festival is The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man, a take on the spate of amazing, incredible, transparent, indestructible, projected, and melting men who filled movie marquees in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Once again, however, it’s accompanied by a gimmick lifted straight from Castle’s oeuvre – or, more accurately, the popular understanding of it.

While the audience is watching the film, certain seats throughout the theater are fitted with electrical “buzzers” which give audience members a mild shock when triggered during key scenes in the movie. Because Popcorn is, itself, a horror movie, this electrical apparatus gets put to nefarious purposes and ultimately electrocutes one of the film student victims.

(We’ll get to the third movie in Popcorn’s fictitious film festival – as well as Popcorn itself – in a later column, when we discuss the assorted variations on the gimmick of “Odorama,” which Castle never tried to use… but plenty of other people did.)

It’s probably for the best that the real “Percepto!” gimmick wouldn’t have been able to electrocute – or even mildly shock – anyone. Instead, the buzzing sensation experienced by moviegoers who were watching The Tingler in 1959 was provided by surplus airplane wing de-icers, which were planted on the bottoms of certain seats.

These worked, in their original context, by vibrating hard enough to shake ice from the wings of planes. In a darkened movie theater, this same vibration was enough to make people jump in their seats, especially when they were watching a scary movie and not expecting it. A remarkably similar premise was later put to use in the DualShock controllers famously associated with the PlayStation line of video game consoles – and also the haptic actuators that cause your cell phone to vibrate.

Even more so than “Emergo,” this gimmick ties directly into the film’s plotline, which concerns a scientist who has discovered the existence of the eponymous “tingler,” a heretofore unknown parasite that exists within human beings and causes the “spine-tingling” sensation that we associate with being afraid.

These “tinglers” feed on fear and, as they do, they get bigger and stronger – so much so that they can actually kill a person by breaking their spine. However, most of us can thwart the tingler simply by screaming. By venting our fear with a scream, we paralyze and weaken the tingler and, unknowingly, save our own lives in the process.

This all culminates in a sequence in which a tingler gets loose in a silent picture theater within the movie. As the protagonists try to search out the crawling creature, they shut off the lights in the projection booth and Vincent Price exhorts the audience, “Do not panic but scream – scream for your lives!”

This is another prime example of Castle’s gimmicks “breaking down the fourth wall and transforming the members of the audience from viewers to participants,” for while Price’s character may be addressing the audience of the silent theater within the movie, he is also, by extension, addressing the audience who is actually watching The Tingler. And by shutting out the lights in the diegetic movie theater, the screen of the actual theater also goes black, functionally plunging the viewing audience into darkness and recreating the material circumstances of the spook show Blackout.

It was, of course, during this Blackout that the “Percepto” buzzers would have been working overtime.

The sequence obviously left a big impression on moviegoers, and many people who are only vaguely familiar with William Castle will be aware, at least by reputation, of the movie with the buzzing seats. Even without the “Percepto” gimmick, you can see a direct nod to the theater sequence of The Tingler in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2 – Dante, of course, a big fan of Castle.

But, as usual, Castle wasn’t one to do things in half-measures, and he knew that part of the effectiveness of a good gimmick lay in priming the audience. It wasn’t enough to simply shock the occasional seat. You had to build anticipation. To that end, Castle appeared in a recorded warning – a trick he would make use of in several of his other films, and which had previously and famously been used in Frankenstein, when Edward Van Sloan emerges from behind a curtain with a “friendly word of warning” – to caution viewers about what they were about to see.

“I feel obligated to warn you,” Castle says, “that some of the sensations – some of the physical reactions which the actors on screen will feel – will also be experienced, for the first time in motion picture history, by certain members of this audience. I say ‘certain members’ because some people are more sensitive to these mysterious electronic impulses than others. These unfortunate, sensitive people will at times feel a strange, tingling sensation; other people will feel it less strongly. But don’t be alarmed – you can protect yourself. At any time you are conscious of a tingling sensation, you may obtain immediate relief by screaming. Don’t be embarrassed about opening your mouth and letting rip with all you’ve got, because the person in the seat right next to you will probably be screaming too. And remember this – a scream at the right time may save your life.”

While the “Percepto” buzzers were the only official gimmick associated with The Tingler, they were not the only novel element of the film’s production. Castle was fond of using distorted “funhouse” sequences in his films, where a variety of classic spook show imagery would be hurled at the characters (and, by extension, the audience).

Such sequences had done well in House on Haunted Hill, and Castle went out of his way to try to one-up them here in a portion of the film where a man frightens his wife to death. The showstopper of the sequence is a moment in which a bathtub fills with blood, from which a bloody hand clutches.

The rest of The Tingler is black-and-white, but the blood in this scene is bright red. How did they do it? They actually shot the tub scenes in color, and simply painted everything around them to look black-and-white – including the actress.