Let’s do some retroactive projection: The Angry Red Planet was released in November 1959, making it the very last Sci-Fi monster movie of the fifties, the decade where the form flourished. There would be more films approximating that style made in the sixties, but the space age obsessions that animated them, both the exaggerated optimism and the equally exaggerated fears, would be gradually replaced with new ones as the genre film business moved on. Completely unintentionally, this movie serves as a sort of denouement for the decade’s monster movies—so, now that we’ve put The Angry Red Planet in the hot seat, what does it have to say about the whole mess? As it turns out, it’s a lot of the same things these movies had been saying since the beginning of the decade.
To understand The Tingler, you have to understand the one part of The Tingler that no one now can actually experience: Percepto! Maybe the most elaborate theatre-going gimmick created by producer/director William Castle, Percepto! was a series of electrical buzzers attached to the backs of random seats in the theatre, and during a specific scene in the movie, operators would use the buzzers to jolt audience members in those seats, leading to reactions both in and out of said movie. As Castle puts it in his clearly Hitchcock-inspired prologue:
Some of the physical reactions which the actors on the screen will feel—will also be experienced, for the first time in motion picture history, by certain members of the audience…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…And remember, a scream at the right time may save your life.
Castle was all about driving people towards his movies through a promise of audience participation that feels almost like a dare. I can imagine it was probably far more frightening to the theatre owners who were stuck having to rig up this thing for every screening.
Castle became infamous for the silly gimmicks in movies like House on Haunted Hill and 13Ghosts, but if you actually watch his movies, you quickly realize that the jocular nature of those gimmicks is very much present in them. The Tingler is a knowingly ludicrous movie, one that incorporates the meta nature of its presentation into the narrative and regularly one-ups itself with a series of imaginative scenes. The titular monster, literally a creature of pure fear, is only one bizarre element in a film full of bizarre elements, never quite reaching self-parody but coming close without necessarily calling attention to it, and it acts as yet another perfect vehicle for horror legend Vincent Price to play his witty, sinister self.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 