Director Max Ophüls( Letter From An Unknown Woman 1948, The Reckless Moment 1949) offers a gritty and volatile film noir starring James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, and the imposing figure of Robert Ryan. With an uncredited assistant directorship by Robert Aldrich. Based on the book Wild Calendar by Libbie Block
Written by Arthur Laurents (The Snake Pit 1948, West Side Story 1961, The Way We Were 1973)
Interesting question: If Howard Hughes gained control of RKO in 1949, was Robert Ryan’s characterization of Smith Ohlrig truly based on Hughs?
A young Howard Hughes…Ryan was perfect for the part of Smith Ohlrig.
Also stars Frank Ferguson (regular on Andy Griffith Show) as Quinada’s partner Dr. Hoffman, Art Smith as Ohlrig’s psychiatrist who knows Ohlrig is a walking powder keg, Natalie Schafer as Dorothy Dale and Curt Bois as Ohlrig’s personal assistant, and like many a good Film Noir delivers, the snarky gay cipher – Franzi Kartos, who’s incessantly calling Leonora DARLING… that if subtitled would read ‘you bourgeois cow…’
One of the staples of the Noir catalog, Caught is a brutish and self-contained story about an egomaniac, hungry for power and consumed by a nasty possessiveness that borders on the psychotic.
Paging Dr. Freud… a classic case of overcompensation and oh yes… this man is a ticking time bomb.
Robert Ryan is chilling as the Neanderthal bigwig worth millions of dollars, with an explosive rage that rests on simmer until something sets him off when it doesn’t go his way. Oh, and Ohlrig also suffers from panic attacks, which he believes is truly a heart condition and not a nervous disorder.
Barbara Bel Geddes is the naive Leonora Eames, who has childlike fancies of marrying a wealthy man and living a life of luxury. Invited to a party on a boat one night, she meets Smith Ohlrig outside on the pier, near his yacht. Although Ohlrig could have any woman he chooses, something about Leonora sparks on him. From the very first encounter, we can see that it’s not a romantic chemistry that stirs Ohlrig, but something more forbidding and sinister.
Once he sets his sights on her, taking her for a ride in his car, he decides there and then, to marry this plain girl, whom he doesn’t love but knows he can possess easily.
Leonora soon realizes that her dream has become a nightmare and that Smith is a menacing character who treats her like part of the furniture and is not quite right in the head.
Ohlrig refuses to give Leonora a divorce, so she decides to leave her opulent home on Long Island and take a job as a receptionist in the city working for a doctor who runs a free clinic in a very poor neighborhood.
Perhaps this is Leonora’s way of cleansing her soul for making the mistake of marrying for money and not for love.
James Mason is Dr. Larry Quinada the absolute antithesis of Smith Ohlrig. He’s genteel and compassionate, and soon the two fall in love, though Leonora is held captive by her dominating husband.
Leonora Eames: Look at me! Look at what you bought!
Complicating matters is the fact that Leonora becomes pregnant by the sadistic Ohlrig who would rather see her a prisoner in the sterile palace that is her home rather than let her go free… Is the threat of financial security and the welfare of their unborn child that which will chain her to him forever…?
Smith Ohlrig: Is she coming down? Franzi Kartos: [Stands silent, knowing that Leonora is not coming down] Smith Ohlrig: [Getting angrier] Why the devil do you think I sent you up there, you dirty little parasite? Get her down here! Franzi Kartos: [Long pause] I think I prefer to be a headwaiter again, Mr. Ohlrig. Franzi Kartos: [Heads for the door, then stops] You know, you’re a big man, but not big enough to destroy that girl. Goodbye.
Franzi Kartos tinkling the ivories…darling.
There are thousands of fabulous films in my collection just as thrilling, this is one of them! Don’t you get caught-MonsterGirl
A martyr (Greek : μάÏÏ„Ï…Ï‚, mártys, “witness”; stem μάÏÏ„Ï…Ï-, mártyr-) is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce …
Mysticism ( pronunciation (help·info); from the Greek μυστικός, mystikos, meaning ‘an initiate’) is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, or levels of being, or aspects of reality, beyond normal human perception, sometimes including experience of and communion with a supreme being.
Fifteen years after Lucie escapes a horrific abduction in which she is subjected to prolonged torture and deprivation, she goes on a mission of revenge on the couple who brutally held her captive. She calls upon her faithful friend from the orphanage, Anna, who was also a victim of child abuse and utterly worships Lucie, to help her clean up after the massacre at the seemingly upper-class home.
Lucie slowly devolves into madness, as she cannot exorcise the demon who has been haunting her, a nightmarish and violent phantom born out of Lucie’s guilt for having left another little girl at the mercy of their abductors. If you enter into watching Martyrs thinking that it’s a straight out of the French New Wave of Torture Porn films, you’ll miss a transformative piece of filmmaking.
The Bride of Frankenstein 1935
From the time Colin Clive utters “It’s alive, It’s alive” in James Whale’s seminal classic Frankenstein 1931, the tone is set. Whale’s campier adaptation from Mary Shelley’s more meditative novel, is still self-possessed of science, the origin of being human, the question of ‘a’ God’s role in this existence, and ultimately, reflectively, ‘man’s’ (I loathe using normative masculine case ugh.) relationship to himself, his creator and the universe that bore him.
Anna in chains12-year-old Lucie in chains
Frankenstein is an existential science-fiction fantasy with multiple layers and questions that can not be answered in 70 minutes on camera. But the images, the spirit of the story, and the characters can serve to evoke these primal questions and fears that have been built into our natures as human subjects.
Anna with her head shaved appears as a Joan of Arc figure.
Now, if you abstract Shelley’s allegory and invert the narrative to where the matter of science does not seek out the mysteries of life in terms of how to create it from “the electrical secrets of heaven“ and an infinity of atoms, harness it, control it, thereby becoming god-like yourself …momentarily.
The film’s antagonists are a group of clandestine, ultra-wealthy, suggestive of high up in government, perhaps even royalty, seemingly above the law and untouchable, apparently with a hierarchy of leaders of advanced age. They are consumed with Mysticism orSpiritualism, (not to be confused with spirituality) a modernized form of a movement that was pervasive around the end of the 19th century and continuing around the early 1900s, and which this cabal, assumes a very clinical, anthropologically scientific approach.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and The Theosophical Movement -table rappings, etc.
The film’s narrative uses science vs. religion (although the act of faith in their mission becomes emblematic itself of fanaticism and religious avidity) because it bares an almost anthropological approach; a modern form of ’empirical’ torture, a method of collecting data. The end result is the creation of a theoretical equation, that asserts, if you dehumanize, brutalize, and cause the body enough pain, the subject’s psyche and physical being has nowhere else to go but toward an elevated sense of euphoria, to become Transfigured, like that of Christ on the cross, or Saint Joan de Arc.
Saint-Joan Mother Joan of the Angels 1960 Directed by Jerzy KawalerowiczFlavia The Heretic Nun (1974) is also doomed to be flayed alive.
The subjects of their research also, at this point, become objects. An anonymous and beautiful little girl becomes, at first, a helpless victim, then a monstrous ‘thing’, and then is exalted to a heroic saint and visionary figure.
Their methods, while equally brutal, stand in contrast with the motivations of the Medieval scourge of inflicting pain that was for the sole purpose of punishing, eliminating your enemies, relishing in sadism, barbarism, suffering, and bloodshed, merely to bringing about death slowly.
Transfiguration |transËŒfigyəˈrÄSHÉ™n| noun a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state: in this light the junk undergoes a transfiguration; it shines. "¢ (the Transfiguration) Christ’s appearance in radiant glory to three of his disciples (Matthew 17:2, Mark 9:2"“3, Luke 9:28"“36).
In contrast to the angelic martyred figure, Vanessa Redgrave plays a devil-possessed, sexually repressed nun. Directed by Ken Russell and based on Huxley’s Devils of Loudon. Power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu seeks to bring down the group of nuns and take control of France.
This Cult of Transfiguration uses pain, deprivation, and ultimately a carefully constructed clinical form of torture which for them is the road in which to search for the ‘secrets of life.’ But unlike Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein who sought to create life on this earthly plane, Mademoiselle’s quest is to reach past this plane to the other side… of the veil, the borderland, that thing we call ‘life after death’, the exalted state of being, where we go after we literally ‘shed our skin.’
The head of this Cult of Transfiguration, Mademoiselle, is archetypal of Nazi experimenters. As a French filmmaker, Pascal understands the deeply scarred history of WWII and the profound ramifications that the Nazi’s presence left. She is like the embodiment of the Nazi doctors who often used human subjects for ‘medical research.’
The infamous Dr. Herta Oberheuser, a Nazi physician who experimented on numerous children.
The cult finds that young girls are the most inherently geared to becoming Martyrs, so they set out abducting their ‘specimens’, subjecting them to the most brutal, yet very clinical, torture in order to bring their human subjects to the state of grace and transformation. Then, right before their deaths, they can communicate what they see in the ‘ether world.’
Anna whispers to Mademoiselle… what if anything has she revealed? What has she seen… through her transfiguration?
I use the word clinical to describe the conditions, the beatings, and the gruesome and ultra ‘extreme’ pain they subject the girls too. This clinical torture diverges from the grittier serial killer film, where the interaction is often personal, self-satisfying, and subjective, sublimating the victim’s pain, and devouring it like a cannibal to feed their blood lust.
This cult shows no sign of emotion at all. They do not become aroused or responsive. They do, however, possess an eerily quiet fixation on their victims, as they start to enter Martyrdom. It is then they become, revered much again like a Saint, an icon, an object. But that is only when the experiment has been perceived to have worked. None of their subjects, except for Anna, utters a word before death. At the end of the film, we are left not knowing what Anna whispers to Mademoiselle.
Right after receiving the cryptic message from Anna, Mademoiselle locks herself in her room. She, too, strips away all her superficial layers, her amber-colored lenses, her head scarf, and almost all her earthly signifiers, Like Anna’s flayed body, Mademoiselle prepares herself for the other world. She only tells the man in black awaiting the news of what Anna has shared, “keep doubting” and then puts the revolver in her mouth and blows her brains out.
Viewers are left to conjecture what Anna has shared. Was it that she met Lucie on the other side and found such peace everlasting? Did she meet ‘god’? Did she experience an ecstasy beyond description? It is better not to know because that would disallow Laugier’s point. That WE cannot ever know. And if we spend our days here on this earth using other people to gain that knowledge, we’ll have not only missed the point, but we’ll become monsters ourselves. Seeking out figures to crucify on behalf of a manufactured faith, damned to uncertainty and taking victims along with us…
As Mademoiselle tells Anna “We’ve created more victims than Martyrs.”
I fear that’s how it’s been in history with human subjects and animals alike in such cases where science becomes a monstrous mechanism for knowledge, or when religion sacrifices innocent blood in the name of an ambiguous morality relying on its faith.
It’s the clinical brutality that makes the film all the more disturbing. But when I say disturbing, I do not imply that this is a film that wants to disturb you in only a visceral way. As the protagonist, Anna suffers and ultimately does become transformed, but I found myself becoming altered by the film’s end. And still days after, I have been feeling and processing what I saw on screen.
A good horror film can take an utterly monstrous, abjectly frightening, nightmarish, and at times grotesque situation, and transform itself into a thing of beauty. I truly believe that Martyrs is a horrifically beautiful film.
Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face 1960 comes to mind, the darkly bleak yet mesmerizing, haunting and yes, a clinical setting where a daughter’s dedicated father, a medical doctor abducts young women and skins them in order to give his beloved little girl a new face.
When a film can be so horrific that it taps into our primal fears and what Kristevacalls abjection (a hell of a read if you’re interested), anything that makes us feel something plucking at the core of our senses, perhaps not quite know what it is, but truly alters us somehow. Then when it manages to transcend the horrifying aspects of its story the visceral reactions we experience and goes on to cause an odd symbiosis with the images and the story.. .then to me… it becomes a work of art.
Martyrs evoke themes and images from Clive Barker’sHellraiser, (1987) the hellish underworld society of Cenobites, that seek out and cause pain to acquire the ultimate exquisite pleasure.
But in Martyrs the exquisite release is that of the knowing… what is on the other side of this world. And it is THIS world that is HELL…
Directed by Charles Vidor the man responsible for the eminent noir classic, Gilda 1946 and no relation to the more well know King Vidor. With a screenplay byReginald Denham (The Mad Room 1969 a modern reworking of the same play, Suspense, Kraft Theater and Alfred Hitchock Presents)
The Mad Room 1969 a modern reworking of Denham’s Ladies in Retirement starring Shelley Winters and Stella Stevens.
The film is a suspenseful story with tremors of ethical dilemma, evocative of pity and encompassed by the moor like fog of madness and desperation.
Ida Lupino plays the reticent Ellen Creed, housekeeper to the colorful Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom) who has retired from the music hall stage. Ellen is the obsessive guardian of her two loosely screwed sisters Emily and Louisa portrayed deliciously vague sort of loony by Elsa Lanchester (Emily) and Edith Barrett (Louisa).
Ellen manipulates Leonora to allow her quirky siblings to come and visit, well aware that she has no intention of making it a temporary stay. Once Leonora realizes that the two are batty, she demands that they leave forcing Ellen to do the unthinkable, to not only murder her employer, but create a deceptive strategy that will allow the sisters to dwell in sanctuary at the cozy manor house by the moors.
Unfortunately, Ellen not only has the full time job of wrangling her nutty sisters, she becomes the target of her blackmailing nephew Albert Feather, played with a dash of charming malevolence by Louis Hayward. ( And Then There Were None 1945, Ruthless 1958, House By The River, Night Gallery: Certain Shadows on The Wall.)
The film is moody, macabre, theatrical, with a musty air of Gothic as Leonora’s remains lay hidden in the coal bin behind the bricks, near the grand piano where she once boisterously sang Tit -Willow from The Mikado…
The atmosphere stays closed in, as all three sisters flit about exposing their disconnection to reality. Evelyn Keyes is Lucy the house maid who brings a bit of naivete to the atmosphere as she too falls prey to Albert the ‘charming rogue” who gets her to participate unwittingly in his ruthless scheme of blackmail.
A quiet and delicately creepy hybrid of the old dark house sub genre of horror, mixed with suspenseful psychological thriller as it whimsically touches on the subject of mental illness and the darker sides of human nature.
The brooding Lanchester and the chattering, guileless Barrett (I Walked With A Zombie, The Ghost Ship, Jane Eyre all 1943) are wonderful as the one who is intense and a compulsive collector, to the one who is as fay as an aged wood sprite, wide eyed and childlike.
In contrast to the flightiness of her two sisters, the tightly coiled Lupino is beautiful and menacing as she anguishes over the fate of the peculiar pair who act more like undisciplined children, and less the blatant lunatics.
It’s the subtle intrusions of reality that impinge on the character’s terminal state of fantasy,which brings out the self-centered, insulated psyches of the two sisters. This creates the environment of insanity, and while they cause the situation to ignite a criminal conspiracy because of their unchallenged instability they are essentially harmless ultimately exposing Ellen as the most dangerous and cunning in the family.
Albert charms his way into Leonora’s home and heart!
Louisa Creed: I hate the dark. It frightens me. Sister Theresa: It shouldn’t, my dear. Don’t you believe we’re watched over? Louisa Creed: Oh yes. But I’m never quite sure who’s watching us.
Ida Lupino on the set of Ladies in Retirement 1941
There are thousands of films as fabulous as this in my collection, this is just one of them!-MonsterGIrl
But, I that am not shap’d for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass I, that am rudely stamp’d and want love’s majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deform’d unfinish’d sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them-
-Shakespeare, King Richard III, I.I.14-23
Merry Anders plays the attractive and likable Nancy Campbell married to Scott Campbell (Ron Foster) an architect who is hired by their mutual friend Joseph Schiller( Richard Crane), to survey a castle up in the Hollywood hills. It’s more like a Hollywood Spanish fortress set in the middle of nowhere, for the reclusive Rochester’s who had it built for privacy.
Upon driving up to the Rochester Castle up on the isolated hill, it brought to mind the long opening driving sequence in House on Haunted Hill (1959), with its similar eccentric mansion, opulent… a monstrosity… Same with Eleanor Lance driving up to Hugh Crane’s twisted damned architectural fiend that was Hill House.
Directed by Michael Gordon, Produced by Ross Martin, based on a play, and adapted to the screen by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, this crime melodrama is filled with all the right tawdry drama and campy dialogue that makes watching films from the fabulous 60’s so much fun!
Starring Lana Turner as Sheila Cabot a woman who is married to a dying shipping magnate Matthew Cabot ( Lloyd Nolan). Anthony Quinn portrays Dr. David Rivera, Matthew Cabot’s attending physician. The wealthy couple lives in a sumptuous home in San Francisco.
Sheila and the good Doctor, begin having an affair, and soon after their sparks fly, the lovers decide to murder Sheila’s nasty yet, terminally ill husband.
But as often the way these juicy tales of murder and passion go, someone knows the lovers have killed off the rich old Cabot, and begins blackmailing them.
Sandra Dee plays Cathy, Cabot’s daughter from his first marriage. Richard Basehart is Howard Mason, Cabot’s greedy business partner. John Saxon plays Blake Richards, the chauffeur, who is pursuing Cathy, and Ray Walston, Virgina Grey and Anna May Wong fill out the cast of dubious characters, all of whom might be the ‘one’ who knows about their crime!
Oh the flashy melodramatics, Oh Turner’s wardrobe! There are thousands of films in my collection, this is just one of those deliciously trashy ones.- MonsterGirl…
You know, men aren’t the only ones that know how to use a syringe…turn some dials, flip some switches, crank the whatsit, and raise up the thingamabob…extend the oscillator and tweak the Mezzershmitzchen levels!
Women play with Ape Men, they build men, they like maggots, make deadly nerve gas and even perform reconstructive surgery on their own faces!
Urbane master of horror Vincent Price stars in one of William Castle’s atmospheric carnival rides as Dr. Warren Chapin, a pathologist whose milieu is the autopsies of executed prisoners from the State prison.
Chapin is driven by a curiosity to find out the source of the mysteriously evil force that creates the SENSATION of fear, and so he sparks a theory that there is an organism called… The Tinglermanifests itself at the base of the spine when one is experiencing abject fear. The Tinglerhowever is subdued by the act of screaming. This nightmare from the vertebral id looks like a giant centipede or a flat lobster with mandibles, lots of legs, and armored scales.
Each of us is inhabited by one of these creepy crawling death grippers, which grow larger as our fear expands, but because of our ability to scream, it lays dormant, incognito, and in repose at the base of our spines.
At first, Chapin locks himself in his lab, experimenting by taking doses of LSD and trying to induce fear first in stray cats and then in himself.
So it goes until Chapin meets Ollie and Martha Higgins who own a revival silent movie theater, and oh yes, Martha happens to be a deaf-mute, who also has an extreme phobia of the sight of blood.
As you know, I adore Judith Evelyn and am not very happy when it’s suggested that Chapin injects her with some LSD instead of a sedative in order to induce some nightmarish experiences, in which Martha will not be able to ‘scream’ therefore unable to suppress the little monster waiting to grip her when the moment of fear takes hold…
Click on the image, to see the ghostly chair at work…
In one of the most memorable classic horror movie sequences, Martha (Evelyn) during her presumed lysergic acid journey is stalked through her modest, bleak, and sinister apartment by a ghoulish phantom, who hurls a hatchet at her and then maneuvers her into the bathroom, where blood runs from the sink taps and the white porcelain tub fills with actual red-colored blood (the film is of course in B&W) An arm rises from the tub and clutches toward Martha, who is in the throws of primeval fear, made all the more brutal by the fact that she cannot utter a sound thus not… scream out!
Dying of fright on the bathroom floor, Ollie wraps her up in a sheet and brings her to Dr. Chapin’s house. Sensible, skip the police and straight to the autopsy I say!
Chapin had figured that Martha’s extreme fear would enable the Tingler to grow to its veritable actual size, and thus give him the opportunity to catch a living specimen, by slicing open Martha’s back and peeling the monster from her spinal column.
Having set out to try his experiment, he was unaware that husband Ollie equipped with a ghoul mask, axe, and tub filled with tomato red blood ( in a B & W film, using special focus lenses for the colored sequences) was plotting to scare his poor wife to death, and appropriate Chapin’s LSD inducing experiment to frighten Martha to death.
Once Chapin has the Tingler, Ollie takes his de-tinglered wife back home and Chapin’s wife Isabel (Price always seems to have a scheming hussy for a wife in these flicks) slips him a Mickey and lets loose the Tingler on her unconscious husband, which proceeds to clutch at his throat like a tick on a sunny august hound dog. Luckily sister-in-law Lucy arrives just in time to… SCREAM!
“Don’t you hate it when your neighbor’s dog fluffy humps your leg whenever he’s out for a walk!”
The Tingler lets go of its death grip, Chapin puts the thing in a pet carrier and goes off to Ollie’s apartment to put the darn thing back onto Martha’s backbone. He soon realizes that Ollie murdered his wife, a fight ensues, and the Tingler gets loose, slipping through the floorboards, and is now inside the movie house looking for someone to death grip!
From Guilty Pleasures of The Horror Film page 137- Article by Tom Weaver
William Castle had told Price that:
“Usually people who are frightened scream, and that keeps their Tingler from growing. Judith Evelyn will play a deaf-mute who runs a silent movie theater. Experimenting you scare the hell out of her, but because she can’t utter a sound she’s unable to scream-her Tingler grows, crushing her to death, you operate, remove the Tingler from her spine, but it escapes and gets into the silent movie theater. Well then, make believe that the theater is actually where the picture is playing…all hell breaks loose!”
In Weaver’s article, he discusses the waning horror movie genre after WWII and how Henri-Georges Clouzot’sDiabolique in 1955 was at the vanguard of cinema.
Vera Clouzot in her husband’s masterpiece Le Diaboliques 1955.
Castle was so impressed with how much the younger audiences had a hunger to be scared pantless, that supposedly it was this French thriller, that inspired Castle to try scaring the pants off audiences as well.
Many a Film Noir was tinged with elements of the horrific, with dark undertones and psychological angles that became very influential in American and British cinema. Where else did darker cinema have to go in order to funnel its often transgressive, unorthodox, taboo energies but through the Psychotronic, Cult, or B-Movie horror genres?
The very bizarre, disturbing, and surreal Shanks directed by William Castle.
Just a little later in the early 60s, I think of The Stranglerwith Victor Buono in 1964 or Grant Williams in The Couch in 1962, The Nanny in 1965, or The Naked Kiss 1964 which filtrated pretty grotesque narratives of, Pedophilia, deranged psychosis, incest and again, the Oedipus complex.
Aldrich had ushered in a whole new persona for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford with his Grand Dame Guignol tour de force, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane 1962.
The trumpets were hailing for Castle to step up and create his own uniquely tacky ballyhoo! While not Freud in the inkwell, certainly at least some kitschy Schadenfreude.
Castle could see that young Americans were starving for entertainment that was part horrific and a little exhibitionist. He purchased a copy on the cheap of a horror/mystery novel called The Marble Forest and got television writer Robb White to put a screenplay together, and hey while they were at it, why not give it a french sounding title as a tout to Diabolique!
That’s when they released Macabre 1958which actually didn’t come until 3 years after the release of Diabolique. Weaver doubts Castle’s accuracy about certain details in his relatings about the series of events but then again William Castle was admittedly a showman, a huckster, the PT Barnum of Horror films, and didn’t deny that he could tell big whoppers at times. It was all in fun…!
William Castle and Mia Farrow on the set of Rosemary’s Baby!
There are even conflicting stories as to how the project for The Tingler came about. White who also wrote the script for House on Haunted Hill claims that it was makeup man Jack Dusick who showed White a foot-long rubber worm that he had created. “This worm, it haunted you… it scared you!!!”
White thought about the idea and went to Castle and told him that they should find out “where fear comes from” and they’ll use the WORM!
Actually, the concept of FEAR itself becomes a vital character to the narrative of The Tingler, although I’m sure Castle couldn’t give a hoot about the real ‘why’ more likely it was the ‘how’ to go about doing the ‘how’! He was more of the discount provocateur than an auteur. He had vision, it was just in 3D.
According to Castle, he asked an artist at Columbia’s art department what a Tingler should look like, ” Sort of like a lobster but flat, and instead of claws, it has long slimy feelers!”
Of course, the cast thought the script preposterous, but Price always approached anything he did with style, and an urbane dignity.
For the promotion of The Tingler, some theaters even had boxes in the lobby, where a live Tingler was being held. You were warned not to panic, but to SCREAM if it breaks loose!
White had written that they couldn’t find anything to make the Tingler look more frightening until Castle (Bill) came in one morning with a small vibrator which eventually saved the picture.
It was his idea to take out all the motors from thousands of vibrators and screw them under the theater seats, then rig everything up at crucial moments so that the audience would suddenly begin vibrating in waves, six rows at a time!
Again, whether this is true or not, Castle claims he got the idea one night after he got a violent electrical shock from changing a light bulb on his bedside table. William Castle wrote in hisStep Right Up! “I’m going to buzz the asses of everyone in America!”Â
By installing little motors under the seats of every theater in the country, the projectionist would get the special cues on the film itself, then press a button once the Tingler appears on screen to ‘jolt’ the audience, leading them to believe that the Tingler was loose in the actual theater!
Dona Holloway the Associate to the Producer dubbed the process PERCEPTO!
Now that I’m back in the NYC area, I have to see if the Film Forum on Houston Street still runs their horror/sci-fi/fantasy Festivals. Years ago, I happened to catch a showing of The Maze 1953 where they passed out 3D glasses to the audience. At one time the Film Forum ran The Tingler complete with Percepto! I would love to have had my ass in one of those seats…
As far as Robb White, he considered these films dumb, “I hated ’em” and “And for years didn’t see some of the films I made with Bill Castle. I mean they’re so dumb God!- there’s not a worm in your backbone when you get scared.”
The 49th Parallel (1949) Directed by Michael Powell and starring Leslie Howard and Laurence OlivierLa Belle et la Bête 1946 directed by Jean Cocteau starring Jean Marais and Josette DayBeggars of Life 1928 staring Wallace Beery, Louise Brooks and Richard Arlen. Directed by William WellmanBunny Lake is Missing 1965 Directed by Otto Preminger. Starring Carol Lynley, Laurence Olivier, and Keir DulleaLa Main du Diable or Carnival of Sinners 1943 Directed by Maurice Tourneur and stars Pierre Fresnay, Josseline Gael and Noel RoquevertThe Devil and Daniel Webster 1941 Directed by William Dieterle and stars Walter Houston as Old Scratch, and Edward Arnold, Jane Darwell and Simone Simon.Dracula’s Daughter 1936 directed by Lambert Hillyer and starring Gloria Holden, Otto Kruger and Marguerite ChurchillExperiment in Terror 1962 directed by Blake Edwards and starring Lee Remick, Glenn Ford, Stephanie Powers and a raspy Ross Martin as ‘Red’ LynchFallen Angel 1945 Directed by Otto Preminger and starring Linda Darnell, Dana Andrews and Alice FayeFedra The Devil’s Daughter 1956 Directed by Manuel Mur Oti and stars Emma Penelia, Enrique Diosdado and Vicente ParraJoan Crawford is Possessed 1947 directed by Curtis Bernhardt, also starring Van Heflin and Raymond MasseyDiaboliques 1955 directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot and Paul MeurisseNever Take Sweets From A Stranger 1960 Directed by Cyril Frankel and stars Gwen Watford, Patrick Allen and Felix AylmerThe Night Holds Terror 1955 Directed by Andrew L. Stone starring Jack Kelly, Hildy Parks, Vince Edwards and John CassavetesRobert Mitchum is Harry Powell, in Night of The Hunter 1955 Directed by Charles Laughton also starring Shelley Winters and Lillian GishPlunder Road 1957 directed by Hubert Cornfield and stars Gene Raymond, Jeanne Cooper, Wayne Morris and Elisha Cook Jr.Seance On a Wet Afternoon 1964 directed by Bryan Forbes and stars Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough and Margaret LaceyAlfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On a Train 1951 starring Farley Granger, Robert Walker and Ruth RomanGloria Swanson is Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard 1950 Directed by Billy Wilder and starring William Holden and Erich von StroheimVal Lewton’s The Seventh Victim 1943 Directed by Mark Robson and stars Kim Hunter, Tom Conway and Jean BrooksBoris Karloff and Bela Lugosi star in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat 1934 inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story.The Killer Is Loose 1956 Directed by Budd Boetticher and stars Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming and Wendell CoreyThe Ox-Bow Incident 1943 Directed by William Wellman and stars Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes and Anthony QuinnThe Prowler 1951 Directed by Joseph Losey and stars Evelyn Keyes and Van HeflinThe Queen of Spades 1949 Directed by Thorold Dickinson and stars Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans and Yvonne MitchellLon Chaney stars in Tod Browning’s The Unknown 1927 also starring Joan Crawford and Norman Kerry.Edward L. Cahn’s 1956 film The WerewolfJean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher 1928 inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and adapted for the screen by Luis BunuelCarl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) Based on a story by Sheridan Le Fanu. Starring Julian West, Maurice Schutz and Rena Mandel
Dear readers, I am grateful to finally be back on line, after some of the devastation that so many people experienced from this past storm.
We got a little thrown back into the primitive days of reading ghost stories by candle light instead of watching them on TV, and huddling together with the cats to stay warm.
Others in New York and New Jersey did not fair as well. I send so much peace and healing to those who have been adversely affected.
If there is anything I can do, please reach out. Now that PSE&G has thrown us back into Modernity, I can not only feel my fingertips again, I can also continue to blog once again.
Also of special note: While I was out of communication, I missed out on so many lovely sentiments about my contribution to the Val Lewton Blogathon as well as some of the nifty things I posted before all went BLACK!
Thank you all for being so kind and supportive to my blog. Every comment means a lot, and makes me smile so wholeheartedly.
My heart goes out to my friends and neighbors here in the Tri State Area. We are strong, we have our senses of humor and we stick together in times like this. Be well, be safe, be happy until all is restored again.
With much peace, Joey MonsterGirl
I’ll leave you with a wonderful mascot of energy Behold Eck!
