Disembodied screams, rattling chains, and ghoulish groans amidst creaking doors- all a delicious mixture of frightful sounds that emanate from a jet-black screen.
Suddenly Watson Pritchard’s floating head narrates the evening’s spooky tale…
“The ghosts are moving tonight, restless… hungry. May I introduce myself? I’m Watson Pritchard. In just a moment I’ll show you the only really haunted house in the world. Since it was built a century ago, seven people including my brother have been murdered in it, since then, I own the house. I’ve only spent one night there and when they found me in the morning, I… I was almost dead.” -Watson Pritchard
The marvelously dashing face of Vincent Price or for the film’s purposes, Frederick Loren’s head sporting a plucky mustache and highbrow tone introduces himself in front of the imposing Modern-Ancient structure.
“I’m Frederick Loren and I’ve rented the house on haunted hill tonight so my wife can give a party. A haunted house party"¦ She’s so amusing. There’ll be food and drink and ghosts and perhaps even a few murders. You’re all invited. If any of you will spend the next twelve hours in this house, I’ll give you each $10,000. Or your next of kin in case you don’t survive. Ah, but here come our other guests…”“It was my wife’s idea to have our guests come in funeral cars… She’s so amusing. Her sense of humor is shall we say, original. I dreamt up the hearse. It’s empty now but after a night in the house on haunted hill"¦ who knows.”“Lance Schroeder a test pilot, no doubt a brave man but don’t you think you can be much braver if you’re paid for it?”“Ruth Bridges the newspaper columnist. She says the reason for her coming to the party is to write a feature article on ghosts. She’s also desperate for money. Gambling.”“Watson Pritchard a man living in mortal fear of a house and yet he’s risking his life to spend another night here"¦ I wonder why? He says for money.”“Dr. David Trent a psychiatrist. He claims that my ghost will help his work on hysteria. But don’t you see a little touch of greed there around the mouth and eyes?”“This is Nora Manning- I picked her from the thousands of people who work for me because she needed the 10,000 more than most. Supports her whole family… Isn’t she pretty?”“The parties’ starting now and you have until midnight to find the house on haunted hill.”
Von Dexter’s music, a mixture of solemn strings, and a sustained and queasy Hammond organ & Theremin greet us with an eerie funeral dirge while the shiny black gimmicky funeral cars pull up in front of the quite sinister post-modern structure.
And this is just the opening fanfare of William Castle’sclassic House on Haunted Hill!
White’s story is quirky and wonderfully macabre as it works at a jolting pace delivering some of the most memorable moments of offbeat suspense in this classic B&W B-Horror morsel from the 50s!
The success of the film inspired Alfred Hitchcock to go out and make his own low-budget horror picture- Psycho 1960.
Much of the style and atmosphere can be attributed to the unorthodox detail by art director Dave Milton and set designer Morris Hoffman. The exterior of the house is actually The Ennis Brown House in Los Angeles, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, built in 1924, and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
There’s a pervasive sense of dread in House on Haunted Hill, that makes the house itself a ‘spook.’
Whether the house is haunted or not, its forbidding presence tells us that it just doesn’t matter. The history of the house itself, its violent past is enough to give one chills. While not in the classic sense like that of RobertWise’s diseased and imposing Hill House, William Castle does a fabulous job of inventing a parameter to tell a very cheeky and pleasurable little scare story. As David J Skal puts it succinctly “The real, if unintentional spook in House on Haunted Hill is postwar affluence.”
The narrative is fueled by the creepy atmosphere of the house itself. Not using a claustrophobic Old Dark House trope but rather a modern Gothic construction that swallows you up with odd motifs and a sense of malignancy within the fortress walls. The starkness of the wine cellar and it’s empty minuscule dark grey rooms with sliding panels is almost more creepy than black shadowy corners with cobwebs and clutter. Director of Photography Carl E Guthrie  (Caged 1950) offers some stunning and odd perspective camera angles and low lighting which aid in the disjointed feeling of the sinister house’s magnetism.
The constant explorations into the viscera of the house by the guests is almost as titillating as the criminal set-up and conspiracy that is afoot propelled by Von Dexter’s tantalizingly eerie musical score with deep piano notes and eerie wispy soprano glossolalia.
House on Haunted Hill works wonderfully, partly due to the presence of the urbane master of chills and thrills, the great Vincent Price who plays millionaire playboy Frederick Loren. Vincent Price was a versatile actor who should not be pigeonholed as merely a titan of terror, given his too numerous layered performances in great films like Otto Preminger’sLaura ’44, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’sDragonwyck ’46, etc. Vincent Price did however make his mark on the horror genre with House on Haunted Hill. The New York Herald-Tribune praised Price’s performance as having “waggish style and bon-vivant skepticism.”
As David J Skal puts it in his, The Monster Show {Vincent Price} “Could bring an arch elegance to the most insipid goings-on…“
The omnipresent Elisha Cook Jr. is superb as Watson Pritchard, the neurotic sot who is riddled with fear, spouting anecdotes about the house’s grisly history.
I adore Elisha Cook, from his cameo in Rosemary’s Baby, his performance as George Peatty in Kubrick’s masterpiece The Killing ’56 to his very uniquely intense role as Cliff the sexually jazzed up drummer in Phantom Lady ’44.
Elisha Cook Jr as the doomed George Peatty in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing ’56.
The strikingly beautiful Carol Ohmart plays Loren’s treacherously seductive wife Annabelle who is sick of her husband’s irrational jealousy. Has she already tried to poison him once but failed? The story alludes to as much. Annabelle wouldn’t be happy with a million-dollar divorce settlement, she wants ALL her husband’s money! Annabelle is Loren’s fourth wife, the first wife simply disappeared.
Gee-I’ve been excited about Bill Castle ever since I saw his skeleton who is billed as ‘himself’ in House on Haunted Hill ’59 down in the wine cellar with Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart.
First of all, I can’t even begin tell you how incredibly grateful I am to all the amazing contributors who are joining me and Goregirl (who’s got a lot of high spirited fun in store for us) in celebrating one of THE most iconically entertaining auteurs. William Castle reached across many genres not just the B-movie spine tinglers that some people remember him for.
Thanks again to all of you who are joining in the fun. You will not only ensure that it’ll be a week of fabulous thoughts, themes and thrills. I just know in my heart that Mr. Castle would glow with pride to see how many people’s lives were touched by his inimitable style and purely delicious ballyhoo!
Don’t forget to grab yourself a banner or two, thanks to my versatile and lovely partner Wendy Christensen and David Arrate for designing such great graphics for the event…!
Because I’m in such a celebratory mood due to our upcoming William Castle Blogathon, I thought I should take his memoirs off the shelf and start devouring it along with watching the fabulous documentary Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story. I just wanted to say a few words about the first few chapters of Bill Castle’s compelling life story Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America: Memoirs of a B-Movie Mogul, and I’m hoping that his wonderful daughter decides to produce a serious biopic about her father’s incredibly captivating life. It would make one hell of a fascinating and titillating journey of what led up to his iconic legacy amidst some memorable figures that inhabited the glamorous and often tumultuous Hollywood of yesteryear. If our blogathon turns even one more person into a new William Castle fan, I’ll feel satisfied that I’ve done right by him.
It’s a hell of a read. From the first few chapters, you feel like Bill is an old friend on a marvelous adventure that you’re rooting for all the way. I have always been such an avid fan of his movies, and the charming way he made us all feel like we were helping participate in the process of making each thrill & chill, gimmick and diversion such a sensational part of the movie experience. That’s what mattered most to him, to entertain all of us. Even if most of his films were considered B-movies they had a lot of heart, and he always dreamed one day to do an A-List film like Hitchcock or Welles, that would garner critical acclaim.
William Castle has been referred to as The Poor Man’s Hitchcock..
He certainly had a great eye for artistic property, considering he spotted the story for what would become The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
He found the novel and obtained the rights to, ‘If I Should Die Before I Wake’, bringing it to his new friend Orson Welles at Columbia. Yet ultimately Cohn insisted on having Welles direct the story which turned into the classic Film Noir paragon with Rita Hayworth. Castle was sad about this, but ultimately knew Welles would do an incredible job and thus settled into being co-director on that film. I wonder how many people realize that he was associated with that iconic piece of noir?
Then, seeing Hitchcock’s success with Robert Bloch’sPsycho (who borrowed a little from Castle’s ballyhoo to concocted his own gimmickry to get the audience to line up around the block) Castle took writer Robb White’s gender bending psycho thriller story and turned it into Homicidal(1961) in response to Hitchcock’s ‘deviant’ genre hit. He drew from the same master of the macabre, Robert Bloch (Psycho 1960) which fueled the graphic shocker Strait-Jacket(1964) with Joan Crawford once again in response to the success of Aldrich’sWhat Ever Happened To Baby Jane (1962) Eventually Castle spotting the greatness in Ira Levin’sRosemary’s Baby!
Mia Farrow standing in the phone booth and Castle’s cameo outside the phone booth, appearing a little like the nefarious Dr Saperstein.
Purchasing the rights to Ira Levin’s script ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ a film which came the closest to elevating him from The Carnival Barker/Maestro of Schlock to Cinema Auter. He wanted so badly to direct himself but Robert Evans head of Paramount at the time insisted on having the young and wildly imaginative director Roman Polanski take the reigns.
But Bill was gracious once he saw Polanski’s vision. And so he did what he was great at and facilitated the film’s process from behind the scenes, trying to keep things moving within the studio’s budget and time constraints. Let’s just say their collaboration created one of THE most gripping pieces of film-making in cinematic history, and my favorite film of all time. Rosemary’s Baby is an irrepressible and timeless masterpiece that transcends any genre.
And I’ll talk about that in depth during the upcoming William Castle Blogathon, with my entry Back Story: What Ever Happened to William Castle’s Baby?
And I wish we hadn’t lost him at age 63. Although he started having doubts about his contribution to the art of film-making, the relevance of all his showmanship, and the fan’s lives he imprinted his trademark on, he would have seen how much of a precious legacy he left behind and how we all still gravitate to his pictures with the same enthusiasm. There’s so many of us who appreciate him and understand that there would be a gaping hole in history if he hadn’t headed out to Hollywood to follow his dream with his incomparable brand of hutzpah!
Even if you’re not familiar with William Castle’s work, you’d be surprised at how much his bigger-than-life presence had influenced Hollywood, and the actors, film-makers and writers he crossed paths with. He was beloved and still is. His stories are fascinating, real or inflated with just a little spice and embellishment about his experiences in the business. He touched so many lives with his exuberant lust for ideas and blithe spirit, always looking for that applause, just an overgrown happy kid.
I could watch his films over and over. They just never gets stale for me and the high spirited imaginings that radiate from all his pictures taps into that nostalgic adrenaline that flows through my veins.
From his first encounter with Bela Lugosi as a young man who went to see Dracula on stage repeatedly, to meeting the wonderful Everette Sloane who was working with OrsonWelles in the theatre, to being suddenly thrown into the midst of great stars like Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant when he first got to Hollywood, his life is as interesting as any good melodrama.
the great character actor Everett Sloan in The Fever episode of The Twilight ZoneWilliam Castle, Barbara Stanwyck and Lloyd Bochner on the set of The Night WalkerIconic film director George Stevens
He ingratiated himself into working under director George Stevens on the classic Penny Serenade and actually got along with Columbia Studio head Harry Cohn who was considered to be up in the there in the ranks of ornery with Hitler and Mussolini! And he was even controlled and bullied by Joan Crawford on the set of Strait-Jacket as he struggled to appease her every whim. But he always remained gracious and kind to everybody.
A scene with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in George Steven’s Penny Serenade with William Castle as director of dialogue?Van Johnson, Mia Farrow, Joan Crawford, Roman Polanski and William Castle Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, John Ireland and Bill Castle on the set of ‘I Saw What You Did’infamous Columbia studio head Harry Cohn
So get hold of a copy of this great book, and here’s to the man who started out as an orphan in New York. A man who just didn’t fit in and was teased at camp until he showed that he had the unusual talent of being double jointed. Then he was touted as ‘The Spider’ saving him from constant beatings and turning him onto the lure of applause and circus side show ballyhoo. That endearing and infectious charm made the great Bela Lugosi, while acting in the stage production of Dracula, give him his first break in theater.
Eventually he met actor Everett Sloane and had the moxie to arrange a meeting with new sensation, Orson Welles. He impressed the artistically distilled cigar smoker so much that he convinced Welles to let him take over his Stoney Creek Theater in Connecticut while he left to film Citizen Kane.
Castle adopted the ritual of smoking a big fatty from watching Welles pace the floor with one. Castle had a ‘twinkle in his eye’ and that taste for risk-taking, pulling a play out of thin air over a long weekend. He made up a pseudonym of a famous German Playwright, gave it a German title translated into ‘Not For Children’ and got one of Germany’s top actresses Ellen Schwanneke (Madchen in Uniform) to star in it.
Ultimately he carried off a publicity stunt that went as far as sending a telegram to Germany telling Adolf Hitler himself that ‘his’ actress would not be coming back to Nazi Germany. Thanks to Bill Castle, Schwanneke became known in the press as the ‘girl who said NO to Hitler…’
That solidified the beginnings of his career and gave him the momentum that would launch him into the world of that grand ‘show business’ and into our collective hearts.
And that’s just the first few chapters…!
With love to dear Bill Castle- From Joey (MonsterGirl)
“I think he was a wonderful director. He followed his dreams, and after all he was right.”–Marcel Marceau
On July 29th 1959 American Producer/Director & Screenwriter William Castle premiered (click on link to read my past post) The Tinglerin the US to theater goers. The audience had the underside of their seats rigged with electric buzzers which were activated at the moment Vincent Price cautions them “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic. But scream! Scream for your lives! The stunt was named ‘Percepto’ and once the projectionist got his cue to let the current rip, people in the audience got a mild jolt to their tuchus and their money’s worth of chills and thrills!
The urbane Vincent Price plays Dr. Warren Chapin a man driven by a curiosity to find out the source of the mysteriously evil force that creates the SENSATION of fear. He discovers an organism called"¦ The Tinglerwhich manifests itself at the base of the spine when one is experiencing abject fear. The Tinglercan only be subdued by the act of screaming.
In his memoirs Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America he talks about the people who got their gluteus maximus’ buzzed with a small electric shock. Castle went as far as to hire fake “screamers and fainters” that he planted in the audience who would then be carted away on a gurney by “nurses” who were situated out in the lobby ready to put them in an ambulance parked outside the theater. This gimmick definitely outshines the last publicity scheme for his first chiller film touted with fanfare in which he offered a certificate for a $1,000 life insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London in case they should die of fright during his picture Macabre (1958) a film he felt inspired to make after seeing the success of Henri-Georges Clouzot’sDiabolique (1955)Â
Growing up in the 60s and 70s my childhood was filled with the sort of wonderful attractiveness William Castle’s shenanigans fostered in my yearning imagination. His films wouldn’t really be considered frightening by anyone’s standards today, but if you were a kid watching television on a rainy Saturday afternoon way back when, and suddenly you were thrust into a world where wearing whacky goggles would allow you to see wild ghosts wreaking havoc in an old eerie mansion in 13 Ghosts, or a disembodied hand rising up from a bath of brilliant red blood in an otherwise black and white landscape in The Tingler, or that moment when Nora Manning sees Mrs.Slydes the blind housekeeper who glides past her, a crone like harbinger of death, or those jaunty little party favors in the shape of coffins containing guns for the guests in House on Haunted Hill, with the added sensational musical scores and atmospherics you’d know the thrill and nostalgic glow that washes over you because William Castle made himself a presence quite like Hitchcock who was invested in bringing us into their world of fear and getting us excited about it!
Castle’s films have left an indelible mark on so many of us, not to mention the incredible movie stars and character actors who inhabited his memorable films, like Vincent Price, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Shelley Winters, Sid Caesar, Ann Baxter, Robert Ryan, Richard Conte, Julie Adams, Rock Hudson, Rhonda Fleming Robert Taylor, Guy Rolfe, Janette Scott, William Prince, Judith Evelyn, Audrey Dalton, Margaret Hamilton, Tom Poston and Elisha Cook Jr. and so many more…
Keep in mind, he produced my favorite film of all time, which I’ve been planning to do a major feature on down the road. The transcendent mind blowing tribute to paranoia and motherhood, Rosemary’s Baby 1968, thank god he decided to let Polanski direct, but still he was the man behind the masterpiece.
And Castle didn’t just do scary campy joyrides, if you look at his filmography you’ll see an array of film noir & mysteries like Hollywood Story (1951),The Fat Man (1951) Undertow (1949) series’ like The Crime Doctor & The Whistler, adventures like Serpent of the Nile (1953), with Rhonda Fleming. Westerns, television series and screwball comedies too like The Busy Body (1967) starring Sid Caesar, Robert Ryan and Ann Baxter , so if you’re a scaredy cat no worries there’s plenty to cover for everybody!
William Castle is one of THE most recognizable showman of film camp, purveyor of cheap chills, the maestro of gimmickry! In a time when the censors were becoming more lax and psycho-sexual themes were infiltrating the cinematic frontier, the trumpets were hailing Castle to step right up and create his own uniquely tacky ballyhoo! Sometimes kitschy, at times quite jolting and paralyzing, so many of us were marvelously effected by the collective tawdry Schadenfreude.
And so I got to thinking– geez it’ll be the 54th anniversary of that Spine-Tingling fun house ride of B-Movie schlockery and what better way to tribute the P.T. Barnum of Classic B-Movie fanfare than to co-host a blogathon with the witty and well versed Terri McSorley of Goregirl’s Dungeon.Â
Castle opens up The Tingler with this fabulous warning to the audience:
I was going to wait and announce the blogathon officially on May 31st which will be the anniversary of Castle’s death in 1977, but we all seem so excited about this, I thought I better get on it and post the details and start the Tingler climbing up our proverbial collective spines! And what a great bunch contributing too!
In honor of The Tingler’s 54th anniversary
The William Castle Blogathon runs from July 29th through August 2nd, 2013 and is Co-hosted by Joey (MonsterGirl) of The Last Drive In and Terri of Goregirl’s Dungeon.
The list of films and contributors are below: We’ll narrow down the dates each person will publish their post a little further down the road. I don’t want to be too restrictive about films being covered twice as everyone has their own unique perspective. There’s still a bunch of films not chosen yet so please consider widening the scope of our celebration by tackling a lesser known film of Bills! All are welcome, if you’re interesting in joining the ride, please contact me!
Please grab any banners for the blogathon and use them on your site if you’d like!
There’s also no constraints on how long your piece should be. As you know I tend to be really long winded myself. If you have any questions at all, like if you’d prefer your name displayed differently please always feel free to drop me a line at ephemera.jo@gmail.com or leave a comment here:
(Joey-MonsterGirl!) The Last Drive In –House on Haunted Hill(1959) & Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949) & Back Story: What Ever Happened to William Castle’s Baby? (Rosemary’s Baby)
Director/Showman extraodinaire William Castlebrings us writer Robb White’s story centered around a quirky dilapidated mansion once owned by eccentric scientist/occultist Dr. Plato Zorba who collected ghosts from around the world, and invented goggles that enable you to see them. When Dr. Zorba dies he wills the strange house and it’s ‘contents’ to his nephew Cyrus Zorba (Donald Woods) and family, wife Hilda (Rosemary De Camp), son Buck (Charles Herbert) and daughter Medea (Jo Morrow). The Zorba family is broke, the bank has even reclaimed the last bit of furnishings. While blowing out the candles on his birthday, Buck wishes for a house with furniture that can’t be taken away. So the fortuitous inheritance comes just in time. Not long after moving in they discover that the house is haunted. Cyrus finds uncle Plato’s notes and learns about the 12 ghosts that inhabit the house, including Dr. Zorba himself who also leaves his housekeeper Elaine Zacharides (Margaret Hamilton) whom Buck constantly refers to as a witch, not a subtle homage to her role in The Wizard of Oz. Hamilton adds a nice bit of nostalgic camp to the creepy environment; floating objects, hidden panels, a bed canopy that closes up like a vice grip to crush the person sleeping in it, and lurking cob webby fiends who lunge from the shadows. Trapped within the walls of the house are the 12 manifested ghosties:Â the crying lady, a feisty skeleton, a meat cleaving Italian chef who murdered his wife and her lover in the kitchen, a roaring lion along side its headless tamer, and Dr. Zorba himself. They need a 13th ghost to set them free. The family is in danger because of the fortune hidden in the house. Martin Milner plays Benjamen Rush, the lawyer who handles the estate for the Zorbas. Is there a flesh and blood killer among them looking for the hidden fortune. Well, you’ll just have to find out for yourself… A true William Castle fun house ride.
One of William Castle’stautly macabre psycho thrillers written by the prolific Robert Bloch (Psycho). Robert Bloch went on to write the surreal story The Night Walker (1964) starring Barbara Stanwyck. This frenetic yet subtle Grande Dame Guignol style flick in the spirit of Robert Aldrich’sHush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), stars the inimitable Joan Crawford as Lucy Harbin, who after 20 years in an asylum for the double axe-murder of her cheating husband and his lover, returns home to stay with her daughter Carol (Diane Baker) where the tension starts to boils over. As Lucy’s daughter Carol prepares to get married, the bodies start piling up, or I should say the heads start to roll once more. Has Lucy become an axe-wielding murderess again?
Carol Harbin: “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! No, I didn’t mean that, I love you. I hate you!”
Also co-starring Lief Erickson, Howard St John, and George Kennedy.Â
Crawford replaced Joan Blondell in the role of Lucy Harbin after Blondell was injured and couldn’t finish the film. Also, Ann Helm had originally been picked to play the role of Carol, but Crawford insisted on them using Diane Baker. There was a lot of product placement of Pepsi-cola as Joan Crawford was on the Board of Directors of the soft drink empire.
the effervescent ever lovin’ Joan Blondell.Ann Helm and Elvis in Follow That Dream 1962.
La Belle et la Bete (1946)Caged (1950)Criss Cross (1949)Devil Girl From Mars (1954)Les Diaboliques (1955)Experiment in Terror (1962)Les yeux sans Visage (1960)Les yeux sans visage (1960)Gloria Grahame The Cobweb (1955)I Bury The Living (1958)Island of Lost Souls (1932)Kiss The Blood Off My Hands (1948)Lady in a Cage (1964)Mother Joan of The Angels (1961)Belle et la Bete (1946)Strait-Jacket (1964)Sunrise (1927)The Haunting (1963)The Queen of Spades (1949)Vampyr (1932)The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962)
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.”
“Only the ghosts in this house are glad we’re here”.
“The ghosts are moving tonight, restless… hungry. May I introduce myself? I’m Watson Pritchard. In just a moment I’ll show you the only really haunted house in the world. Since it was built a century ago, seven people including my brother have been murdered in it, since then, I’ve owned the house. I only spent one night then and when they found me in the morning, I… I was almost dead.”
“These guns are no good against the dead. Only the living.”
