In 1959, when I was seven years old, I saw the film, The Tingler, in the theatre. At least, I saw most of it. For those not familiar with this film, The Tingler, starring Vincent Price and helmed by William Castle, is a basic horror film of that era, with the premise that, at the peak of our fear, an actual creature, that of the film’s title, forms inside our bodies, attaching itself to our spinal column, and will kill us if we do not release our fear in a scream, which disables the critter. Price plays a doctor whose theory this is.
Bear in mind that this was a decade before a formal rating system for movies was implemented, and a seven-year-old kid, who had no business being in that theatre, could sit with older kids and adults, and have the stuffing scared out of him. What fun.
Before the film began, Castle himself appeared on screen to make the introduction, menacingly warning the audience about what they were about to see and that they, like the characters in the story, should scream at the top of their lungs when the tingler appears. This will help the poor saps in the film to render the beastie harmless. Uh huh. All around me, the crowd, including my parents and sister, was laughing and hooting at all this. So was I. However, my reaction was more of a going-along-survival-instinct, rather than bona fide amusement. I should mention here that, in order to add more fun to the experience, buzzers were randomly placed under some seats in the theatre, and they would go off under those lucky patrons’ posteriors at the appropriate moments. Oh, the jocularity.
Well, the movie starts and goes along, with Vinnie and his co-stars doing their thing, and finally, the moment comes to reveal the tingler itself. After someone goes ape doo-doo, Vinnie performs surgery in his laboratory, and there it is: The Tingler. It looks like a combination bug and lobster made out of rubber. Scary? To seven-year-old me, you bet! But since this one has been removed, it’s alive and sticks around, later crawling up on the dozing doc, wrapping its tentables around his neck, and trying to choke the life out of him. Of course, he couldn’t scream and render it harmless because he couldn’t breathe. Fortunately, the girl in the film enters at that moment and provides the neccesary blood-curdling shriek. Naturally, the audience is helping all the while. Having fun yet, kid?
The part that did it for me came when a woman–a deaf-mute–wakes to see a form under the covers in her absent husband’s bed, and she gets up and pulls back the covers. Whoa, Nelly! Here we go! A monster is there, threatening her with a knife, chasing her into the bathroom. This film is in black and white, but here is the point of the special effect: the bathtub is filled with blood, and we can tell because it’s red! Then, as the terrified woman watches, a hand reaches out. Lovely red blood also streams out of the spigot in the sink. Yipes! This was as far as I got. I was officially scared out of my gourd. My father took me out of the theatre, and neither of us saw the rest of the movie till years later on TV, at which time, I was old enough not to freak out.
In those days, there weren’t malls all over, with mutliplexes in most of them. If you lived in the ‘burbs, you had to go “downtown” to the movies. We had done this several times over the years, seeing mostly, for my benefit, Disney movies, both new and classic, so it was probably not a splendid idea to take me to a horror film, campy–by today’s view–or not. Lesson learned. Not gonna do that again.
The following year, 1960, we all went to the movies again. This time, however, we split up, going to see different movies in different theatres. My father and I went to see The Lost World, starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, Jill St. John, David Hedison, and Fernando Lamas. It had dinosaurs, or lizards dressed up like them, and, to an eight-year-old, nothing’s cooler than dinosaurs. I loved it. Even when character actor, Jay Novello, who played Fernando’s bud, got grabbed and eaten by a dino, I was loving it. Nothin’ scary here!
My mother and sister went to see a film that was a little scary for its time. It was Psycho. I never did ask them if they enjoyed it.