Horror
United States of America
The Tingler is a 1959 horror film directed by William Castle and starring Vincent Price. The plot follows a pathologist named Dr. Warren Chapin (Price) who discovers a creature known as a "tingler," which lives in every vertebrate and grows in size when the host experiences extreme fear.
Chapin becomes obsessed with studying the tingler and decides to capture one for his research. He eventually finds a tingler in the spine of a deceased woman who had a lifelong history of fear and anxiety. He removes the creature and discovers that it is capable of causing its host to become paralyzed with fear.
Chapin believes that the only way to kill the tingler is to make its host scream, which causes the creature to weaken and die. He decides to test his theory by trapping a live tingler in the spine of his wife, and then giving her a drug to induce fear. When she becomes paralyzed with fear, Chapin forces her to scream, and the tingler dies.
The Tingler is notable for its use of "Percepto," a gimmick devised by Castle that involved electrical buzzers attached to theater seats that would vibrate during key moments of the film to simulate the sensation of the tingler being loose in the theater. The film was a box-office success and has since become a cult classic in the horror genre.
