Queer for Fear

The movie is about an inquisitive doctor with a ghoulish enthusiasm for slicing up the cadavers of those who died in fear. He is sure that fright is a living thing that survives in corpses in much the same way that hair and fingernails have been popularly believed to grow after death. So he performs an autopsy on the body of an electrocuted criminal, frightens his wife unconscious by faking her murder, finally shocks a deaf-mute into a heart-stopping nightmare--blood running from the bathroom spigot, a rubber-masked fiend with knife and hatchet popping out of closets, etc. This last time, when the doctor performs his autopsy, a cockroach-like incarnation of fear escapes, the movie stops, and the silhouetted "tingler" itself seems to be crawling on the blank screen.

High Pressure. The viewers at The Tingler's preview in Hollywood last week watched with a kind of critical apprehension. Surely, Horror Movie Expert William Castle, 45, had dreamed up a gimmick more devilish than that. He had. Seconds later, as the tingler was supposedly slithering across the screen, seats actually shivered and buzzed; the audience tingled for fair. Bill Castle had wired vibrators beneath almost everyone in the place.

For Bill Castle, who grew up in a "nice nontheatrical family" on Manhattan's Upper West Side, such electronic promotion is mild. In 1939, in his hopeful, pre-Holly-wood days, he found himself running a straw-hat theater in Stony Creek, Conn, with a German actress, Ellen Schwanneke, on his hands. Business was bad, but Hitler saved the show by inviting Ellen home for a festival. She refused, and Bill billed her as "The Girl Who Said No to Hitler." Then one night he broke every window in the theater and scrawled swastikas on the walls. "We opened," says he, "to klieg lights and state militia all over the place. We ran for ten weeks."

Low Budget. When he got to Hollywood, Bill began a long series of low-budget pictures. They were equally low on profits. Then, in 1957, he made a horror film called Macabre. It was not much of a picture--in fact, it was a wretched thing --but Bill paid Lloyds of London $5,000 for life insurance covering anyone in the audience who died of fright. The picture cost only $80,000, grossed an estimated $1,200,000. This year, Bill released The House on Haunted Hill. The picture cost $150,000, but he spent $250,000 manufacturing skeletons that dance off the screen and dangle out over the audiences. The gimmick has paid off so well that he expects to take in well over $3,000,000.

The Tingler's tingles are produced by small electric motors (one under each seat) bought from war-surplus stores for $3 apiece. They will be distributed to theaters along with a control panel, so that a man in the projection booth can turn them on and off in waves as the tingler crawls across the screen. Says Bill Castle: "I want to tap the entire potential audience--teen-agers, children, all devotees of adventure and horror."

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