MovieChat Forums > The Tingler (1959) Discussion > The original in the theater

The original in the theater


I ahve a friend who has probably (no offense) forgotten more about movies than any of you will ever remember. He told me that when this movie originally was in theater, the directer had metal plates installed on the back of the seats and when the Tingler scene came, a shock of electricity went throught he persons spine. Anyone know anything about this? Was there?

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I have a relative who saw this movie in the theatre as a child and he said that yes, the seats were rigged so that people would get an electric shock.

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Just to add on a bit it was a gimmick called "Percepto". William Castle was famous for gimmicks I guess. There is a bit about it on the 40th anniversary DVD.

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I believe it was a vibration not an electric shock. The electric shock thing was supposedly a rumor, which I'm sure the master of cheesy publicity himself, William Castle, did nothing to stop.

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Electric shocks? Think about it for a minute ... how would you get insurance against fatally electrocuting some of the customers? Did teams of electricians follow the movie out on the road with generators and miles of wiring? How much would it all cost? This is simply an amusing piece of film folklore, probably invented and fed to the press by that master of publicity William Castle. There's a watered-down version of this legend that says it was really only some kind of vibrating gizmo fitted to the seats, but that seems to be subject to most of the same objections. Still, I've never been so scared by a film in my life, albeit that was at the impressionable age of 15, and I was seeing it on TV without benefit of electric shocks. The ordinary shocks were good enough.

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I believe Castle did set up vibrators on certain seats for the premiere of this movie. I saw it in the theater at the Film Forum in NYC in about 1994 where they supposedly set it up the way Castle had for that original premiere presentation.

Really it made no difference, unless you were in one of theose vibrating seats, but they did have a plant who got up and wrestled around with a (red) lobster thingy at the crucial moment.

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

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no they really did have those in the seats.

*ooo a piece a candy oo a piece a candy oo a piece a candy oo a piece a candy oo a piece a candy!

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People keep pushing that electric shock garbage. I saw the film in the theatre on its original release and a few of the seats were wired with some sort of vibrating box. I knew about this before I went to see the film and specifically searched until I found one of the seats. It wasn't hard. They were all on aisle seats. The effect was there but no one jumped out of their seats. Mostly the people giggled when the buzzers went off. Same when the film stopped and Vincent Price starting saying "Scream for your lives - just a lot of giggles and laughter.

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There weren't giggles and laughter when I saw it in l960. Scream for your lives is what we did. We were kids. And some grown-ups were screaming, too.
It was wonderful.

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Yes, there was. They talk about it on the DVD. The director was known for doing things like that. He had a skeleton fly through the audience when House on Haunted Hill came out.

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I will never forget that skeleton flying out at the top of the screen if I live to be 100. I was a teenager and all we knew that there was supposed to be a skeleton that comes out of the screen. Well, at the end of House on Haunted Hill, when the guy has the skeleton and a contraption and he's reeling the skeleton in, at the top of the movie screen, someone must have pushed a button, when this skeleton came flying out of the top of the screen. I never laughed so hard in all my life. What a wonderful time we had way back when. Before all the CGI effects, and star wars. This was way back when, when you went to a scary movie, you were actually scared.

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The skeleton thingy was another Castle "process" called EMERGO. The publicity said "The thrills fly off the screen!" In the event, there was a long black box, the same height as the screen and right next to it, partly concealed by the screen curtain. At the appropriate moment, a dangling skeleton "emerged" from the box and was pulled out over the audience. I was a kid, but just old enough to be disappointed, as I'd believed the publicity and expected something to come jumping out at us. Our skeleton didn't "fly" out; it only sort of floated. Even so, I did and still do like the movie a lot.


"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it."--Oscar Wilde

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I don't remember feeling any sensation through my back, but in my theatre
they definitely had the armrests rigged, so that I felt a mild electrical sensation through my forearms every time the "Tingler" went on one of its rampages.

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people were so stupid back then.

*ooo a piece a candy oo a piece a candy oo a piece a candy oo a piece a candy oo a piece a candy!

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Mm hmm...and some people are so stupid today.

...and your suffering will be legendary even in Hell!!

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[deleted]

I do believe it was just a vibrator seat.

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If I attended a movie and sat in a vibrator seat, I don't think I'd ever leave. Even subjected such campy acting in a movie like THE TINGLER.

Am I anywhere near the imaginary cliff?

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Lady, i was wondering when someone would say that.

' Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.'-Marx

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It was a buzzer type of device that vibrated the seats. It was NOT raw electricity. As someone else stated - think about it - electricity and lawsuits. Castle was a great promoter, great at coming up with gimmicks to drum-up press on his movies, but he wasn't stupid. He wouldn't risk lawsuits or the bad press of someone being injured or dying.

Further, it would require raw wires on the seats to give people a shock - it would've been visible. The buzzers attached to the bottom or back of the seats would've been far less visible, far easier to install and much easier to operate. The buzzer/vibrator gives the impression of a shock especially when you see someone getting shocked on the screen. It's just like the old joy buzzers that would "shock" someone you have a handshake too - it only buzzed & vibrated - no electricity - they were wind-up toys. It's all the power of suggestion.

The same sort of thing is used in haunted houses and amusement parks today. Show a dummy "getting electrocuted" with it jerking around, some buzzing, maybe even some sparks, then put a vibration through a platform others are standing on or the railing they're holding onto and voila - everyone's convinced they're being shocked.

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Just because it's electricity, that doesn't mean at all that it is fatal.

¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,"No power in the 'verse can stop me."-River Tam~¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,

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The same sort of thing is used in haunted houses and amusement parks today. Show a dummy "getting electrocuted" with it jerking around, some buzzing, maybe even some sparks, then put a vibration through a platform others are standing on or the railing they're holding onto and voila - everyone's convinced they're being shocked.

A few years back I went to Las Vegas and visited The Star Trek Experience before it shut down, at The Hilton. It was a live action show with actors and your are moved from room to room like in a real starship. At one point in the show, The Borg are "assimilating" you while we are sitting in an auditorium, and the seat start poking you with these small, slow pistons like they are inserting their cyborg implants. It was pretty cool.

At some of these scary shows back then, they would have a Nurse in the lobby of the theater for those that felt "overcome" by the gimmicks and shocking things in the movie. My mom saw most of them growing up, and got me hooked on horror at an early age.

http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv207/haspenc13/zombiestronghold.jp g

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C'mon, it was .25 cents to see this at the local movies theatre. How much do you think it would have cost to set up vibrators in all the seats around all the theatres it played at just in the USA ? THINK people !! Do ya have any idea what it costs to hire an electrician(s) ? Especially a union electrician around NYC, LA, Chicago ...
Sometimes I come on here and find myself astounded at what I read. I can see having a 'buzzer' type unit mounted on the floor which made the entire floor of the theatre give off a 'tingling' sensation - maybe on opening night just to create a buzz' (bad pun intended) in the papers but to wire every seat in every theatre just for a 2/3 day engagement no less ...

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John Waters called The Tingler the fondest moviegoing experience of his youth. He saw it every day and he talks at length about the Percepto device in his book, Crackpot.

A Tingler was an organism that lived in everyone's spinal column. A cross between a lobster and a crab, it came to life only when a person was frightened. The only way to kill this little bugger was to scream. In the film, the Tingler breaks loose in a movie theater and kills the projectionist. In real theaters where the film was playing, the screen would go white at this point and a voice would announce, "Attention! The Tingler is loose in this theater. Please scream for your life." Naturally, the audience responded by shrieking their lungs out but this wasn't good enough for the Master of Gimmicks. He came up with "Percepto," "the newest and most startling screen gimmick." Similar to a handshake buzzer, Percepto was nothing more than little motors installed under theater seates and activated by the projectionist at teh exact moment the audience was in a frenzy. As the patrons got their asses buzzed, the theater would erupt in pandemonium. Castle estimated in his autobiography that he buzzed more than 20 million American asses.

Naturally there were problems. In Philadelphia one beefy truck driver was so incensed that he ripped his entire seat from the floor and had to be subdued by five ushers. In another city, the management dutifully installed the percepto equipment the night before the film was scheduled to open. That night the smart alecky projectionist decided to test the fanny buzzers on a group of older women who were watching The Nun's Story on the last night of its run. I'm sure Audrey Hepburn never got such a vocal reaction before or after this "electrifying" screening.

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I was just listening to a local radio show here in Ohio and the subject of old movies came up and someone called in about this one. A caller said he saw this movie in a theater when he was just a kid and mentioned the vibrating seats.

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Where did you read that? All I know is that they were unsuspecting "victims."

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Not true. Vibrators were actually invented in the late 19th century by doctors to help with "female problems" ... specifically, for women who suffered from "hysteria," used back then to discribe female sexual dissatisfaction. I doubt that the vibrating seats used by Castle in theatres for his film "The Tingler" had any effect.

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Don't believe everything John Waters tells you - he's a total drama queen.

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I'd take John Waters word over yours.

I don't want a large farva. I want a goddamn litre o' cola!

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I know a guy who installed these back in the '50s WITH William Castle when the film first came out. Castle's company bought vibrators from an army surplus store (the kind that were attached to plane wings during the war to de-ice them). There was no shock of any kind involved whatsoever. Anyone who remember is like that is remembering wrong.

It's also interesting to note that not all theaters did the vibrator trick-- only theaters in big cities or towns or in place where Castle was touring in person. The chances of having seen the film in person with the vibrator gag was pretty slim, but the blackout effect in the film was enough for any delinquents to do their own mischief comparable to the buzzers.

-J. Theakston
http://centraltheater.blogspot.com

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During a revival of this film at the Strand Theater in San Francisco in 1989, selected seats were indeed wired with rings that gave two dozen or so lucky patrons a mild electrical shock two or three times during the film. People of all ages were actually fighting over them. I can remember parents asking their children to change seats during the movie so their younger siblings could "feel the Tingler bite them." The effect definitely made spectators squirm when the juice was turned on. House on Haunted Hill was also featured during this retrospective. A plastic skeleton (complete with mismatched tennis shoes) emerged from a coffin-like box in front of the screen and was pulled a few feet over the audience on an overhead wire, more or less in sync with the skeleton in the movie that rises from a vat of acid to torment the unfaithful Mrs. Loren.

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