As we get to the end of the first 100 films, I am using #98-100 for some unusual picks that are my hills to die on. Because 100 is a common endpoint for a list of Greatness, I like to reserve it for my favorite “bad” movie. Of all the Best Horror/Thrillers, this one’s the worst?
I avoided filmmaker William Castle for a long time because his legacy was always connected to his box office gimmicks. It made him sound corny, and not a serious director. How wrong I was. Castle never had the budget for something truly cinematically groundbreaking, but he had skill and like Hitchcock – who he often jokingly compared himself to – he knew how to use cinematic language to get a reaction from an audience.
I’ve now seen 29 William Castle features, including all the Horror/Thrillers. House on Haunted Hill is his most popular and a crowd-pleaser, but The Tingler is his bonkers Masterpiece. It’s his only film with Vincent Price, and the two were made for each other. It has the nutso premise of a creature that forms around the spine during moments of extreme fear. (The creature is very rubbery/fake, and that doesn’t even matter, like the film would’ve been worse with a quality monster.) There’s a classic moment of genuine Horror involving a bathtub filled with blood, and a scene where the creature gets loose in a movie theater and the screen goes to black while we hear Vincent Price encourage the audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic. But SCREAM! Scream for your lives!”
This ties back to my post on the documentary The American Scream. It’s the real reason why audiences will always show up for a movie like this. Cinema.
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