TCM is airing a Vincent Price Marathon today, with special consideration to the Roger Corman's productions of Edgar Allen Poe's writings.I've just viewed The Tingler (1959) for the first time (taped it too, thank goodness) and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Having studied The Last Man on Earth (1964) for my NCUR research on women in zombie film, I noticed that horror text write off The Tingler as gimmicky-William Castle-schlock, most notably for the amazing "Percepto!" effect in which tiny shockers were attached to theater seats to frighten patrons into screaming. What fun it would have been to be in the audience the first time that was used!
Writes David Skal in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (Faber & Faber: New York, 2001):
"Castle's gimmicks were part of the larger Hollywood movement in the fifties towards expansive presentational modes that could compete with television...Flying skeletons, buzzing seats, and hokey insurance policies had the additional effect of turning impersonal moviegoing into a ritual of participatory live theater, an understandable lure in a decade marked by suburban isolation and personal alienation...Horror gimmicks provided audiences with a needed sense of contact, engagement, and recognition. Even if the dominant sensation was gooseflesh, at least it was a feeling." (259)
Knowing this, a tingle goes up my own spine upon hearing that Feast (2005) writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan are in the process of writing a remake of The Tingler, due out in 2009. The L.A. Times reports (with a nod to The Tingler) that advances similar to "Percepto!" are being made in 3D technology,
"At a time when theater attendance is threatened by the explosion in home entertainment choices, filmmakers and exhibitors are eager to come up with an experience that can't be duplicated at home."
What does this say about the current social climate? Are we so, as Skal writes of fifties audience, isolated and alienated, that remakes and special gadgetry are all that can shock Americans out their dimly-lit living room malaise and into theaters? It can hardly be coincidental, Hollywood is remaking fifties and sixties horror movies with wild abandon: The Invasion (2007) hearkens back Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), I Am Legend (2007) to another Price flick, The Last Man on Earth.
Is it any surprise in this age of television infotainment, increasing globalization but decreasing world coverage, a world where everyone knows of Paris and Lindsay's "tragedies" but has to be pushed and shoved into giving a damn about the Darfur. A society so desperate for feeling that the outrageousness of torture porn is all that will motivate horror fans to the theaters in search of voyeuristic carnage and sexuality?
Is America's social psyche so fragile that events like 9/11 and Katrina - as truly horrible as they are, but small potatoes in concern to the thousand unknown atrocities perpetuated in other parts of the world; where soldiers are killed in the line of duty - are enough to throw it into a metaphorical isolation chamber, hungry for any feeling, no matter how distasteful, simply to feel?
I didn't intend to take this post in this direction.
Frankly, it makes me a little sick to my stomach.
