SPINAL CORN

My friend and New Times colleague Dewey Webb passed on yesterday, at 64. New Times gave me the privilege of writing his obit.

In Dewey’s honor… 

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s acknowledge a monster from one of his favorite filmmakers, gimmick-master William Castle: the title character from 1959’s The Tingler…

 

Scientist Vincent Price discovers that the multi-legged creepy-crawly forms on the human spine and awakens during moments of terror, thus causing the “tingle.” Screaming is the only defense against it, so Price is eventually able to remove a live specimen from the body of a mute woman who died of fright. But he doesn’t take proper biohazard precautions, to his misfortune… 

SPINAL ZAP

On my honor, I don’t watch Dancing With the Stars. But a friend of mine who does told me about Ricki Lake & her partner dancing the tango to Bernard Herrmann’s great Psycho theme, & said that it was excellent. I watched it here, & he’s right, it is.

As we roll toward Halloween, yet again we turn to Turner Classic Movies to provide us with…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our weekly nightmare: This time it’s the title creepy-crawly of 1959’s The Tingler, a sort of big centipede-ish critter which, scientist Vincent Price discovers, attaches itself to the human backbone during moments of terror, on which emotion it feeds. Hence the tingling.

Directed by William Castle from a script by Robb White, the movie is perhaps best remembered for Castle’s notorious gimmick “Percepto”—theater seats electrically wired to produce a mild, tingler-like jolt in audience members. Unless you have a Taser & are masochistic, this effect is difficult to reproduce while watching the film now—it plays, by the way, at 9 p.m. (MST) on Monday, October 17. But even without it, The Tingler, though obviously preposterous, is bizarre & imaginative, probably my favorite of Castle’s films as director.

By the way, I recently became Facebook friends with Castle. Considering that he died in 1977, it’s enough to give you a you-know-what down your spine…