‘Scream for your lives!’: The philosophy of horror in William Castle’s The Tingler (1959)

The present article considers the underlying philosophical logic of William Castle’s horror film The Tingler, demonstrating how the film mediates on the nature of horror. It notes the similarities with existential phenomenological theories of horror, particularly the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who posited horror as an emotional response to phenomena apprehended in defiance of the rationalistic scaffolding used to make sense of things. Likewise, when the underlying logic of the film is considered, The Tingler presents the nature of horror to be an extreme emotive result of a subjective dislocation and perceptual alienation from the objective world. This is represented via the campy B-movie image of a rubber monster, as well as the film’s preoccupation with hallucination. Additionally, the famous ‘Percepto’ gimmick puts the film’s philosophy into affective practice. Considering The Tingler in this way presents a way of seeing American horror cinema as linked with existential ideas, presenting even ‘low’, disreputable exploitation horror as unique, alternative contemporary mediations on themes taken for granted in ‘high’ cultural media.