STRAIT-JACKET and THE TINGLER show a director in touch with the times
A lot of filmmakers have been called “Hitchcockian;” the adjective used to describe anyone who contains the same kind of storytelling and stylistic flair for horror and suspense that the legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock possessed. Yet only director William Castle ever earned the moniker of “the dime store Hitchcock,” thanks to his B+ horror movies which delighted and terrified audiences for years in the late 50s and 60s. The director became famous for implementing novelties, such as buzzing theater seats, which made watching his films all the more thrilling for audiences of the day. A great many of his more famously shocking titles have continued on, becoming classics in their own right, such as House on Haunted Hill and 13 Ghosts. Known for creating schlock filled horror at the drop of a hat, Castle earned a reputation as a delightfully gimmicky showman who knew what audiences wanted from scary movies and was more than willing to give it to them. What many never realized however, were the underlying ideologies that flowed through his work, which showed an artist so deeply interested and in tune with the times.
Strait-Jacket may perhaps be Castle’s crowning achievement; a slasher pic so entertaining and tightly made with a killer twist that caps it all off. In it, Joan Crawford stars as Lucy Harbin, a woman who has spent a good many years in an insane asylum after murdering her cheating husband and his lover with an axe. Now a stable Lucy is coming back home to her family, including loving grown daughter Carol (Diane Baker), whom she hasn’t seen since she was a child. However, when people start meeting grisly ends courtesy of an axe, some begin to suspect that Lucy isn’t fully cured.
The obvious draw of Strait-Jacket is Crawford, who was fresh from her Baby Jane success, prompting Castle to have Psycho writer Robert Bloch fashion this vehicle for her. Watching this legendary actress wield an axe and have fits of unstable rage are candy for anyone in love with grand dame guignol of the day. But at the heart of Strait-Jacket is Castle’s rebuke of the stigma attached to mental illness by society. For much of the film, Lucy remains a timid individual, almost ashamed to exist because of her past. Yet the love Carol (whose own deep-seeded trauma comes to light in the finale) feels for her mother gives Lucy the strength she needs to own her past and declare that she isn’t the woman society is quick to write her off as. Castle made sure that Strait Jacket has more than enough bloodshed for an entry of it’s sort. But he also took great pains to explore the idea that people afflicted with mental illness are still people.
Frequent Castle leading man Vincent Price leads The Tingler, perhaps the director’s most abstract offering. When well-respected pathologist Dr. Warren Chapin (Price) discovers a mysterious creature that latches onto people, tapping into their darkest fears, he tries his hardest to contain and study it. Unfortunately for him, the element eventually dubbed “the tingler,” has other plans.
Somewhat of a high concept venture for Castle, The Tingler employs many of the director’s trademark gimmicks and flourishes, including a bathtub with blood spilling out of the faucet. But the true idea behind this fun creature feature is the examination of fear itself. Here, Castle is attempting to investigate the very notion of fear as a very real entity and the way it firmly plants itself within a person’s psyche. Because this is after all a William Castle operation, The Tingler’s probing nature only goes so far. Yet the movie makes the point of its intent crystal clear in one key sequence when the tingler sets its sights on a deaf/mute housewife (Judith Evelyn), who in turn falls prey to it’s power, journeying into a fear-filled odyssey in which the emotion of fear alone leads to her death. The Tingler is ripe with a melodramatic subplot involving Chapin’s bitchy wife (Patricia Cutts) and their soap-opera sparring, which proves mildly amusing, if nothing else. But The Tingler is squarely a movie about fear as Castle perceived it to be, perhaps in relation to himself.
For the majority of his career, Castle would continue to make movies which would both thrill audiences looking to be frightened while also taking care to craft tales which spoke to the changing times and society’s reaction to them. 1961’s Mr. Sardonicus explored the public’s fascination with science and plastic surgery as the magic salve towards becoming one’s idealized version of themselves. A couple of years later, The Night Walker saw Castle explore the power of dreams and the psychology attached to them (capturing Barbara Stanwyck’s final film performance in the process). While Castle’s shorthand with his public remained solid throughout the bulk of his career, the director proved to those clever enough to notice that he was worthy of being a novel filmmaker who was eager to challenge himself by mixing a horror panache with the realism of the day in ways few others could. What remains are a cavalcade of films that exist as not only still-entertaining beloved horror classics, but also documents of the time.
Strait-Jacket and The Tingler are both available on Blu-Ray from Scream Factory.
