The Tingler

It’s time for another movie episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and you might be surprised to discover all the weird and wonderful themes at work in the often-dismissed 1959 Vincent Price film “The Tingler.” Not only does it dwell on fear and symbiosis, but it also features the first reference to LSD in a major motion picture.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to
Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And in the grand tradition of
the Dark Crystal Highlander to the Quickening two thousand one
of Space Odyssey. Boy, do we have a movie episode

(00:25):
for you today? That's right. We would previously wondered if
we would get outside of the sixties, seventies, eighties, and
nineties for a movie episode, and now we have because
this episode takes us to nineteen fifty nine. Uh, this
is a very nineteen fifties kind of movie in multiple
ways as Uh. They will actually kind of connect with
our series on Psychedelics, though I'm not sure if that's

(00:46):
why we ended up doing this. So today we're gonna
be talking about William Castle's The Tingler. How did we
arrive at The Tingler? What was this? This was your idea, right, Robert? Well, yeah,
like basically, we just did that big series on Psychedelics
five episode and I was thinking, well, it's time to
do a movie episode again. Well, let's let's do a
psychedelic film. And so I was thinking, well, maybe we'll

(01:06):
do something like Blue Sunshine from Night, which we're both
partial to, or yes, one of the ugliest films, right
that that does concern like LSD. Or I thought, well,
you know, maybe a more of like a modern film
like Beyond the Black Rainbow, which is another psychedelic film
that I really like. But then I started poking around
and I realized that the the earliest reference to LSD

(01:30):
and a major motion picture is none other than nineteen
fifty nine. Is The Tingler really the earliest? I didn't
know that. Yeah, that's what I That's what I've read
is that the references to LSD in this film mark
that the first time that LSD was referenced in a
major motion picture. I mean, it would make sense because,
as we know from our research on psychedelics, uh, there
was legitimate LSD based therapy or l s D assisted

(01:53):
therapy going on in the nineteen fifties. There was LSD
therapeutic research going on in the nineteen fifties. It was
it was kind of all over the place. And actually
in the nineteen fifties it wasn't as controversial yet as
it would become later, right, And it was legal at
this point too. Yeah, uh yeah, and so there probably
would have been a lot of experience. In fact, I
remember reading a few accounts about people in Hollywood specifically

(02:16):
saying that they benefited from LST assisted therapy. They were
like movie stars in the nineteen fifties who had therapists
in Beverly Hills that gave him LST and had him
a lie on the couch and talk through their problems,
and they were like, Wow, this stuff is great. So
it's kind of surprising it didn't end up in the
movies earlier. Yeah, it really is. But it's not surprising
to me anyway that it ends up in a horror

(02:37):
film and essentially kind of a B picture, because because
that's where you you see a lot of like the
first strikes, the first references to some sort of new idea,
new movement, new sometimes a new technology, or some sort
of new societal, uh concept or fear. I think we
should give you the listener a direct sense of the

(02:58):
flavor of the tingle. So can we do a little
audio sample here. I'm William Castle, and I feel obligated
to warn you about the next attraction you will see
at this theater. The picture is the Tingler, which I directed,
and for the first time in motion picture history, members
of the audience, including you, will actually play a part

(03:21):
in the picture. You will feel some of the physical reactions,
the shocking sensations experienced by the actors on the screen.
I guarantee that The Tingler has more shocks per minute
in my last film, The House on Haunted Hill. But
don't be alarmed. You can protect yourself. When you see
the picture, you will be told and remember the instruction

(03:44):
how you can guard yourself from attack by the Tingler.
And now may I show you a few scenes from
The Tingler? All right? So that was that is uh,
William Castle himself just selling you on this picture. It's

(04:04):
such a weird trailer because it was just part of it.
But it's just basically him in front of the camera saying,
I've got a picture for you. He's got It's like
he's not like a film director. He's like a guy
with the Traveling Medicine Show. He's like, I must warn
you that these tonics are so potent they have been
outlawed in four counties for the amazing benefits it has.
You know, like he's just selling it and selling it

(04:26):
and uh, and and so William Castle, of course was
a horror director. He directed movies like The House on
Haunted Hill, which also has Vincent Price. I don't know,
did the cliff reveal that this movie has Bencent Price?
The Tingler features Vincent Price in the lead role. So
you mentioned House on Haunted Hill, fifty nine, Tinkler and
fifty nine, follow that up with Thirteen Ghosts in nineteen sixty,

(04:46):
you know, just back to back. Uh. He would go
he would, you know, produce a number of pictures like this.
He would go on to produce Rosemary's Baby in Night
so produced not yeah, of course. So where we enter
the Tingler to oratory here though, is after the success
of House on Haunted Hill, Columbia Pictures set Castle up
with his own unit, and uh and this was his

(05:08):
first project under that unit. Uh. He this this was
mainly because you know, he had a reputation for delivering
films on time, under budget, and he was famously a
promotion king when it came to these films. Uh, and
was all throughout his career. Was often you know, pulling
out these different gimmicks, like not just selling you the
theater experience in the shock of the film, But but

(05:30):
something beyond, like some new technology that was going to
make the film, uh, you know, all the more evocative.
It was like for a time when people were bored
with regular old movies, so they would try gimmicks of course,
like three D right, three D glasses and all that.
But but William Castle was sort of went in another direction. Yeah,
he would beyond that. So howiseon Haunted On Haunted Hill

(05:50):
was filmed in Immergo, which sounds fancy. It sounds like
some sort of special filter that's used on the camera.
Does Amergo have an exclamation point after? I don't think
it did, but it was kind of implied. But basically
this boiled down to a red eyed skeleton prop would
float over the theater on wires during a key scene
in the picture. Thirteen Ghosts was filmed in illusion oh,

(06:15):
which meant audience This is actually a little more complicated.
Audience members were given red blue screens to either see
or hide the ghosts that appear in the movie. Oh
I see. So yeah, there'd be like a like a
color polarized kind of image on the screen, and so
you could hold up the screens to either see or
not see the ghost on the picture, and that's rather
clever apparently like recent Blu Ray releases of the film

(06:38):
like coming with a little gadget that that replicates this effect. Yeah,
that's kind of fun. Homicidal from featured a fright break
during which you you know, you could you have this
break to catch your breath and decide if you wanted
to stay and see then in the finale or leave
and get a full refund. So you know, it's one
of those you see this a lot with promotions of

(07:00):
these pictures, like they're so confident, uh in its the
ability to deliver that you you were offered a full refund.
And then there was also Mr Sardonicus from nine and
in this the audience got to vote with glow in
the dark cards on the fate of the villain. And
this one's interesting because it was it was almost certainly
gimmicked because you had two endings. You had the mercy

(07:23):
ending for the villain and then the the ending where
the villain got his come up, and and there are
allegations that they never even shot the mercy endings, like
nobody was going to vote for it, so you know,
you didn't really have the choice. It was just the
illusion of the choice which audience is going to be like,
I don't want the villain to be punished. Yeah. Castle

(07:43):
claimed that he shot it, but but some disagree. And
then there were various other promotional gimmicks and claims over
the years, but The Tingler is ultimately, I think the
most famous of these because it was filmed in percepto
percepto that's so good. From what I understand. That means
more like, there were some appliances installed in seats in
the movie theater which would which would mess with members

(08:05):
of the audience. Yeah. Basically, Castle purchased military surplus airplane
wing de iceres, which are essentially vibration devices and motors.
Yeah uh, and put these up under some of the
chairs in theaters showing the picture, and they went off
at a key moment in the film during which the Tingler,
the monster will describe in a bit, is on the

(08:25):
loose in a theater in the film, and Vincent Price's
character tells the audience to scream, scream for your lives. Uh.
And then also Castle planted human screamers and key locations
as well. Yeah uh. And so this is funny because
this has been replicated in other films like the movie
Gremlins too from what was that nineteen nine or so

(08:46):
or the into the eighties whenever it is. That's a
fantastic movie, by the way, one of the best of
eighties motion pictures. Um. You know, one of my favorites,
John Carpenters in the Mouth of Madness ends in a
movie theater. Oh yeah, yeah, And so I think some
of them are taking after this William Castle kind of thing,
where like there's a scene in a movie theater and
the movie kind of breaks the fourth wall to like

(09:08):
wink at the audience and be like, just imagine you're
in this movie theater. Yeah. I was actually lucky enough
to see the thing there for the first time a
couple of years ago at the Plaza Theater here in Atlanta,
where it was riffed live by Trace Bolieu and Frank
Conniff from Mr Sennen's Theater. Okay, they were there in
person to to riff it, and there were no d

(09:28):
ier is installed under the seats, but the screaming part
of the film was still a lot of fun. Like
everybody in the audience really got into it and screamed
for their lives, right. They actually encouraged the audience to
scream because they suggest that the monster from the film
has become real and is out in the theater with you. Yes,
I can imagine that was a lot of fun with
Dr Forrester and TV's Frank on Hand. Oh absolutely, all right,
So that's basically Castle in a nutshell. I don't know

(09:50):
how much we really have to say about Vincent Price,
because I mean, he's Vincent Brice. He was a legend,
Hollywood legend. Acted more than a hundred films, everything from
like the Tin Conn Endments in nineteen fifty six to
a string of wonderful Led Girl and po adaptations. He
was in The Fly, The Abominable Doctor fivees uh Ultiate,
later on, towards the end of his career, Edward Scissor Hands. So,

(10:12):
I mean he's and then he was in He was
on Batman, he was on The Muppet Show. He was
a cooking enthusiast and author, a supporter of commendable social
issues and campaigns. I mean, he's one of those rare
old Hollywood stars that the more you learn about him,
I feel like, you know, the more you look up
to him, the more you respected, the more you can
even relate to him the rare case where you there's

(10:33):
a famous person who doesn't turn out to be more
and more of a sleeves bag the more you like. Yeah.
And then there's a finally of note here there's the
screenwriter of The Tingler, which it's easy to overlook with
films like this, that yes, somebody wrote this, there was
a screenwriter, and the screenwriter someone of note because it's
it was Rob White, who lived nineteen o nine through

(10:54):
nineteen ninety, and he was a prolific writer. That's probably
best remembered as the author of the nineteen seventy two
novel death Watch, which has been adapted twice, once with
Andy Griffith and Sam Bottoms and a second time with
Michael Douglas and Jeremy Irvine. White had previously worked with
Castle on House on a Hunted Hill, uh, and he

(11:15):
was impressed, apparently by a creepy white worm prop on
the set. But he was also inspired to make the
mad science angle in the story a little more cutting
edge by bringing in LSD. So Turner. Classic Movies insider
Info shares a quote from an interview that authored Tom

(11:35):
Weaver had with White. Tom Weavers great by the way.
He does some really good commentaries on some of the
Universal Monster. Yeah, he's the author of this particular book.
It's from his apparently Return of the b Science Fiction
and Horror Heroes. And this is White's White speaking here. Quote.
I wanted something different from the typical shot or pill
that you see in movie trips. Algis Huxley told me

(11:58):
about a doctor at U C. L A who was
run in an experiment on online sergic acid LSD. So
I went up there to see this man, Dr Cohen,
and he gave me some of it. He took me
into a nice little room with a cod in a radio,
and he got something out of his refrigerator and gave
me a shot. It was all legal. Then I watched
the grain in the wood writhing around and listened to

(12:19):
the music. It was very pleasant, although I did never
want to do it again. This is funny that he
describes it as pleasant because it is specifically deployed in
the movie as part of the like acid exploitation kind
of vibe where it like gives you nightmares and drives
you insane. Right now, Huxley, you might remember from our
psychedelic episodes. Not only wrote Brave New World. But he

(12:41):
wrote the highly influential book The Doors of Perception ur
which explores the psychedelic experience. Yeah, and Huxley had a
correspondence with Humphrey Osmond, who was an important nineteen fifties
psychedelic researcher, and they it was from their correspondence I
believe that the term psychedelic came. Yeah. And then oh,

(13:01):
by the way that I think we may have touched
on this in past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
But Huxley experienced a fantasia. He couldn't form, you know,
mental images in his mind except when he had large
quantities of mescaline. That's interesting. So, uh so White had
this experience worked it into the plot, and we'll discuss
how he does that later. But then apparently White related

(13:22):
his experiences to Vincent Price, hoping that it would convince
Price to give a more convincing performance in the film,
you know, specifically in the scene where he's supposed to
be on LSD. But then Price allegedly just disregarded the
suggestion and did it like the typical like Vincent Price
freak out the scene. Oh yeah, he's got the wide
open mouth and the ohh he's I think he's supposed

(13:43):
to be hallucinating that the walls are closing in on him.
But the scene is hilarious because he's trying to prevent
the walls from closing in on him by running back
and forth between the walls, and it's like a thirty
foot wide room. So he runs and pushes on a wall,
then runs all the way to the other side, moaning
and pushes on that wall. Uh. I don't want to.

(14:05):
I don't want to, you know, blame Price in any
of this, because I mean, he still gives a really
solid performance. Was ultimately like the glube holding the whole
thing together. His charisma carries the film. I mean, one
thing I will say about this movie is I was
surprised how engaging it was. We watched it just last night.
I don't know how I've made it this far without
seeing The Tanler before, especially because I love, you know,

(14:27):
nineteen fifties horror movies, and and and I how did
it happen? I think for some reason I had maybe
been told or I just assumed somehow that it was
one of those really dull, dry nineteen fifties sci fi
horror movies and you know, there are a number of those.
There are a lot of fifties horror movies I like
that maybe have a great, funny looking monster, great set

(14:50):
or prop or something, but a lot of the characters
and the dialogue are just infinitely stiff, you know, kind
of like gray neutral things receding into infinity, and so
it just happened sometimes I assume this was one of those.
Not the case at all. This movie is like highly engaging,
really funny camp and I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop watching. Yeah,

(15:13):
I think it's it's easy to overlook it from our
standpoint looking back through cinematic history, because on one hand,
if you if you see just a line of a
different movie Monsters, the Tingler is not going to be
as captivating as you know, certainly like Universal Monsters, but
even other things like the crawling brain creatures and Fiend
without a Face that sort of thing. Uh, and yeah,

(15:34):
it can easily be lost in the shuffle. It also
doesn't help that the trailer for it is just William
Castle telling you how scary it's going to be, and
like shots of people screaming. Yeah, but it is a
really fun movie, I think because a lot of it
I think has to do with the charisma of Vincent Price,
and like the weirdness of the premise. A lot of
it also just has to do with the zany nous

(15:55):
of the plot. Yeah, it has a zany plot and
and really just a weird premise. We're gonna get into
this and and ultimately draw some some science out of it,
but yeah, this is a weird plot. And even if
White's LSD experiences didn't have a huge influence on Vincent
Price's performance, and ultimately they don't even factor into the
plot all that deeply, I still wonder, if you know,

(16:19):
if what we're looking at here some of the weirder
aspects of it might have something to do with the
psychedelic experience. I think it is a more engaging film
because it was written by somebody who had an LSD experience.
I'll go I'll go that far and make that assumption.
So maybe we should just describe what happens in the movie. Warning,
we're gonna have some spoilers for this movie from If

(16:40):
you want to watch it fresh, pause the podcast. Now
go see it. It's available you know, for rent at
all major online movie rental websites, alright, so the plot
of the film is kind of a mess, but here's
how it goes. The crazy central nugget upon which everything
is based is that Dr Warren che Happen. That's prices character.

(17:01):
I think they say Chapenha've been a couple of years
and I've seen it. So Dr Chapin, he's a pathologist
who makes a game changing discovery about human physiology, something
that scientist healers shamans uh you know, body hacking warriors
uh failed to discover throughout our species entire history. And

(17:23):
this is it. We all have a centipede like paraside
a k a. A tingler affixed to our spine and
it curls up and feeds whenever we exhibit fear, and
if it keeps feeding, it kills us by constructing constricting
our spinal cord. But we have a way to cope
with it. Screaming weakens the creature and stops its strangulation

(17:46):
on the human spine. So you can tell this was
kind of I think written around the idea, or I
don't know, maybe maybe it was adapted to what was
already in the script, the idea of getting people to scream,
as like a gimmick in the theater. So they're like
parts of the movie that just have people screaming. It's
like divorced from the plot. It's just faces on the
screen screaming into the camera with really ragged, real sounding screams.

(18:10):
This kind of shocking because usually the screams you hear
in a movie feel a little bit smoothed over. They're
a little bit sanitary as far as screams go. Yeah,
but these are these feel unsettling for sure. Yeah, totally.
And so this premise is amazing so Vincent Price. It
starts off with him as a guy who does autopsies.

(18:31):
He's like doing autopsies on executed condemned prisoners who were
murderers and stuff, and he keeps getting this idea, why
do I find the spinal column cracked and destroyed? You know,
and these people who died of fright. There's actually a
great part where he's he says something like, I've thought
about not for two years, but the spinal cracking due

(18:54):
to fear. So yeah, you just kind of have to imagine,
like all of his conversation ends of his family and friends,
it all comes back to the spinal column breaking due
to fear and yeah, and so he makes this discovery
that it's it's a Tingler. It's a parasitic organism that
not just these individuals have, but that everybody has. Right,
everybody's got a Tingler. And and I'm it's been a

(19:16):
while since I've I've seen it. But as I recall, like,
he uses LSD to try and invoke an intense enough
experience of fear in himself to better study the Tinglers.
That right, Yeah, So he's trying to to document the
Tingler I think by taking X rays of people's spines
right after they're mortified and uh. And so he wants

(19:36):
to do it to himself, but he laments the fact
that nothing scares him. It's like, you know, when I
was a child, I could have been afraid, but now
I'm just grown up and nothing, nothing really scares me
like that. So he gets the bright idea to inject
himself with LSD and this will they explain helpfully in
the film that this will induce nightmares like nothing else.

(19:59):
And so he does it, and the walls start closing
in and he starts looking at a prop skeleton and
his laboratory and this causes him to have such terror
that I guess the tingler comes out of him. But
the problem is, I think what he's try that's right,
it activates, right, it activates, which means it like puffs
up like a balloon on your spine and you can
see it in X rays when you wouldn't normally be

(20:20):
able to see it. Uh. And so the thing that
he's trying to do, I think is get the tingler
to puff up and then see what happens if he
doesn't scream. But he's not able to do it. He's
so overcome with fear that he has to scream. And
from this, I think he concludes that it is impossible
to avoid screaming if the tingler swells up to a
significant size, And like, screaming is a natural response that

(20:43):
you can't avoid unless, say, you are incapable of screaming. Ah.
And that's where we get to our next plot element,
because meanwhile, theater owner Oliver Higgins has a terrible relationship
with his wife Martha. Oliver also owns a theater. This
is the theater that is used later. And I believe
they just do they just show silent films, that's right, Yeah, yeah,

(21:05):
they don't. They only do the old movies and the like.
At one point, there's a there's a long scene towards
the end where they're just showing an old silent movie.
That's a real old silent movie. It seems like a
convenient way to pad the run time. So it's anyway,
Oliver and Martha they do not get along, and we're
presenting with a lot of scenes just showing how poorly

(21:26):
they get along. They're always fighting and uh and we
also learned that she herself, Martha, is deaf and mute.
So you can see where this is going now. Having
heard about the Tingler from his neighbor, uh Vincent Price,
Higgins plots to scare his wife to death, knowing that
she will be unable to scream to keep her own

(21:47):
tingler from killing her. Okay, does that make sense? So
when you scream because you're scared, that stops the tinkler
from swelling up to such a size that it breaks
your spine and kills you. But if you can't scream,
it will swell up to that size, break your spine
and kill you. So he just has to terrify his
wife to death, right, and that's what he he sets
out to do. He frightens her to death with a

(22:07):
mix of of stage and what I assume are supposed
to be actual hallucinations, including an actually really trippy scene
in this black and white movie in which a hand
emerges from a red bathtub. Yeah, that's an interesting thing.
I guess there's another sort of cinematography gimmick of castles
in a way where the movie is in black and white.

(22:29):
But there is one scene where where this woman is
having this horrifying experience where she looks into the bathroom
and the bathtub is full of red liquid, presumably blood,
and she has a terrible, terrible fear of seeing blood. Um,
and so, like, how did they do that? I was
reading about it. Supposedly what happened is they spliced in

(22:49):
this one scene that was filmed in color, where everything
in the scene had to be like painted black and
white and gray except the bathtub which had the red
stuff in it. Uh. That that's what's been alleged, But
I don't know if that's actually true. I guess another
way it could have been done is just like hand
coloring of a black and white image. Well, either way,

(23:09):
the result is impressive. When I saw it for the
first time in the theater, not expecting it to happen.
I was legitimately wild by it, because on one hand,
it's like, oh, she's seeing blood so vividly that it's
visible in black and white. But also it's like, this
is a black and white world, and via the this
this fear hallucination, you're they're actually seeing this color for

(23:31):
the first time. So she dies and then Chapin performs
the autopsy and removes the oversized tingler from her spine. Um.
I guess it's either still swollen from feeding on all
that delicious fear or just since she could never scream
her entire life, it was an enlarged specimen. But then
it escapes and it runs them uck ends up in

(23:52):
a movie theater. There were I'm skipping ahead, like, there's
a lot of there's a scene where Vincent Price's character
is sleeping and it's crawling on it. Well, that this
is all to do with the conflict, I wonder if
you might have been conflating a couple of things earlier
actually when you said that, uh, that Oliver Higgins and
his wife Martha were always fighting. What what we definitely
see a lot of is Vincent Price and his own wife.

(24:15):
That's what I'm getting confused. His wife played by Patricia Cutts,
who she's she's portrayed as like the scheming heiress who uh,
she doesn't take her husband seriously because he spends too
much time working. Rachel and I were talking about it
and I was like, this is kind of like a
bore At movie because it's like, it's all about these
guys who are like my wife and they want to

(24:37):
get revenge on their wives and end up using the
Tingler to do so. And it's I cannot express how
funny it is the way people in this movie keeps
saying the words the Tingler and dialogue. So like there's
a part where, you know, one of the characters is
Oliver Higgins is explaining his plot to murder his own wife,

(24:57):
and he says something like, I got the idea from
you about you know the Tingler. Ah. Yeah, it's uh,
just the the dialogue alone is is wonderful in this
so at any rate, skipping ahead, the Tingler ns up
running a monk. It's running a bunk in a movie
theater um and you know people are or or you know,

(25:19):
it's vibrating the seats and then people watching it, you know,
they're having the vibration effect going on as well, ideally
to heighten the fear. And then Chapin shows up and
he's telling everybody scream, scream for your life in order
to subdue the creature, and they are able to subdue it,
and then Chapin inserts the parasite back into Martha's corpse,

(25:39):
and then in a confusing and perhaps nonsensical ending, the
husband winds up locked in a room with the corpse
and he's experiences this like, you know, crazy hallucinatory fear,
and her corpse rises up from the table and he's
so scared he's unable to scream, and we're left to
presume what that means for him. I was trying to

(26:00):
understand what was happening at the end of there. It
didn't make any sense to me. Why was she coming
back to life? I don't know. Yeah, it's not something
that has been established with the creature before. It's not
even suggested that it can animate a corpse. I feel
like they kind of just work themselves into a corner
there and they're like, what would be a flashy ending,
and let's do that. Yeah, I guess so. Um I

(26:22):
don't know. I mean maybe it's just kind of like
it's like the ending of Jaws, right, you know, where
it's like people could complain like, I don't understand, doesn't
make any sense that the shark has this tank in
its mouth and that it explodes the shark when it
and it's just like, you know, at that point in
the story, you're not worrying about it. It's the finale.
You're just you're good with whatever. Yeah, it's true, they've

(26:43):
got you. But but I do think we should just
take another moment to just think about how wonderfully weird,
and I argue, incredibly psychedelic. Just the basic concept is,
I mean, think about some of the perceptions and confrontations
of fear, the personification and manifestation of various fear as
you see in psychedelic literature and descriptions of psychedelic experiences.

(27:03):
And this film is telling you, hey, there, your fear
is a weird bug monster living inside you. But you
can fight back against it, you can scream at it,
you can wrestle with it on the floor. Uh, it
feels suitably psychedelic in that sense. Well, well, I think
it's one of those things that is not literally biologically true,
but may actually be a quite useful metaphor. Yeah, you know,

(27:26):
I'm reminded of, you know, some of the things that uh, well,
Terence McKenna has written about talking about, you know, this
disconnect that humans have with their inner realities and from
their souls, and how that might tie into psychological experiences
of UFOs and aliens. He wrote, we are alienated, so
alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial

(27:50):
in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre
dimensions that it encompasses. So maybe I'm reading too much
into the Tinkler, But but I I thought about that.
You are not reading too much into the Tingler. You
are tingling it just the right frequency. It's actually kind
of a fun mental exercise to try and imagine, like
what would the world be like if there were Tingler.

(28:12):
Let's come back to that. Alright. On that note, we're
going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Thank Alright, we're back. So we've been talking about the Tingler,
and Robert I am to understand that you believe the
Tingler is based on a real life organism, or at
least could be. Yeah, I mean to a certain extent.
It's my understanding based on some of the materials I

(28:33):
was looking at that it's commonly believed that the basic
design of the creature is based on a very real organism.
It's not not an indo parasite or a parasite at all,
but it is a real life organism known as the
velvet worm and the velvet worm um. I encourage everyone
to look up images or footage of this creature. I

(28:55):
know it is is factored into some recent Attenborough documentaries,
so there so there is some tremendous footage of these creatures.
Even though they're they're they're hard to find as as
we'll discuss here, but there are roughly seventy species of
velvet worm that are still thriving in the world, and
you'll only find them in rainforest environments. Again, they're not

(29:16):
parasites at all, but rather a leaf litter predator that
that has this wonderful adaptation. So, just to describe it
real quick, it's this this long looking creature that looks
kind of like a centipede and looks almost exactly like
the tingler um has. You know, this pair of a
long antennae in the front, and as you're watching it
move around, it is there's this odd feeling that what

(29:39):
you're looking at is a little bit unlike any other organism,
Like it kind of looks like a sea slug, but
it has legs and it is on the ground, So
what's happening? So uh, it has a number of really
cool adaptations. For example, Uh, it's rather slow moving, but
it is a predator and the way that it a

(30:00):
wires its prey is by shooting fast hardening slime from
a pair of projections near its mouth. And this fast,
this like quick hardening slime subdues their prey long enough
for the worm to to you know, shamble over, crack
open the prey's shell, inject it's digestive saliva, and then

(30:21):
suck the slurry of saliva and you know, generally, like
arthropod guts back out of the out of the slim husk.
Oh my god, that's awesome. Well, it's kind of like
some species of arachnid, like the lasso spiders or the
spitting spiders that will shoot a like some kind of
projectile web thing at their prey or drop some kind

(30:43):
of projectile web thing from above, and then they can descend,
and then of course that they also deal with some
some vomiting or injecting of digestive juices. Yeah, and and
this creature can also shoot the slime and self defense
and the it's a very swift attack, especially coming from
a creature that's the wise quite slow. The other crazy
thing about this, uh, this creature is that it's often

(31:05):
described as being like a halfway point between an earthworm
and uh and you know, proper insects. So it's not
a centipede, which you would normally think of as having
like an exoskeleton, right, yeah, it's it's a stranger creature
and it's been around for about five hundred million years.
Oh so this is a Cambrian friend. Yeah, yeah, fossils day,

(31:25):
back to the Cambrian Age. Their fossils pop up in
the Burgess Shale in Canada, alright, so that we're talking
like five d five million years old, and also the
ching Jiang Formation in China about five twenty million years old,
so we have fossil evidence of essentially the same creature.
So wait a minute, that would be uh. I think
all of those fossil beds are ancient marine fossil beds.

(31:48):
So would this also be a creature that you would
find in the water, or would this be like a
water dwelling version of it, or or do you know
what's going on there? I'm not entirely sure on that account.
I mean that the species that are alive today are
all terrestrial organisms that thrive exclusively in rainforest in environments.
Um they have waterproof skin, they their legs have retractable claws,

(32:14):
and they have when it comes down to like how
many legs they have, it varies like some have as
few as thirteen pairs of stubby legs, others have as
many as forty three pairs of stubby legs depending on
the species. The spigots that it's that it squirts the
slime out of or essentially modified legs, and then the
slime legs modified legs like two little modified legs in

(32:37):
the front that have become slimespigots. But then the glands
that power those slimes figots, they run the entire length
of the creature's body and they amount that for about
ten percent of the creatures overall body mass. So basically
muscles contract and squeeze it out like fast squirting toothpaste,
and there's some other just really like weird curios about

(32:59):
this particular creature. For instance, there's at least one species
of velvet velvet worm that is social, and it lives
in groups ruled by a dominant female and they have
an entire hierarchy, which is just mind boggling. There's another
species that's apparently all female. The rest use sexual reproduction,

(33:19):
with the males in one particular genus simply depositing their
sperm on the female skin, which causes the localized area
of the skin to break down and permit the sperm
to pass into the female's body and then swim to
the ovaries. So it's like a form of like chemical
traumatic insemination. Yea, some velvet worms lay eggs, but most

(33:40):
of them give birth to live young weird. So yeah,
they are. They are strange creatures, like it, really alien
feeling creatures, as alien, if not more so than the
tingler itself. Yeah, especially the idea that you have these
little like a social group of these things. Um. But
but of course the you know, you get into the

(34:01):
world of various creepy crowls and you find other weird
creatives as well. Like I was reading the other day
that there are some varieties of centipede where you see
maternal instinct where the the mother centipede will like corral
the young centipedes and like surround them to protect them.
So um uh yeah, I mean we shouldn't take just

(34:22):
because something is you know, seemingly primitive organism, uh and
uh and kind of icky, we shouldn't take for granted
the complexity of its life cycle. Yeah. I think, uh,
A lot of these discoveries undercut the kind of traditional
top level belief in you know nature, red in tooth
and claw, where it's just outside of the mammals, it's

(34:43):
all just killing and struggle and all that. I mean,
I think the more we learn about not just uh,
you know, other vertebrates, but even invertebrates, you you start
to see I mean, of course you will see you know,
like parents eating their young young eating the parents, but
you will also see strange, almost mammalian looking parenting instincts
that you wouldn't expect if you just have this like

(35:06):
struggle and fighting based view of nature. Absolutely so so
again the Tingler. Don't watch The Tingler and expect to
you know, accurate portrayal of velvet worm biology and behavior.
But roughly speaking, like the creature is based on the
morphology of a velvet worm. Well, especially because I think,

(35:26):
don't they say in the movie that the tingler is
like indestructible, like they can't pierce it with any implements
or something. I imagine velvet worms are not quite like that.
They look pretty soft to me. Well, they're certainly not indestructible,
that's for sure. Uh, And they are you know again,
they're not parasites. It's really hard to imagine how a
velvet worm could have U I mean, so certainly we

(35:49):
see creatures that you know, take on a parasitic relationship
over the course of evolutionary history, but it's hard to
imagine how a velvet worm would carry this off. You know,
like velvet worms start hanging out on people's necks or
on you know, you know, pre human harmited necks, and
it just kind of evolves from there. I don't think

(36:10):
it really makes a lot of sense. Well I do think, well, okay,
so let's follow up on that then, because I think
maybe we should talk about the idea of fear and
the indo symbion. So there's, uh, the premise of the Tingler.
I guess is that we've got this um, this indo
symbion living inside us. And I don't think it's ever
said explicitly, but I get the impression that it's that

(36:31):
this thing has evolved with us and has passed down
from parents to offspring, since there's like no indication that
people have to get exposed and infected at some point
in their lives. Did you get the same impression, right,
it's it's it seems to be implied that it's just ubiquitous,
like you're not going to find communities of humans that
do not have a Tingler, right, And so this kind

(36:51):
of like cross generational inheritance of the indo symbion Tingler
is what we would call vertical transmission parent parent offspring transmission.
Now it turns out that, of course, humans do have
plenty of other organisms living in and on us which
apparently have evolved with us and are vertically transmitted across generations.

(37:14):
One very ancient, deep and fundamental example is the mitochondria
inside the cells in our body. So of course the
mitochondrian is this organelle that's found inside the cells of
eukaryotic organisms, meaning organisms with a cell nucleus, and that
of course includes us and the mitochondria do important work

(37:36):
to help supply the host cells with energy. They generate
a dinzine triphosphate or a t P, which is a
molecule that carries chemical energy around inside the cells and
inside the body. But there are very weird things about mitochondria,
so that they are these little organelles inside our cells.
But one example of a weird fact about them is

(37:57):
that mitochondria have their own DNA. So inside a cell
in your body, you've got your cell nucleus, which is
where you find your own primary genome, the genetic code
that builds your body. But then there are these other
little things inside our cells that have their own separate genome.

(38:18):
And the really weird thing is when you examine that
separate mitochondrial genome inside our cells, it looks an awful
lot like the genome of a bacterium. Now why would
that be, Well, the prevailing theory about the origin of
mitochondria is maybe even weirder than the Tingler. It is
that long long ago, a bacterium was somehow captured inside

(38:42):
an early eukaryotic cell, meaning, of course, a cell with
the nucleus, and instead of dying or just getting resorbed
or whatever, the bacterium lived and became a part of
the cell that captured it, reproducing along with it and
its descendants evolving along with the descendants of the cat
sure cell. So that now what was once a free

(39:02):
floating bacterium that was completely unrelated to us is a
fundamental part of the cells in our body. It's a
crucial element in what our cells do. So in this
the the human tingular relationship, you could really look at
it is kind of like this oversize maybe like you
know cartoonified, uh, you know, illustration of something that that

(39:24):
has actually occurred. Yeah, I mean, and occurs all the
time in nature. One organism just sort of becomes a
part of another organism's lineage history over time and becomes
a part of their evolutionary story. And this theory on
the origin of of mitochondria is known as the indosymbiosis theory.
It's also a leading theory about the origins of other

(39:45):
things like chloroplasts in photosynthetic life forms like plants um.
But of course it doesn't stop with the little things
inside ourselves. We've got other organisms living and evolving with
us of all sorts. It's not necessarily co evolved inside
our cells, but definitely in and on our bodies. And
this the primary example, of course, would be the human microbiome,

(40:09):
the sum total of micro organisms that inhabit the environment
of your body. This can be hard to fathom, but
your body is likely home to so many microbes that
your cells with your DNA are outnumbered ten to one.
Now what I'm about to say wouldn't apply in terms
of mass or volume, but just in terms of sheer

(40:29):
numbers of cells. You are only ten per cent of
your own body. The other nine of the cells that
are in you and on you are bacterial cells that
are of course smaller than mammal cells. And of course,
like the Tinkler, there's evidence that our microbiome is transmitted
not only horizontally, meaning you know, through exposure to microbes

(40:50):
in the environment, but also vertically passing directly from mother
to offspring. And we can see this because babies tend
to often pick up the same strains of bacteria found
in there but in their mothers. And I think one
of the most fascinating things we've learned in microbiology and
human medical science over the past few decades is how
deeply bound up each individual human microbiome is with that

(41:14):
person's health and physiology, and even with their psychology, with
what's happening in their brain. And here's where I would
argue that if the tingler is a co evolved indosymbiotic
organism living inside our bodies for generations and influencing our
fear and anxiety, we sort of do have a tinkler,
at least a collective tinkler, and it appears to be

(41:34):
your gut flora, the microbes living in your digestive tract.
It's been established in plenty of studies by now that
there are relationships between what's happening in the gut flora
and human behavior and including things like depression and anxiety. Uh.
And so does that relationship extend to the direct regulation
of like the immediate fear response like it does in

(41:56):
the tingler you know you're getting freaked out about something
scary you encounter or in your environment. It appears likely yes.
So I want to look at a recent study from
by Alani hoban at All published in Molecular Psychiatry called
the microbiome regulates a migdala dependent fear recall. And the
basic gest here is that normally mice can be conditioned

(42:19):
to exhibit a fear reaction, and this usually consists of
freezing in place when they hear a sound that they
have come to associate with something scary or bad. You know.
So there's like a tone that mice gets scared of,
and when they hear the tone, they freeze in place.
And the study found that germ free mice, meaning mice
that are depleted of their internal microbiota, do not show

(42:42):
fear responses the way normal mice do. They appear to
have a reduced stability to learn to be afraid of
things and have the fear response. And weirdly, once these
germ free mice are exposed to environmental microbes and become
infested with all the normal kind of bacteria that make
a home inside mice guts, the same mice suddenly do

(43:05):
have a fear response again, and the researchers believe that
their studies shows that at least in mice, the gut
flora somehow exert control over the amygdala, which is a
region in the brain that appears to be crucial for
generating fear in response to frightening stimuli. Now, of course
we don't know if this would translate perfectly to humans.

(43:25):
This is just a study in mice, but there's a
decent chance I think that the same is true for us.
And if this is true for humans, can you imagine, like,
what if a fecal transplant, which is that is what
it sounds like, um or some other method of manipulating
gut flora could trigger fundamental changes in our propensity for anxiety,

(43:48):
or our phobias, or even our fundamental personality. The haunted
fecal transplant sounds like a potential gimmick for a future
horror film. I mean, how crazy is that? Like that
that we were full of bacteria and in other microbes
that are controlling our brains in a way. It doesn't
feel like that, but it does very much appear to

(44:11):
be true. Yeah, I feel like this is one of
those things that certainly, over the course of the show,
here is stuff to blow your mind. You know, we
just have looked at a case after case where show
where we're exploring just the power of the microbiome, you know,
and it's and it's it's integration with with the mind
and when what we think of when we think of ourselves. Yes, exactly,

(44:36):
these bacteria in us and on us aren't just in
us and on us. They are us and we are them. Uh.
The most fundamental thing, I mean, the only way that
you would really say that they're not us is that
they have different d NA than we do. But like
they share the same body space, they're involved in the
same generation of behaviors as our brain cells are. So yeah,

(44:59):
so basically we am legion to take him. Yeah, amazing, Like,
how much of your idea of yourself, your your legion personality,
your legion identity is a result of effects generated by
the ecosystem of non human organisms living in your digestive system.
I positive that this is actually much weirder than having

(45:21):
a tingler on your spine. I always anytime I think
about all this, though, I always come back to the
future episode where Fry eats a tuna sandwich that he
buys out of a machine in a men's room and
it causes this. Uh, They're like these little intestinal worms
to build a colony inside him and like build little cities,

(45:43):
and and then they start fixing him and they make
him smarter and so it's essentially like it. It has, Uh,
there's an inner space aspect to the episode as well
as the Flowers for Algernon aspect to it. And it's
a great episode overall and very funny. But but what
they're portraying in a sci fi sense and an an
exaggerated cartoony away is essentially some of what's going on. Yeah,

(46:05):
we're we're full of these legions of life that in
many senses control us and or at least exert influence
over us, and in some ways really truly are us.
All Right, well, maybe we should take another break, and
then after we come back we can talk a bit
more about fear and the scream. Thank thank thank Alright,

(46:26):
we're back. Say what you will about The Tanler, love
it or hate it, but it has some tremendous screams
in it. Absolutely, Yeah, And Robert, there was one thing
we were talking about the day after I first watched
The Tingler. I came in the morning and when we
were discussing the quality of screams in movies, and I

(46:47):
had this reaction to a part of the movie. So
my question is, why do some screams feel so much
more disturbing than others when you hear them, Like there's
one screaming session at the beginning of The Tingler that
felt like something that was not out of a nineteen
fifties movie. It felt more like the Texas Chainsaw Masks

(47:07):
with some great screaming in that film. Courtesy of Maryland Burns. Yeah,
but it's just like the pure sonic quality. I mean,
it was nothing about what was happening on screen. It's
just the sound of it felt extremely disturbing and almost unbearable.
It had this weird, kind of forbidden or pornographic quality
to it. And this is purely to do with what

(47:30):
it sounded like, the auditory qualities and nothing else. Most
movie screams, especially from the horror movies of the nineteen fifties,
feel kind of sanitary. They're kind of stagy and clean.
But this scream at the beginning of The Tingler feels
wrong and you wanted to stop. And the only reason
I could really identify was that something about it sounded.

(47:51):
The word that came to my mind was ragged. Yeah,
do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah? Absolutely, this Yeah,
this kind of like ragged like screaming. No, you know,
no intention of retaining your voice for the next set
of takes um and you do. And when you do
encounter it in a film, it it does just add

(48:12):
to the the intensity of the horror um And you know,
only a few films really come to mind. I instantly
think of Texas Chainsaw Mascre. I think of House by
the Cemetery, in which you have a small child disturbingly enough,
who is screaming its head off in a similar fashion
where it has this raw intensity. Yeah, and it's it's
like a I was honestly shocked by how disturbing it

(48:35):
sounds just to hear a scream like that that, like,
even with no context at all, because no story is
happening at this point in the movie. There's just like
just before it starts, they're just like, we'll throw some
screams at you. And it really, it really like hurt
to listen to. And so I was thinking about that, like, Wow,
what's going on with that scream? And well, one read

(48:55):
could be Joe that it's causing your tingler to relax,
and uh, I like my tingler inflated. Oh my goodness,
what if what if this were the case? What if
what if the Tingler does not relax does not react
at all to fake screams. It has to be like
a significantly believable scream. And therefore, like a lot of
our horror movie viewing is ultimately pointless because you're no

(49:19):
good Catharsis to it, Like, it's not actually going to
relax the Tingler that is that is slowly um, you know,
exerting this death grip on our spine. Yeah, it's one
of those smooth, polished, stagey screams that just does nothing
for your Tingler. Yeah, but I can set around all
day and discuss the ramifications of if the Tingler was real. Uh,
let's get back to just the nature of screams in

(49:42):
our reality. Okay, Well, I've got that question, So we
can table that for a second about like what is
it about the sonic qualities of that scream that felt
so different than most movie screams, especially at that period.
The other thing is just the question of like why
do we scream? Is there a biological answer of what's
going on? The The second question I think is is

(50:02):
not a super complicated one, Like the leading theories about
why we scream are just not very surprising, right, Uh.
Screaming in response to fear is most likely some kind
of instinctual alarm call. When you see something dangerous, you
kind of scream automatically, and this serves the purpose of
communicating the threat to others because we're social animals, right,
and we see animals that do this to communicate with

(50:25):
members of their own species. We see animals that do
this seemingly to communicate with with other species as well. Yeah, totally,
And this could serve several different biological functions, maybe all
at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive. One is
to immediately request help, you know, like I need air support. Uh,
You scream to request help from friends and kin and
other protectors or even other types of animals in your environment,

(50:48):
especially help from adults. If the scream comes from a child,
I think that's like a very specific kind of thing,
like you know, you hear your kids scream, and there's
like this automatic, powerful and mediate response. Yeah, And that's
another reason why House by the Cemetery Lucio Foolsey's film
is probably so disturbing, because you're getting this very authentic

(51:09):
scream from a young child, and there's also the sense
that they just terrified a young child. Yeah, I mean yeah,
that's it's especially bad because they sound actually scared. Um.
But a couple of other possible biological functions the scream serves,
again not mutually exclusive. Another one is to maybe worn
nearby can of danger, reducing their own risks. So you

(51:31):
share some genes with them, you scream, and that warns
them of danger. They're also in reduced danger because now
they're on alert. Right. So if I wandered away from
the rest of the tribe and a large predator jumped
out at me, well I got that one good scream
in so I may be toast, but at least there's
a shot of the rest of my people hearing my
death cry and reacting to save their own skin. Yeah.

(51:55):
And then another perhaps secondary maybe possibly in some cases
this is what's going on, could be defensive. Some predators
or threats might be frightened or held at bay by
a sudden, very loud noise. Yeah, I mean, yeah, this
is this is true. I mean you one of the
things that is advised and encountering, say a bear in
the wild, is to be loud, to make a lot

(52:17):
of noise exactly. Yeah. But but there are also some
interesting finds. So so like the question about why we
scream biologically, that doesn't seem like a big mystery, that
that seems like one of those pretty straightforward evolutionary stories,
is at least as far as we know. But there
are some very interesting scientific findings about what happens in
our brain when we hear a scream. And so I

(52:38):
was reading about a study by by Luke h rn
All at All in Current Biology and called human screams
occupy a privileged niche in the communication soundscape. And so
essentially what the authors here found is that the brain
has a different, dedicated pathway for processing screams, and this
pathway is sort of separate from the way it processes

(53:00):
other sounds and other types of auditory communication between people. Uh.
And so they did some brain imaging and it revealed
that most of the time, incoming audio is perceived by
the ear, of course, and leads to activity in the
standard auditory processing centers. But screams, on the other hand,
are heard and then they sort of bypass normal auditory

(53:22):
processing and instead trigger pretty much immediate activation in the amygdala,
a region of the brain that of course is very
important for generating the fear response. Now, the brain seems
to immediately recognize screams as signaling something threatening, and then
it responds accordingly. It's kind of like it's like a
short cut in there. You don't need to figure out

(53:42):
what's going on. As soon as you hear the scream,
the fear that you know, the the alarm state, wells
up inside you. And so I was wondering, well, what's
the acoustic criterion here, Like, how does the brain tell
what a scream is or how much like a scream
a sound has to be before it triggers this react action.
And the researchers found that the main criterion activating the

(54:04):
sphere response in the brain was was a quality of
the sound. That was that they called acoustic roughness. And
this means how rapidly the amplitude of the sound is modulated. Uh,
it can be kind of hard to explain, but basically
it refers to if the loudness of the sound rapidly changes.

(54:24):
So think about a smooth sound kind of like a
single tone alarm, you know, deep versus those rapidly pulsing
alarms that might play the same pitch maybe even at
the same volume, but suddenly but like rapidly pulsing loud
between loud and quiet, and it takes on this kind
of rough, ragged, kind of auditory quality. And I think

(54:45):
this might be the reason I'm okay with normal movie screaming.
But sometimes a scream in a movie sounds real, and
it sounds wrong, and it sounds upsetting. I think that
quality of raggedness that I was trying to put words
to might at least be partially rooted in this quality
they're talking about in the paper of acoustic roughness. This

(55:06):
is really this is really interesting. It makes me think
too about music that incorporates like a lot of like
primal yelling and screaming um. And obviously they know intense
metal such as death metal, and I think a lot
of that is going to fall into the category of
kind of movie scream territory. Whereas there are particular artists,

(55:27):
the one that comes to mind is the vocalist Jen's
Kidman of Sugar, who, at least in some of the
tracks we have, not really just collectively in all the tracks,
is able to really bring out this this guttural raw,
like vicious ragged nous to the things that he is
screaming in in the songs, and it's a and and

(55:48):
it's it's tremendous. I mean, it's one of the reasons
where like I don't listen to a lot of death metal,
but I'll I'll listen to my Sugar and then I'll
I'll think about how much I appreciate it, and then
I'll try out other artists and I'll often just listen
to it and be and think, well, that's not really
scratching the same itch, and I wonder if that's part
of it, Like I'm not it's not activating the same
circuits in my brain because it's a different level of vocalization.

(56:11):
So you want your metal to be like more directly
activating of the fear circuits in your brain. Or yeah, yeah,
if I'm listening to you know, if I'm listening to
something called chaos fear you know, or something you know,
or or New Millennium Cyanide Christ, it needs to have
it needs to connect with that fear network otherwise it's
it's disingenuous, right, Yeah, that's interesting. Well, another interesting thing

(56:35):
that they found in the study was that it wasn't
just human screams, Like the same auditory qualities came through
in like alarm sounds, like people found synthetic alarm sounds
more disturbing if they had this quality of acoustic roughness
that sounds kind of like raggedness to us, you know,
the rapidly modulating volume. Right. So I'm not positive, but

(56:57):
I'm I'm like nine percent sure that's what's going on
in my reaction to the screaming session at the beginning
of of The Tingler. It's got acoustic roughness that most
movie screams don't have. But of course, in the movie
The Tingler, individuals don't just scream. Uh. There's also this
idea of of of dying due to the inability to scream,

(57:18):
the idea of just being scared to death, and that's
another that's that's another like fun topic to unravel. Well, yeah,
so in the movie, the explanation is can you be
scared to death? Because when you get scared and you
can't scream, the Tingler crushes your back, breaks breaks your spine,
and that's like what gets uh Vincent Price's character really excited.

(57:41):
There's that part where he says, like, I've thought about
not for two years, but the breaking of spines due
to fear. But obviously that's not what is happening in
actual human beings. No. Though. The question I guess is
can you actually be scared to death? And the answer
is absolutely yes, that you absolutely can and this does happen.

(58:02):
I found a good article about this from Scientific American
that was consulting with an expert named Martin A. Samuel's
who was chairman of the neurology department at Brigham and
Women's Hospital in Boston, and so uh so so Samuel's
talks about these cases and basically there are tons of
documented instances where a sudden terror causes somebody to die.

(58:24):
But the big question is we know that when people
die of fright, it's not because something like living in
them crack their vertebrae. Something else must be going on,
So what is it? Well, according to Samuel's, the primary
mechanism of death when people are scared to death seems
to be damaged to the vital organs, particularly the heart,
by a toxic surge of stress hormones, primarily adrenaline. So

(58:46):
when we experienced terrifying stimuli, our bodies kick off a
familiar process that you've almost certainly both heard of and
felt for yourself, which is the fight or flight response.
And this is a response within the autonomic nervous stem
that reacts to a threat by preparing the body for
life saving actions. So the heart rate increases, it's pumping
more blood, more blood flows to the muscles, perspiration increases,

(59:11):
the pupils dilate, meaning they you know, they get bigger
to let in more light. Uh, the normal background workings
of the digestive system sort of go on. Hold. Uh,
there's like loosening of the of the lower bowels and
all this kind of stuff. And this automatic response is
of course very useful if you have to take immediate
physical action in response to a threat, as the fight

(59:31):
or flight name implies, So this response primes you to
either you know, to freeze up, take in sensory data,
and evaluate the situation as quickly as possible, then neither
runaway as fast as you can or get ready to
fight for your life. But of course, it's funny so
many of the situations in which our bodies choose to
deploy this type of response in normal life, because so

(59:52):
many of the things that trigger the fight or flight
response to us are not physical threats. They're not something
we need to run from or fight. They're like you know,
you've got an email that upset you or something like that.
Paper tigers is the term we often use. Yeah, the
same fear response that we would have to an actual
physical threat we have, we still experience those, but it's
to these these things that are not that are that

(01:00:15):
are not physical threats or at least not directly, you know,
like there's several degrees of separation between uh, this letter
you got in the mail and like physical incarceration, yes, exactly.
And so the nervous system, of course, it triggers this
fight or flight response by by by releasing, by flooding
the body with stress hormones, uh, one of which, of

(01:00:36):
course the primary one is adrenaline here, and adrenaline is
good at the good at this job. It causes this
rapid response throughout any different parts of the body, gets
us ready to engage in urgent survival behaviors. But according
to Samuel's in this article, adrenaline is very toxic in
high concentrations. Like flooding of adrenaline can damage organs like
the kidneys or the liver over the long term, but

(01:00:59):
the most immediate threat is the damage it can cause
to the heart. And this happens when surging adrenaline forces
the muscle cells in the heart to contract uncontrollably, and
this leads to fatal alterations in the rhythm of the heartbeats,
such as ventricular fibrillation, which is when patterns of contractions
in the ventricles actually prevent the heart from pumping blood correctly.

(01:01:21):
And if the heart doesn't pump blood, suddenly our tissues
stop getting oxygen and we die. And so according to
Samuel's anybody can die of fright, but pre existing cardiac
conditions like heart disease can make you more vulnerable. Uh.
And so a weird way of thinking about this issue
is that our fight or flight response could also be
imagined metaphorically as a kind of Tingler like but whatever,

(01:01:45):
you know, it's like this thing within us that's there
for ancestral reasons. It got in us many many generations
ago when it served a purpose. But now the fight
or flight response like most of the time, I mean,
unless you live in like a very violence or cumstances,
the fight or flight response is generally parasitic on you.
Now it is it is an instinctual parasite that is

(01:02:09):
serving its own purpose, which is mostly obsolete and meanwhile
killing your body in the process. Yeah, I think I
think about this a lot dealing, you know, since I
deal with in a certain amount of anxiety myself. But
like the anxiety, if I think of the anxiety, is
the tingler, Like the tingler kind of takes on different
forms and like whatever the thing is that's bothering me

(01:02:31):
at a particular time, I kind of at times stop
and realize, what's the same force. You know, it's the
same creature, but it's wearing a slightly different skin. It's
just dressed in in some other in the skin of
some other paper tiger. To uh, that's going to disrupt
my day? Yeah, I mean I I wonder if it
is actually I haven't seen the study about this or anything,

(01:02:54):
but at the risk of getting a laugh here, I
wonder if it could actually be helpful to or soonify
your anxiety to like to give yourself a visual metaphor
to think about your anxiety through. It doesn't have to
be a tinkler, but a tingler might be an especially
funny one if you're trying to disempower your own anxiety

(01:03:15):
response to things that aren't actually gonna hurt you. Well,
on one hand, I come back again to the psychedelic
themes of the Tingler, you know, the sparious psychedelic accounts
of psychedelic experience in which fears or even anxieties are personified.
Is something that can then be banished. But then also
like this is this is tantamount to uh many religious faiths,

(01:03:36):
you know, get the behind me Satan? Uh you know,
I mean that's so what is that but taking your
fears and anxieties or temptations or something, you know, so
whatever your your your negative emotional baggage happens to be
and putting it in the form of this, uh, this
this this non human entity that then can there then
be interacted with or fought? Can they can be farted at?

(01:03:58):
If say, if you're Martin luth there exactly well, well yeah,
to to what does he say to the devil? I
give the affart? Yeah. I think the Tingler might be
a good one. It might be a good one to imagine,
because the Tingler actually is not very scary, Like I mean,
if you cut out the parts of the movies with
the screaming that's actually kind of disturbing. The Tingler is

(01:04:19):
very funny. Uh, And so I wonder if you you
listeners out there who have problems with anxiety, try this experiment.
I want to hear about the results when your anxiety
flares up when a paper tiger has got you sweating,
when you you know you're you're experiencing that that full
body stress response, and the adrenaline is flowing and the
cortisol is flowing, and you know your organs are restraining

(01:04:40):
under the weight of this thing that's not actually physically
a threat to you. I think it's just the Tingler.
It's just a Tingler in there, and and see if
that makes you laugh and helps you get over it.
Before we close out here, I do want to come
back just just to to William Castle's gimmickry here. You know,
there's a there's a whole line of thinking on this
that that I don't think I would have even considered

(01:05:02):
had we we not just done a multi episode look
at photography and motion pictures on our other podcast, Invention.
It's especially easy to watch a film like The Tingler
and to laugh at its manipulation of audience reactions, right
and uh, and perhaps a bit challenging to view The
Tingler and feel anything approaching legitimate fear but of course

(01:05:22):
we have to you know, couch the film within the
context of its time, etcetera. But another thing that I
was thinking about was there were some studies that we
touched on in those Invention episodes. Uh, particularly regarding a
researcher by the name of Talma Hendler, founder and director
of the Functional Brain Center at Tel Aviv Sarowski Medical Center.

(01:05:43):
They found that certain scenes from Black Swan this is
a film from two thousand ten Darren Aronofsky, Yeah, a
lot of kind of Suspiria esque Ballerina Shenanigans and Hitler
found that this film produced results that quote compared to
a schizophrenia like state, with the cognitive and emotional centers

(01:06:04):
of the brain operating dramatically in and out of sync. Now,
this is of course a much more modern film we're
talking about here, and certainly one that showcases a much
more ambitious and technically proficient cinema. But I think it
underlines the idea here that films induce a kind of
alternate cognitive experience, maybe even an alternate cognitive reality in

(01:06:25):
and of themselves. Uh, you know, they're not that different
in some respects. Uh, you know, compared to a psychedelic experience.
And so it's it's interesting to to think about cinema
in that regard that we're taking this medium that that
messages with your brain, that changes how you're perceiving reality,
and then on top of that, we're going to just

(01:06:47):
fill it with fear and death and terror and see
what happens. Yeah, that's funny. I mean, um, I agree
with you. I do think you could legitimately think of
watching a film as a form of entering altered state
of consciousness. I don't think that's actually a stretch at all.
It does bring us back to this question, you know,
why why people do enjoy horror movies? I mean, you

(01:07:09):
and I both enjoy horror movies? Like why is that fun?
Like you would think that you just, uh, you would
think that you would never want to provoke negative arousal
states like fearfulness without needing to, because I mean, there's
enough stuff in life giving us anxiety. But I think
we talked about this when we went as guests on
Movie Crush with with Chuck Bryant over on that show.

(01:07:33):
If you haven't checked that out, we're we're on some
episode of it. It was like an October episode yeah,
but we talked about our love of horror movies, and
you know, I totally have the opposite experience. For me,
for some reason, watching scary movies seems to to decrease
my level of anxiety about normal day to day stuff.
And I don't know exactly why that is, but I

(01:07:54):
think it's that, you know, it's sort of like, um,
it gives you a kind of low stakes practice environment
to sort of observe your fear in a controlled setting
where you know that nothing is actually going to threaten you.
But you can also think, perhaps maybe this is a stretch,
but you can think of this anxiety inside of us
as this you know, this autoimmune function that is there

(01:08:18):
to deal with actual threats. And when when those threats
are not there, I mean, what what does it do?
What does it have to feed on? In the same
way that, uh that if you are isolated from stimulive
you are saying solitary confinement, the senses may pick up
on sensory data that is not quite there and extrapolated.
So perhaps on on some level, it's like we don't

(01:08:40):
have enough real concrete threats to fear in our day
to day life. Actual tigers, you know, actual boulders falling
up from the cliffs onto us. But we're we're still
hardwired to deal with those kind of threats, and so
without those kind of threats, we end up fearing all
these other things. And then a horror movie, a good
one anyway, gives us something else to feed to the

(01:09:02):
tingler in our mind. Yeah, somehow a monster is is
a nice compromise there. It's like something that you can
focus this fear response on, but you know, it's not
actually real. Now. One thing I will say is that
I don't know if I'm really a fan of when
I watch a horror movie that's so good and so
effective that I walk out kind of looking over my shoulder.

(01:09:26):
It doesn't happen much anymore. Used to happen more often,
I guess when I've just seen fewer horror movies and
I was less exposed to it. But well, I mean,
I remember seeing the original American remake of The Ring.
Oh yeah, and I was basically up all night after that.
At the time, that was not a lot of fun,
But I look back on it fondly because I had
such an authentic, you know, emotional, fear based reaction to

(01:09:50):
that film and it's it's just something I rarely experience
with a movie. The same can be said for a
lot of psychedelic experiences, though, you know, you hear people say, well,
you know, it wasn't fun at the time, but I
learned something from it. I had the exact same reaction
with with the American remake of The Ring when I
was young. I don't know how old I was. I
must have been I don't know, eighth or ninth grade
when I mean I I was technically like an adult

(01:10:12):
at the time, and I still stayed up all night,
you know, unable to shake it. Yeah, it's certainly made,
like TVs pretty freaky. Anytime after that you turn on
a TV and static pops up, it's like, oh, well,
you know, maybe after a return to The Ring in
the future. I know we've talked before about potentially exploring
something related to like superstitious ideas about technology. Oh yeah,

(01:10:34):
I'd love to do that, you know, I will report.
I still think it actually is a pretty well made
horror movie. Like a lot of the imagery is pretty
inventive and creepy, and it kind of holds up. But
at the same time, I rewatched it more recently and
it didn't have the same effect anymore. And now parts
of it made me laugh. But not to say it's
not that it's like bad. It's just like I you

(01:10:56):
know somehow, especially in the context of my memory, is
a lot of the stuff, the scare moments in it
have become funny. Yeah, And of course it was an
influential film, so it's kind of had a chance to
delude itself through popular culture, I imagine. But it's still
got Brian Cox in it so that you can't fall
can't go wrong with Brian Cox. Put Brian Cox in

(01:11:17):
every single movie, it'll be better, all right. Well, on
that note, we're gonna go and close this one out.
You know, obviously we'd love to hear from anyone out there.
Have you seen The Tinler? Uh? Do you have you know,
some some fond memories of this film, perhaps you even
saw it in the theater. If you saw The Tingler
in the in an actual theater like original production or
even you know, more recently, but definitely if you were

(01:11:40):
in a vibrating chair, we we totally want to hear
about that. Likewise, if you have suggestions for future episodes
of stuff to blow your mind in particular, if you
have suggestions for future movie episodes that we do, we
would love to hear from you. In the meantime, heading
over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that's
we will find all the shows and if you want
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(01:12:02):
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(01:12:29):
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