patrons to scream for their lives. Paid shills would be planted in the audience to begin screaming and, in some of the larger theaters, fainting, carried outside by fake nurses to be loaded into fake ambulances. Spare no expense. The entire gimmick added a reported $250,000 to the film's budget, but also cemented it in Hollywood legend. This ingenious bit of shock-tactic would be impossible today -- someone would definitely sue for "pain and suffering" -- and gimmicks are now relegated to over-bloated 3D films. Still, watching The Tingler , I'm reminded of the best that campy horror can be: bizarre, improbable, creepy, and endlessly enjoyable. Is The Tingler a serious horror classic? No -- of course not. It's about a worm that lives in your spine for god's sake. But is it one of the strangest, most raucous, most memorable films of the late 1950s. It's a throwback to a time when horror let loose the strangest, wildest fears and hallucinations of the human mind and cemented them in celluloid black and white (with a touch of red). It was a time when Vincent Price was the Master, and you never knew what was going to happen when you walked into a William Castle movie and sat down in a strangely buzzing seat. It was the year following The Tingler that Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho , with its own notorious bath-set scene, but would still be a good deal of time before horror films were really taken seriously by