The Tingler (1959)
Directed by William Castle
A pathologist experiments with a deaf-mute woman who is unable to scream to prove that humans die of fright due to an organism he names The Tingler that lives within each person on the spinal cord and is suppressed only when people scream when scared.
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What critics compared The Tingler to
Later, Finney is seen watching the 1959 horror movie “The Tingler” on TV one night, which is a scene inspired by director Derrickson doing the same thing when he was a child.
Though "Shivers" occasionally echoes a couple of its forerunners, "The Tingler" (1959) and "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), the film achieves its own peculiar power with one ingeniously lurid scene after another.
William Castle — the horror producer who wired movie seats to produce electrical jolts during screenings of “The Tingler” in 1959 — would be proud.
For the century prior, a filmmaker’s toolset was limited primarily to sight and sound, but 4DX assaults audiences with touch and smell as well, improving on such short-lived 1959/’60 gimmicks as “The Tingler” (an in-seat joy buzzer rigged to vibrate on cue) and Smell-O-Vision (which spritzed nauseating perfumes at pre-programmed intervals).
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The movie talks about fear in the same way that we heard in William Castle's "The Tingler" (1960), much of which was set in a tacky movie theater where fear, in the physical form of something that looked like a soft, white lobster, crawled around under the seats attacking the paying customers.
Yes, there's a quick aside here to "The Tingler," if you're observant; an even more fleeting one to the Lon Chaney "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." (And of course the central situation is from "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" - or, perhaps more accurately, the first sequel, "Revenge of the Creature."