William Castle is having some kind of weird renaissance indeed. There’s been the almost annual rash of remakes of his films from Dark Castle Entertainment (they missed this year). Now producer Neal Moritz (the immortal mastermind behind XXX: State of the Union, Torque and S.W.A.T.) is putting together a redo of the Castle film The Tingler.
The original Tingler was a Vincent Price film notable for how awful it was, but also because it featured one of Castle’s trademark novelty gags – in the film the Tingler monster attaches to your spine and the only way to defeat it is to scream. Castle would outfit some seats in some (I assume very few) theaters with buzzers so that people would feel the Tingler assaulting their buttocks, and be forced to scream to fight the beast off. Or scream because it got them off. Either or.
It seems unlikely that the new version would involve anything like ass tingle technology, which is too bad, as I think that would go over big in San Francisco. The first draft of the film will be written by Greg Pace, a guy whose prior writing credit includes Race for the Glory: The Story of Drill Team Racing. That’s actually his only writing credit. But he was previously Alec Baldwin’s assistant, so I think it’s all covered.