Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. And in the grand tradition of
Speaker 1: the Dark Crystal Highlander to the Quickening two thousand one
Speaker 1: of Space Odyssey. Boy, do we have a movie episode
Speaker 1: for you today? That's right. We would previously wondered if
Speaker 1: we would get outside of the sixties, seventies, eighties, and
Speaker 1: nineties for a movie episode, and now we have because
Speaker 1: this episode takes us to nineteen fifty nine. Uh, this
Speaker 1: is a very nineteen fifties kind of movie in multiple
Speaker 1: ways as Uh. They will actually kind of connect with
Speaker 1: our series on Psychedelics, though I'm not sure if that's
Speaker 1: why we ended up doing this. So today we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about William Castle's The Tingler. How did we
Speaker 1: arrive at The Tingler? What was this? This was your idea, right, Robert? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: like basically, we just did that big series on Psychedelics
Speaker 1: five episode and I was thinking, well, it's time to
Speaker 1: do a movie episode again. Well, let's let's do a
Speaker 1: psychedelic film. And so I was thinking, well, maybe we'll
Speaker 1: do something like Blue Sunshine from Night, which we're both
Speaker 1: partial to, or yes, one of the ugliest films, right
Speaker 1: that that does concern like LSD. Or I thought, well,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe a more of like a modern film
Speaker 1: like Beyond the Black Rainbow, which is another psychedelic film
Speaker 1: that I really like. But then I started poking around
Speaker 1: and I realized that the the earliest reference to LSD
Speaker 1: and a major motion picture is none other than nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine. Is The Tingler really the earliest? I didn't
Speaker 1: know that. Yeah, that's what I That's what I've read
Speaker 1: is that the references to LSD in this film mark
Speaker 1: that the first time that LSD was referenced in a
Speaker 1: major motion picture. I mean, it would make sense because,
Speaker 1: as we know from our research on psychedelics, uh, there
Speaker 1: was legitimate LSD based therapy or l s D assisted
Speaker 1: therapy going on in the nineteen fifties. There was LSD
Speaker 1: therapeutic research going on in the nineteen fifties. It was
Speaker 1: it was kind of all over the place. And actually
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties it wasn't as controversial yet as
Speaker 1: it would become later, right, And it was legal at
Speaker 1: this point too. Yeah, uh yeah, and so there probably
Speaker 1: would have been a lot of experience. In fact, I
Speaker 1: remember reading a few accounts about people in Hollywood specifically
Speaker 1: saying that they benefited from LST assisted therapy. They were
Speaker 1: like movie stars in the nineteen fifties who had therapists
Speaker 1: in Beverly Hills that gave him LST and had him
Speaker 1: a lie on the couch and talk through their problems,
Speaker 1: and they were like, Wow, this stuff is great. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of surprising it didn't end up in the
Speaker 1: movies earlier. Yeah, it really is. But it's not surprising
Speaker 1: to me anyway that it ends up in a horror
Speaker 1: film and essentially kind of a B picture, because because
Speaker 1: that's where you you see a lot of like the
Speaker 1: first strikes, the first references to some sort of new idea,
Speaker 1: new movement, new sometimes a new technology, or some sort
Speaker 1: of new societal, uh concept or fear. I think we
Speaker 1: should give you the listener a direct sense of the
Speaker 1: flavor of the tingle. So can we do a little
Speaker 1: audio sample here. I'm William Castle, and I feel obligated
Speaker 1: to warn you about the next attraction you will see
Speaker 1: at this theater. The picture is the Tingler, which I directed,
Speaker 1: and for the first time in motion picture history, members
Speaker 1: of the audience, including you, will actually play a part
Speaker 1: in the picture. You will feel some of the physical reactions,
Speaker 1: the shocking sensations experienced by the actors on the screen.
Speaker 1: I guarantee that The Tingler has more shocks per minute
Speaker 1: in my last film, The House on Haunted Hill. But
Speaker 1: don't be alarmed. You can protect yourself. When you see
Speaker 1: the picture, you will be told and remember the instruction
Speaker 1: how you can guard yourself from attack by the Tingler.
Speaker 1: And now may I show you a few scenes from
Speaker 1: The Tingler? All right? So that was that is uh,
Speaker 1: William Castle himself just selling you on this picture. It's
Speaker 1: such a weird trailer because it was just part of it.
Speaker 1: But it's just basically him in front of the camera saying,
Speaker 1: I've got a picture for you. He's got It's like
Speaker 1: he's not like a film director. He's like a guy
Speaker 1: with the Traveling Medicine Show. He's like, I must warn
Speaker 1: you that these tonics are so potent they have been
Speaker 1: outlawed in four counties for the amazing benefits it has.
Speaker 1: You know, like he's just selling it and selling it
Speaker 1: and uh, and and so William Castle, of course was
Speaker 1: a horror director. He directed movies like The House on
Speaker 1: Haunted Hill, which also has Vincent Price. I don't know,
Speaker 1: did the cliff reveal that this movie has Bencent Price?
Speaker 1: The Tingler features Vincent Price in the lead role. So
Speaker 1: you mentioned House on Haunted Hill, fifty nine, Tinkler and
Speaker 1: fifty nine, follow that up with Thirteen Ghosts in nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: you know, just back to back. Uh. He would go
Speaker 1: he would, you know, produce a number of pictures like this.
Speaker 1: He would go on to produce Rosemary's Baby in Night
Speaker 1: so produced not yeah, of course. So where we enter
Speaker 1: the Tingler to oratory here though, is after the success
Speaker 1: of House on Haunted Hill, Columbia Pictures set Castle up
Speaker 1: with his own unit, and uh and this was his
Speaker 1: first project under that unit. Uh. He this this was
Speaker 1: mainly because you know, he had a reputation for delivering
Speaker 1: films on time, under budget, and he was famously a
Speaker 1: promotion king when it came to these films. Uh, and
Speaker 1: was all throughout his career. Was often you know, pulling
Speaker 1: out these different gimmicks, like not just selling you the
Speaker 1: theater experience in the shock of the film, But but
Speaker 1: something beyond, like some new technology that was going to
Speaker 1: make the film, uh, you know, all the more evocative.
Speaker 1: It was like for a time when people were bored
Speaker 1: with regular old movies, so they would try gimmicks of course,
Speaker 1: like three D right, three D glasses and all that.
Speaker 1: But but William Castle was sort of went in another direction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he would beyond that. So howiseon Haunted On Haunted Hill
Speaker 1: was filmed in Immergo, which sounds fancy. It sounds like
Speaker 1: some sort of special filter that's used on the camera.
Speaker 1: Does Amergo have an exclamation point after? I don't think
Speaker 1: it did, but it was kind of implied. But basically
Speaker 1: this boiled down to a red eyed skeleton prop would
Speaker 1: float over the theater on wires during a key scene
Speaker 1: in the picture. Thirteen Ghosts was filmed in illusion oh,
Speaker 1: which meant audience This is actually a little more complicated.
Speaker 1: Audience members were given red blue screens to either see
Speaker 1: or hide the ghosts that appear in the movie. Oh
Speaker 1: I see. So yeah, there'd be like a like a
Speaker 1: color polarized kind of image on the screen, and so
Speaker 1: you could hold up the screens to either see or
Speaker 1: not see the ghost on the picture, and that's rather
Speaker 1: clever apparently like recent Blu Ray releases of the film
Speaker 1: like coming with a little gadget that that replicates this effect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of fun. Homicidal from featured a fright break
Speaker 1: during which you you know, you could you have this
Speaker 1: break to catch your breath and decide if you wanted
Speaker 1: to stay and see then in the finale or leave
Speaker 1: and get a full refund. So you know, it's one
Speaker 1: of those you see this a lot with promotions of
Speaker 1: these pictures, like they're so confident, uh in its the
Speaker 1: ability to deliver that you you were offered a full refund.
Speaker 1: And then there was also Mr Sardonicus from nine and
Speaker 1: in this the audience got to vote with glow in
Speaker 1: the dark cards on the fate of the villain. And
Speaker 1: this one's interesting because it was it was almost certainly
Speaker 1: gimmicked because you had two endings. You had the mercy
Speaker 1: ending for the villain and then the the ending where
Speaker 1: the villain got his come up, and and there are
Speaker 1: allegations that they never even shot the mercy endings, like
Speaker 1: nobody was going to vote for it, so you know,
Speaker 1: you didn't really have the choice. It was just the
Speaker 1: illusion of the choice which audience is going to be like,
Speaker 1: I don't want the villain to be punished. Yeah. Castle
Speaker 1: claimed that he shot it, but but some disagree. And
Speaker 1: then there were various other promotional gimmicks and claims over
Speaker 1: the years, but The Tingler is ultimately, I think the
Speaker 1: most famous of these because it was filmed in percepto
Speaker 1: percepto that's so good. From what I understand. That means
Speaker 1: more like, there were some appliances installed in seats in
Speaker 1: the movie theater which would which would mess with members
Speaker 1: of the audience. Yeah. Basically, Castle purchased military surplus airplane
Speaker 1: wing de iceres, which are essentially vibration devices and motors.
Speaker 1: Yeah uh, and put these up under some of the
Speaker 1: chairs in theaters showing the picture, and they went off
Speaker 1: at a key moment in the film during which the Tingler,
Speaker 1: the monster will describe in a bit, is on the
Speaker 1: loose in a theater in the film, and Vincent Price's
Speaker 1: character tells the audience to scream, scream for your lives. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then also Castle planted human screamers and key locations
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah uh. And so this is funny because
Speaker 1: this has been replicated in other films like the movie
Speaker 1: Gremlins too from what was that nineteen nine or so
Speaker 1: or the into the eighties whenever it is. That's a
Speaker 1: fantastic movie, by the way, one of the best of
Speaker 1: eighties motion pictures. Um. You know, one of my favorites,
Speaker 1: John Carpenters in the Mouth of Madness ends in a
Speaker 1: movie theater. Oh yeah, yeah, And so I think some
Speaker 1: of them are taking after this William Castle kind of thing,
Speaker 1: where like there's a scene in a movie theater and
Speaker 1: the movie kind of breaks the fourth wall to like
Speaker 1: wink at the audience and be like, just imagine you're
Speaker 1: in this movie theater. Yeah. I was actually lucky enough
Speaker 1: to see the thing there for the first time a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago at the Plaza Theater here in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: where it was riffed live by Trace Bolieu and Frank
Speaker 1: Conniff from Mr Sennen's Theater. Okay, they were there in
Speaker 1: person to to riff it, and there were no d
Speaker 1: ier is installed under the seats, but the screaming part
Speaker 1: of the film was still a lot of fun. Like
Speaker 1: everybody in the audience really got into it and screamed
Speaker 1: for their lives, right. They actually encouraged the audience to
Speaker 1: scream because they suggest that the monster from the film
Speaker 1: has become real and is out in the theater with you. Yes,
Speaker 1: I can imagine that was a lot of fun with
Speaker 1: Dr Forrester and TV's Frank on Hand. Oh absolutely, all right,
Speaker 1: So that's basically Castle in a nutshell. I don't know
Speaker 1: how much we really have to say about Vincent Price,
Speaker 1: because I mean, he's Vincent Brice. He was a legend,
Speaker 1: Hollywood legend. Acted more than a hundred films, everything from
Speaker 1: like the Tin Conn Endments in nineteen fifty six to
Speaker 1: a string of wonderful Led Girl and po adaptations. He
Speaker 1: was in The Fly, The Abominable Doctor fivees uh Ultiate,
Speaker 1: later on, towards the end of his career, Edward Scissor Hands. So,
Speaker 1: I mean he's and then he was in He was
Speaker 1: on Batman, he was on The Muppet Show. He was
Speaker 1: a cooking enthusiast and author, a supporter of commendable social
Speaker 1: issues and campaigns. I mean, he's one of those rare
Speaker 1: old Hollywood stars that the more you learn about him,
Speaker 1: I feel like, you know, the more you look up
Speaker 1: to him, the more you respected, the more you can
Speaker 1: even relate to him the rare case where you there's
Speaker 1: a famous person who doesn't turn out to be more
Speaker 1: and more of a sleeves bag the more you like. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then there's a finally of note here there's the
Speaker 1: screenwriter of The Tingler, which it's easy to overlook with
Speaker 1: films like this, that yes, somebody wrote this, there was
Speaker 1: a screenwriter, and the screenwriter someone of note because it's
Speaker 1: it was Rob White, who lived nineteen o nine through
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety, and he was a prolific writer. That's probably
Speaker 1: best remembered as the author of the nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: novel death Watch, which has been adapted twice, once with
Speaker 1: Andy Griffith and Sam Bottoms and a second time with
Speaker 1: Michael Douglas and Jeremy Irvine. White had previously worked with
Speaker 1: Castle on House on a Hunted Hill, uh, and he
Speaker 1: was impressed, apparently by a creepy white worm prop on
Speaker 1: the set. But he was also inspired to make the
Speaker 1: mad science angle in the story a little more cutting
Speaker 1: edge by bringing in LSD. So Turner. Classic Movies insider
Speaker 1: Info shares a quote from an interview that authored Tom
Speaker 1: Weaver had with White. Tom Weavers great by the way.
Speaker 1: He does some really good commentaries on some of the
Speaker 1: Universal Monster. Yeah, he's the author of this particular book.
Speaker 1: It's from his apparently Return of the b Science Fiction
Speaker 1: and Horror Heroes. And this is White's White speaking here. Quote.
Speaker 1: I wanted something different from the typical shot or pill
Speaker 1: that you see in movie trips. Algis Huxley told me
Speaker 1: about a doctor at U C. L A who was
Speaker 1: run in an experiment on online sergic acid LSD. So
Speaker 1: I went up there to see this man, Dr Cohen,
Speaker 1: and he gave me some of it. He took me
Speaker 1: into a nice little room with a cod in a radio,
Speaker 1: and he got something out of his refrigerator and gave
Speaker 1: me a shot. It was all legal. Then I watched
Speaker 1: the grain in the wood writhing around and listened to
Speaker 1: the music. It was very pleasant, although I did never
Speaker 1: want to do it again. This is funny that he
Speaker 1: describes it as pleasant because it is specifically deployed in
Speaker 1: the movie as part of the like acid exploitation kind
Speaker 1: of vibe where it like gives you nightmares and drives
Speaker 1: you insane. Right now, Huxley, you might remember from our
Speaker 1: psychedelic episodes. Not only wrote Brave New World. But he
Speaker 1: wrote the highly influential book The Doors of Perception ur
Speaker 1: which explores the psychedelic experience. Yeah, and Huxley had a
Speaker 1: correspondence with Humphrey Osmond, who was an important nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: psychedelic researcher, and they it was from their correspondence I
Speaker 1: believe that the term psychedelic came. Yeah. And then oh,
Speaker 1: by the way that I think we may have touched
Speaker 1: on this in past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: But Huxley experienced a fantasia. He couldn't form, you know,
Speaker 1: mental images in his mind except when he had large
Speaker 1: quantities of mescaline. That's interesting. So, uh so White had
Speaker 1: this experience worked it into the plot, and we'll discuss
Speaker 1: how he does that later. But then apparently White related
Speaker 1: his experiences to Vincent Price, hoping that it would convince
Speaker 1: Price to give a more convincing performance in the film,
Speaker 1: you know, specifically in the scene where he's supposed to
Speaker 1: be on LSD. But then Price allegedly just disregarded the
Speaker 1: suggestion and did it like the typical like Vincent Price
Speaker 1: freak out the scene. Oh yeah, he's got the wide
Speaker 1: open mouth and the ohh he's I think he's supposed
Speaker 1: to be hallucinating that the walls are closing in on him.
Speaker 1: But the scene is hilarious because he's trying to prevent
Speaker 1: the walls from closing in on him by running back
Speaker 1: and forth between the walls, and it's like a thirty
Speaker 1: foot wide room. So he runs and pushes on a wall,
Speaker 1: then runs all the way to the other side, moaning
Speaker 1: and pushes on that wall. Uh. I don't want to.
Speaker 1: I don't want to, you know, blame Price in any
Speaker 1: of this, because I mean, he still gives a really
Speaker 1: solid performance. Was ultimately like the glube holding the whole
Speaker 1: thing together. His charisma carries the film. I mean, one
Speaker 1: thing I will say about this movie is I was
Speaker 1: surprised how engaging it was. We watched it just last night.
Speaker 1: I don't know how I've made it this far without
Speaker 1: seeing The Tanler before, especially because I love, you know,
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties horror movies, and and and I how did
Speaker 1: it happen? I think for some reason I had maybe
Speaker 1: been told or I just assumed somehow that it was
Speaker 1: one of those really dull, dry nineteen fifties sci fi
Speaker 1: horror movies and you know, there are a number of those.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of fifties horror movies I like
Speaker 1: that maybe have a great, funny looking monster, great set
Speaker 1: or prop or something, but a lot of the characters
Speaker 1: and the dialogue are just infinitely stiff, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of like gray neutral things receding into infinity, and so
Speaker 1: it just happened sometimes I assume this was one of those.
Speaker 1: Not the case at all. This movie is like highly engaging,
Speaker 1: really funny camp and I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop watching. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's it's easy to overlook it from our
Speaker 1: standpoint looking back through cinematic history, because on one hand,
Speaker 1: if you if you see just a line of a
Speaker 1: different movie Monsters, the Tingler is not going to be
Speaker 1: as captivating as you know, certainly like Universal Monsters, but
Speaker 1: even other things like the crawling brain creatures and Fiend
Speaker 1: without a Face that sort of thing. Uh, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it can easily be lost in the shuffle. It also
Speaker 1: doesn't help that the trailer for it is just William
Speaker 1: Castle telling you how scary it's going to be, and
Speaker 1: like shots of people screaming. Yeah, but it is a
Speaker 1: really fun movie, I think because a lot of it
Speaker 1: I think has to do with the charisma of Vincent Price,
Speaker 1: and like the weirdness of the premise. A lot of
Speaker 1: it also just has to do with the zany nous
Speaker 1: of the plot. Yeah, it has a zany plot and
Speaker 1: and really just a weird premise. We're gonna get into
Speaker 1: this and and ultimately draw some some science out of it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, this is a weird plot. And even if
Speaker 1: White's LSD experiences didn't have a huge influence on Vincent
Speaker 1: Price's performance, and ultimately they don't even factor into the
Speaker 1: plot all that deeply, I still wonder, if you know,
Speaker 1: if what we're looking at here some of the weirder
Speaker 1: aspects of it might have something to do with the
Speaker 1: psychedelic experience. I think it is a more engaging film
Speaker 1: because it was written by somebody who had an LSD experience.
Speaker 1: I'll go I'll go that far and make that assumption.
Speaker 1: So maybe we should just describe what happens in the movie. Warning,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have some spoilers for this movie from If
Speaker 1: you want to watch it fresh, pause the podcast. Now
Speaker 1: go see it. It's available you know, for rent at
Speaker 1: all major online movie rental websites, alright, so the plot
Speaker 1: of the film is kind of a mess, but here's
Speaker 1: how it goes. The crazy central nugget upon which everything
Speaker 1: is based is that Dr Warren che Happen. That's prices character.
Speaker 1: I think they say Chapenha've been a couple of years
Speaker 1: and I've seen it. So Dr Chapin, he's a pathologist
Speaker 1: who makes a game changing discovery about human physiology, something
Speaker 1: that scientist healers shamans uh you know, body hacking warriors
Speaker 1: uh failed to discover throughout our species entire history. And
Speaker 1: this is it. We all have a centipede like paraside
Speaker 1: a k a. A tingler affixed to our spine and
Speaker 1: it curls up and feeds whenever we exhibit fear, and
Speaker 1: if it keeps feeding, it kills us by constructing constricting
Speaker 1: our spinal cord. But we have a way to cope
Speaker 1: with it. Screaming weakens the creature and stops its strangulation
Speaker 1: on the human spine. So you can tell this was
Speaker 1: kind of I think written around the idea, or I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe maybe it was adapted to what was
Speaker 1: already in the script, the idea of getting people to scream,
Speaker 1: as like a gimmick in the theater. So they're like
Speaker 1: parts of the movie that just have people screaming. It's
Speaker 1: like divorced from the plot. It's just faces on the
Speaker 1: screen screaming into the camera with really ragged, real sounding screams.
Speaker 1: This kind of shocking because usually the screams you hear
Speaker 1: in a movie feel a little bit smoothed over. They're
Speaker 1: a little bit sanitary as far as screams go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but these are these feel unsettling for sure. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And so this premise is amazing so Vincent Price. It
Speaker 1: starts off with him as a guy who does autopsies.
Speaker 1: He's like doing autopsies on executed condemned prisoners who were
Speaker 1: murderers and stuff, and he keeps getting this idea, why
Speaker 1: do I find the spinal column cracked and destroyed? You know,
Speaker 1: and these people who died of fright. There's actually a
Speaker 1: great part where he's he says something like, I've thought
Speaker 1: about not for two years, but the spinal cracking due
Speaker 1: to fear. So yeah, you just kind of have to imagine,
Speaker 1: like all of his conversation ends of his family and friends,
Speaker 1: it all comes back to the spinal column breaking due
Speaker 1: to fear and yeah, and so he makes this discovery
Speaker 1: that it's it's a Tingler. It's a parasitic organism that
Speaker 1: not just these individuals have, but that everybody has. Right,
Speaker 1: everybody's got a Tingler. And and I'm it's been a
Speaker 1: while since I've I've seen it. But as I recall, like,
Speaker 1: he uses LSD to try and invoke an intense enough
Speaker 1: experience of fear in himself to better study the Tinglers.
Speaker 1: That right, Yeah, So he's trying to to document the
Speaker 1: Tingler I think by taking X rays of people's spines
Speaker 1: right after they're mortified and uh. And so he wants
Speaker 1: to do it to himself, but he laments the fact
Speaker 1: that nothing scares him. It's like, you know, when I
Speaker 1: was a child, I could have been afraid, but now
Speaker 1: I'm just grown up and nothing, nothing really scares me
Speaker 1: like that. So he gets the bright idea to inject
Speaker 1: himself with LSD and this will they explain helpfully in
Speaker 1: the film that this will induce nightmares like nothing else.
Speaker 1: And so he does it, and the walls start closing
Speaker 1: in and he starts looking at a prop skeleton and
Speaker 1: his laboratory and this causes him to have such terror
Speaker 1: that I guess the tingler comes out of him. But
Speaker 1: the problem is, I think what he's try that's right,
Speaker 1: it activates, right, it activates, which means it like puffs
Speaker 1: up like a balloon on your spine and you can
Speaker 1: see it in X rays when you wouldn't normally be
Speaker 1: able to see it. Uh. And so the thing that
Speaker 1: he's trying to do, I think is get the tingler
Speaker 1: to puff up and then see what happens if he
Speaker 1: doesn't scream. But he's not able to do it. He's
Speaker 1: so overcome with fear that he has to scream. And
Speaker 1: from this, I think he concludes that it is impossible
Speaker 1: to avoid screaming if the tingler swells up to a
Speaker 1: significant size, And like, screaming is a natural response that
Speaker 1: you can't avoid unless, say, you are incapable of screaming. Ah.
Speaker 1: And that's where we get to our next plot element,
Speaker 1: because meanwhile, theater owner Oliver Higgins has a terrible relationship
Speaker 1: with his wife Martha. Oliver also owns a theater. This
Speaker 1: is the theater that is used later. And I believe
Speaker 1: they just do they just show silent films, that's right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't. They only do the old movies and the like.
Speaker 1: At one point, there's a there's a long scene towards
Speaker 1: the end where they're just showing an old silent movie.
Speaker 1: That's a real old silent movie. It seems like a
Speaker 1: convenient way to pad the run time. So it's anyway,
Speaker 1: Oliver and Martha they do not get along, and we're
Speaker 1: presenting with a lot of scenes just showing how poorly
Speaker 1: they get along. They're always fighting and uh and we
Speaker 1: also learned that she herself, Martha, is deaf and mute.
Speaker 1: So you can see where this is going now. Having
Speaker 1: heard about the Tingler from his neighbor, uh Vincent Price,
Speaker 1: Higgins plots to scare his wife to death, knowing that
Speaker 1: she will be unable to scream to keep her own
Speaker 1: tingler from killing her. Okay, does that make sense? So
Speaker 1: when you scream because you're scared, that stops the tinkler
Speaker 1: from swelling up to such a size that it breaks
Speaker 1: your spine and kills you. But if you can't scream,
Speaker 1: it will swell up to that size, break your spine
Speaker 1: and kill you. So he just has to terrify his
Speaker 1: wife to death, right, and that's what he he sets
Speaker 1: out to do. He frightens her to death with a
Speaker 1: mix of of stage and what I assume are supposed
Speaker 1: to be actual hallucinations, including an actually really trippy scene
Speaker 1: in this black and white movie in which a hand
Speaker 1: emerges from a red bathtub. Yeah, that's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1: I guess there's another sort of cinematography gimmick of castles
Speaker 1: in a way where the movie is in black and white.
Speaker 1: But there is one scene where where this woman is
Speaker 1: having this horrifying experience where she looks into the bathroom
Speaker 1: and the bathtub is full of red liquid, presumably blood,
Speaker 1: and she has a terrible, terrible fear of seeing blood. Um,
Speaker 1: and so, like, how did they do that? I was
Speaker 1: reading about it. Supposedly what happened is they spliced in
Speaker 1: this one scene that was filmed in color, where everything
Speaker 1: in the scene had to be like painted black and
Speaker 1: white and gray except the bathtub which had the red
Speaker 1: stuff in it. Uh. That that's what's been alleged, But
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's actually true. I guess another
Speaker 1: way it could have been done is just like hand
Speaker 1: coloring of a black and white image. Well, either way,
Speaker 1: the result is impressive. When I saw it for the
Speaker 1: first time in the theater, not expecting it to happen.
Speaker 1: I was legitimately wild by it, because on one hand,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, she's seeing blood so vividly that it's
Speaker 1: visible in black and white. But also it's like, this
Speaker 1: is a black and white world, and via the this
Speaker 1: this fear hallucination, you're they're actually seeing this color for
Speaker 1: the first time. So she dies and then Chapin performs
Speaker 1: the autopsy and removes the oversized tingler from her spine. Um.
Speaker 1: I guess it's either still swollen from feeding on all
Speaker 1: that delicious fear or just since she could never scream
Speaker 1: her entire life, it was an enlarged specimen. But then
Speaker 1: it escapes and it runs them uck ends up in
Speaker 1: a movie theater. There were I'm skipping ahead, like, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of there's a scene where Vincent Price's character
Speaker 1: is sleeping and it's crawling on it. Well, that this
Speaker 1: is all to do with the conflict, I wonder if
Speaker 1: you might have been conflating a couple of things earlier
Speaker 1: actually when you said that, uh, that Oliver Higgins and
Speaker 1: his wife Martha were always fighting. What what we definitely
Speaker 1: see a lot of is Vincent Price and his own wife.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm getting confused. His wife played by Patricia Cutts,
Speaker 1: who she's she's portrayed as like the scheming heiress who uh,
Speaker 1: she doesn't take her husband seriously because he spends too
Speaker 1: much time working. Rachel and I were talking about it
Speaker 1: and I was like, this is kind of like a
Speaker 1: bore At movie because it's like, it's all about these
Speaker 1: guys who are like my wife and they want to
Speaker 1: get revenge on their wives and end up using the
Speaker 1: Tingler to do so. And it's I cannot express how
Speaker 1: funny it is the way people in this movie keeps
Speaker 1: saying the words the Tingler and dialogue. So like there's
Speaker 1: a part where, you know, one of the characters is
Speaker 1: Oliver Higgins is explaining his plot to murder his own wife,
Speaker 1: and he says something like, I got the idea from
Speaker 1: you about you know the Tingler. Ah. Yeah, it's uh,
Speaker 1: just the the dialogue alone is is wonderful in this
Speaker 1: so at any rate, skipping ahead, the Tingler ns up
Speaker 1: running a monk. It's running a bunk in a movie
Speaker 1: theater um and you know people are or or you know,
Speaker 1: it's vibrating the seats and then people watching it, you know,
Speaker 1: they're having the vibration effect going on as well, ideally
Speaker 1: to heighten the fear. And then Chapin shows up and
Speaker 1: he's telling everybody scream, scream for your life in order
Speaker 1: to subdue the creature, and they are able to subdue it,
Speaker 1: and then Chapin inserts the parasite back into Martha's corpse,
Speaker 1: and then in a confusing and perhaps nonsensical ending, the
Speaker 1: husband winds up locked in a room with the corpse
Speaker 1: and he's experiences this like, you know, crazy hallucinatory fear,
Speaker 1: and her corpse rises up from the table and he's
Speaker 1: so scared he's unable to scream, and we're left to
Speaker 1: presume what that means for him. I was trying to
Speaker 1: understand what was happening at the end of there. It
Speaker 1: didn't make any sense to me. Why was she coming
Speaker 1: back to life? I don't know. Yeah, it's not something
Speaker 1: that has been established with the creature before. It's not
Speaker 1: even suggested that it can animate a corpse. I feel
Speaker 1: like they kind of just work themselves into a corner
Speaker 1: there and they're like, what would be a flashy ending,
Speaker 1: and let's do that. Yeah, I guess so. Um I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean maybe it's just kind of like
Speaker 1: it's like the ending of Jaws, right, you know, where
Speaker 1: it's like people could complain like, I don't understand, doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense that the shark has this tank in
Speaker 1: its mouth and that it explodes the shark when it
Speaker 1: and it's just like, you know, at that point in
Speaker 1: the story, you're not worrying about it. It's the finale.
Speaker 1: You're just you're good with whatever. Yeah, it's true, they've
Speaker 1: got you. But but I do think we should just
Speaker 1: take another moment to just think about how wonderfully weird,
Speaker 1: and I argue, incredibly psychedelic. Just the basic concept is,
Speaker 1: I mean, think about some of the perceptions and confrontations
Speaker 1: of fear, the personification and manifestation of various fear as
Speaker 1: you see in psychedelic literature and descriptions of psychedelic experiences.
Speaker 1: And this film is telling you, hey, there, your fear
Speaker 1: is a weird bug monster living inside you. But you
Speaker 1: can fight back against it, you can scream at it,
Speaker 1: you can wrestle with it on the floor. Uh, it
Speaker 1: feels suitably psychedelic in that sense. Well, well, I think
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that is not literally biologically true,
Speaker 1: but may actually be a quite useful metaphor. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm reminded of, you know, some of the things that uh, well,
Speaker 1: Terence McKenna has written about talking about, you know, this
Speaker 1: disconnect that humans have with their inner realities and from
Speaker 1: their souls, and how that might tie into psychological experiences
Speaker 1: of UFOs and aliens. He wrote, we are alienated, so
Speaker 1: alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial
Speaker 1: in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre
Speaker 1: dimensions that it encompasses. So maybe I'm reading too much
Speaker 1: into the Tinkler, But but I I thought about that.
Speaker 1: You are not reading too much into the Tingler. You
Speaker 1: are tingling it just the right frequency. It's actually kind
Speaker 1: of a fun mental exercise to try and imagine, like
Speaker 1: what would the world be like if there were Tingler.
Speaker 1: Let's come back to that. Alright. On that note, we're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Thank Alright, we're back. So we've been talking about the Tingler,
Speaker 1: and Robert I am to understand that you believe the
Speaker 1: Tingler is based on a real life organism, or at
Speaker 1: least could be. Yeah, I mean to a certain extent.
Speaker 1: It's my understanding based on some of the materials I
Speaker 1: was looking at that it's commonly believed that the basic
Speaker 1: design of the creature is based on a very real organism.
Speaker 1: It's not not an indo parasite or a parasite at all,
Speaker 1: but it is a real life organism known as the
Speaker 1: velvet worm and the velvet worm um. I encourage everyone
Speaker 1: to look up images or footage of this creature. I
Speaker 1: know it is is factored into some recent Attenborough documentaries,
Speaker 1: so there so there is some tremendous footage of these creatures.
Speaker 1: Even though they're they're they're hard to find as as
Speaker 1: we'll discuss here, but there are roughly seventy species of
Speaker 1: velvet worm that are still thriving in the world, and
Speaker 1: you'll only find them in rainforest environments. Again, they're not
Speaker 1: parasites at all, but rather a leaf litter predator that
Speaker 1: that has this wonderful adaptation. So, just to describe it
Speaker 1: real quick, it's this this long looking creature that looks
Speaker 1: kind of like a centipede and looks almost exactly like
Speaker 1: the tingler um has. You know, this pair of a
Speaker 1: long antennae in the front, and as you're watching it
Speaker 1: move around, it is there's this odd feeling that what
Speaker 1: you're looking at is a little bit unlike any other organism,
Speaker 1: Like it kind of looks like a sea slug, but
Speaker 1: it has legs and it is on the ground, So
Speaker 1: what's happening? So uh, it has a number of really
Speaker 1: cool adaptations. For example, Uh, it's rather slow moving, but
Speaker 1: it is a predator and the way that it a
Speaker 1: wires its prey is by shooting fast hardening slime from
Speaker 1: a pair of projections near its mouth. And this fast,
Speaker 1: this like quick hardening slime subdues their prey long enough
Speaker 1: for the worm to to you know, shamble over, crack
Speaker 1: open the prey's shell, inject it's digestive saliva, and then
Speaker 1: suck the slurry of saliva and you know, generally, like
Speaker 1: arthropod guts back out of the out of the slim husk.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's awesome. Well, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: some species of arachnid, like the lasso spiders or the
Speaker 1: spitting spiders that will shoot a like some kind of
Speaker 1: projectile web thing at their prey or drop some kind
Speaker 1: of projectile web thing from above, and then they can descend,
Speaker 1: and then of course that they also deal with some
Speaker 1: some vomiting or injecting of digestive juices. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: this creature can also shoot the slime and self defense
Speaker 1: and the it's a very swift attack, especially coming from
Speaker 1: a creature that's the wise quite slow. The other crazy
Speaker 1: thing about this, uh, this creature is that it's often
Speaker 1: described as being like a halfway point between an earthworm
Speaker 1: and uh and you know, proper insects. So it's not
Speaker 1: a centipede, which you would normally think of as having
Speaker 1: like an exoskeleton, right, yeah, it's it's a stranger creature
Speaker 1: and it's been around for about five hundred million years.
Speaker 1: Oh so this is a Cambrian friend. Yeah, yeah, fossils day,
Speaker 1: back to the Cambrian Age. Their fossils pop up in
Speaker 1: the Burgess Shale in Canada, alright, so that we're talking
Speaker 1: like five d five million years old, and also the
Speaker 1: ching Jiang Formation in China about five twenty million years old,
Speaker 1: so we have fossil evidence of essentially the same creature.
Speaker 1: So wait a minute, that would be uh. I think
Speaker 1: all of those fossil beds are ancient marine fossil beds.
Speaker 1: So would this also be a creature that you would
Speaker 1: find in the water, or would this be like a
Speaker 1: water dwelling version of it, or or do you know
Speaker 1: what's going on there? I'm not entirely sure on that account.
Speaker 1: I mean that the species that are alive today are
Speaker 1: all terrestrial organisms that thrive exclusively in rainforest in environments.
Speaker 1: Um they have waterproof skin, they their legs have retractable claws,
Speaker 1: and they have when it comes down to like how
Speaker 1: many legs they have, it varies like some have as
Speaker 1: few as thirteen pairs of stubby legs, others have as
Speaker 1: many as forty three pairs of stubby legs depending on
Speaker 1: the species. The spigots that it's that it squirts the
Speaker 1: slime out of or essentially modified legs, and then the
Speaker 1: slime legs modified legs like two little modified legs in
Speaker 1: the front that have become slimespigots. But then the glands
Speaker 1: that power those slimes figots, they run the entire length
Speaker 1: of the creature's body and they amount that for about
Speaker 1: ten percent of the creatures overall body mass. So basically
Speaker 1: muscles contract and squeeze it out like fast squirting toothpaste,
Speaker 1: and there's some other just really like weird curios about
Speaker 1: this particular creature. For instance, there's at least one species
Speaker 1: of velvet velvet worm that is social, and it lives
Speaker 1: in groups ruled by a dominant female and they have
Speaker 1: an entire hierarchy, which is just mind boggling. There's another
Speaker 1: species that's apparently all female. The rest use sexual reproduction,
Speaker 1: with the males in one particular genus simply depositing their
Speaker 1: sperm on the female skin, which causes the localized area
Speaker 1: of the skin to break down and permit the sperm
Speaker 1: to pass into the female's body and then swim to
Speaker 1: the ovaries. So it's like a form of like chemical
Speaker 1: traumatic insemination. Yea, some velvet worms lay eggs, but most
Speaker 1: of them give birth to live young weird. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they are. They are strange creatures, like it, really alien
Speaker 1: feeling creatures, as alien, if not more so than the
Speaker 1: tingler itself. Yeah, especially the idea that you have these
Speaker 1: little like a social group of these things. Um. But
Speaker 1: but of course the you know, you get into the
Speaker 1: world of various creepy crowls and you find other weird
Speaker 1: creatives as well. Like I was reading the other day
Speaker 1: that there are some varieties of centipede where you see
Speaker 1: maternal instinct where the the mother centipede will like corral
Speaker 1: the young centipedes and like surround them to protect them.
Speaker 1: So um uh yeah, I mean we shouldn't take just
Speaker 1: because something is you know, seemingly primitive organism, uh and
Speaker 1: uh and kind of icky, we shouldn't take for granted
Speaker 1: the complexity of its life cycle. Yeah. I think, uh,
Speaker 1: A lot of these discoveries undercut the kind of traditional
Speaker 1: top level belief in you know nature, red in tooth
Speaker 1: and claw, where it's just outside of the mammals, it's
Speaker 1: all just killing and struggle and all that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think the more we learn about not just uh,
Speaker 1: you know, other vertebrates, but even invertebrates, you you start
Speaker 1: to see I mean, of course you will see you know,
Speaker 1: like parents eating their young young eating the parents, but
Speaker 1: you will also see strange, almost mammalian looking parenting instincts
Speaker 1: that you wouldn't expect if you just have this like
Speaker 1: struggle and fighting based view of nature. Absolutely so so
Speaker 1: again the Tingler. Don't watch The Tingler and expect to
Speaker 1: you know, accurate portrayal of velvet worm biology and behavior.
Speaker 1: But roughly speaking, like the creature is based on the
Speaker 1: morphology of a velvet worm. Well, especially because I think,
Speaker 1: don't they say in the movie that the tingler is
Speaker 1: like indestructible, like they can't pierce it with any implements
Speaker 1: or something. I imagine velvet worms are not quite like that.
Speaker 1: They look pretty soft to me. Well, they're certainly not indestructible,
Speaker 1: that's for sure. Uh, And they are you know again,
Speaker 1: they're not parasites. It's really hard to imagine how a
Speaker 1: velvet worm could have U I mean, so certainly we
Speaker 1: see creatures that you know, take on a parasitic relationship
Speaker 1: over the course of evolutionary history, but it's hard to
Speaker 1: imagine how a velvet worm would carry this off. You know,
Speaker 1: like velvet worms start hanging out on people's necks or
Speaker 1: on you know, you know, pre human harmited necks, and
Speaker 1: it just kind of evolves from there. I don't think
Speaker 1: it really makes a lot of sense. Well I do think, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so let's follow up on that then, because I think
Speaker 1: maybe we should talk about the idea of fear and
Speaker 1: the indo symbion. So there's, uh, the premise of the Tingler.
Speaker 1: I guess is that we've got this um, this indo
Speaker 1: symbion living inside us. And I don't think it's ever
Speaker 1: said explicitly, but I get the impression that it's that
Speaker 1: this thing has evolved with us and has passed down
Speaker 1: from parents to offspring, since there's like no indication that
Speaker 1: people have to get exposed and infected at some point
Speaker 1: in their lives. Did you get the same impression, right,
Speaker 1: it's it's it seems to be implied that it's just ubiquitous,
Speaker 1: like you're not going to find communities of humans that
Speaker 1: do not have a Tingler, right, And so this kind
Speaker 1: of like cross generational inheritance of the indo symbion Tingler
Speaker 1: is what we would call vertical transmission parent parent offspring transmission.
Speaker 1: Now it turns out that, of course, humans do have
Speaker 1: plenty of other organisms living in and on us which
Speaker 1: apparently have evolved with us and are vertically transmitted across generations.
Speaker 1: One very ancient, deep and fundamental example is the mitochondria
Speaker 1: inside the cells in our body. So of course the
Speaker 1: mitochondrian is this organelle that's found inside the cells of
Speaker 1: eukaryotic organisms, meaning organisms with a cell nucleus, and that
Speaker 1: of course includes us and the mitochondria do important work
Speaker 1: to help supply the host cells with energy. They generate
Speaker 1: a dinzine triphosphate or a t P, which is a
Speaker 1: molecule that carries chemical energy around inside the cells and
Speaker 1: inside the body. But there are very weird things about mitochondria,
Speaker 1: so that they are these little organelles inside our cells.
Speaker 1: But one example of a weird fact about them is
Speaker 1: that mitochondria have their own DNA. So inside a cell
Speaker 1: in your body, you've got your cell nucleus, which is
Speaker 1: where you find your own primary genome, the genetic code
Speaker 1: that builds your body. But then there are these other
Speaker 1: little things inside our cells that have their own separate genome.
Speaker 1: And the really weird thing is when you examine that
Speaker 1: separate mitochondrial genome inside our cells, it looks an awful
Speaker 1: lot like the genome of a bacterium. Now why would
Speaker 1: that be, Well, the prevailing theory about the origin of
Speaker 1: mitochondria is maybe even weirder than the Tingler. It is
Speaker 1: that long long ago, a bacterium was somehow captured inside
Speaker 1: an early eukaryotic cell, meaning, of course, a cell with
Speaker 1: the nucleus, and instead of dying or just getting resorbed
Speaker 1: or whatever, the bacterium lived and became a part of
Speaker 1: the cell that captured it, reproducing along with it and
Speaker 1: its descendants evolving along with the descendants of the cat
Speaker 1: sure cell. So that now what was once a free
Speaker 1: floating bacterium that was completely unrelated to us is a
Speaker 1: fundamental part of the cells in our body. It's a
Speaker 1: crucial element in what our cells do. So in this
Speaker 1: the the human tingular relationship, you could really look at
Speaker 1: it is kind of like this oversize maybe like you
Speaker 1: know cartoonified, uh, you know, illustration of something that that
Speaker 1: has actually occurred. Yeah, I mean, and occurs all the
Speaker 1: time in nature. One organism just sort of becomes a
Speaker 1: part of another organism's lineage history over time and becomes
Speaker 1: a part of their evolutionary story. And this theory on
Speaker 1: the origin of of mitochondria is known as the indosymbiosis theory.
Speaker 1: It's also a leading theory about the origins of other
Speaker 1: things like chloroplasts in photosynthetic life forms like plants um.
Speaker 1: But of course it doesn't stop with the little things
Speaker 1: inside ourselves. We've got other organisms living and evolving with
Speaker 1: us of all sorts. It's not necessarily co evolved inside
Speaker 1: our cells, but definitely in and on our bodies. And
Speaker 1: this the primary example, of course, would be the human microbiome,
Speaker 1: the sum total of micro organisms that inhabit the environment
Speaker 1: of your body. This can be hard to fathom, but
Speaker 1: your body is likely home to so many microbes that
Speaker 1: your cells with your DNA are outnumbered ten to one.
Speaker 1: Now what I'm about to say wouldn't apply in terms
Speaker 1: of mass or volume, but just in terms of sheer
Speaker 1: numbers of cells. You are only ten per cent of
Speaker 1: your own body. The other nine of the cells that
Speaker 1: are in you and on you are bacterial cells that
Speaker 1: are of course smaller than mammal cells. And of course,
Speaker 1: like the Tinkler, there's evidence that our microbiome is transmitted
Speaker 1: not only horizontally, meaning you know, through exposure to microbes
Speaker 1: in the environment, but also vertically passing directly from mother
Speaker 1: to offspring. And we can see this because babies tend
Speaker 1: to often pick up the same strains of bacteria found
Speaker 1: in there but in their mothers. And I think one
Speaker 1: of the most fascinating things we've learned in microbiology and
Speaker 1: human medical science over the past few decades is how
Speaker 1: deeply bound up each individual human microbiome is with that
Speaker 1: person's health and physiology, and even with their psychology, with
Speaker 1: what's happening in their brain. And here's where I would
Speaker 1: argue that if the tingler is a co evolved indosymbiotic
Speaker 1: organism living inside our bodies for generations and influencing our
Speaker 1: fear and anxiety, we sort of do have a tinkler,
Speaker 1: at least a collective tinkler, and it appears to be
Speaker 1: your gut flora, the microbes living in your digestive tract.
Speaker 1: It's been established in plenty of studies by now that
Speaker 1: there are relationships between what's happening in the gut flora
Speaker 1: and human behavior and including things like depression and anxiety. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so does that relationship extend to the direct regulation
Speaker 1: of like the immediate fear response like it does in
Speaker 1: the tingler you know you're getting freaked out about something
Speaker 1: scary you encounter or in your environment. It appears likely yes.
Speaker 1: So I want to look at a recent study from
Speaker 1: by Alani hoban at All published in Molecular Psychiatry called
Speaker 1: the microbiome regulates a migdala dependent fear recall. And the
Speaker 1: basic gest here is that normally mice can be conditioned
Speaker 1: to exhibit a fear reaction, and this usually consists of
Speaker 1: freezing in place when they hear a sound that they
Speaker 1: have come to associate with something scary or bad. You know.
Speaker 1: So there's like a tone that mice gets scared of,
Speaker 1: and when they hear the tone, they freeze in place.
Speaker 1: And the study found that germ free mice, meaning mice
Speaker 1: that are depleted of their internal microbiota, do not show
Speaker 1: fear responses the way normal mice do. They appear to
Speaker 1: have a reduced stability to learn to be afraid of
Speaker 1: things and have the fear response. And weirdly, once these
Speaker 1: germ free mice are exposed to environmental microbes and become
Speaker 1: infested with all the normal kind of bacteria that make
Speaker 1: a home inside mice guts, the same mice suddenly do
Speaker 1: have a fear response again, and the researchers believe that
Speaker 1: their studies shows that at least in mice, the gut
Speaker 1: flora somehow exert control over the amygdala, which is a
Speaker 1: region in the brain that appears to be crucial for
Speaker 1: generating fear in response to frightening stimuli. Now, of course
Speaker 1: we don't know if this would translate perfectly to humans.
Speaker 1: This is just a study in mice, but there's a
Speaker 1: decent chance I think that the same is true for us.
Speaker 1: And if this is true for humans, can you imagine, like,
Speaker 1: what if a fecal transplant, which is that is what
Speaker 1: it sounds like, um or some other method of manipulating
Speaker 1: gut flora could trigger fundamental changes in our propensity for anxiety,
Speaker 1: or our phobias, or even our fundamental personality. The haunted
Speaker 1: fecal transplant sounds like a potential gimmick for a future
Speaker 1: horror film. I mean, how crazy is that? Like that
Speaker 1: that we were full of bacteria and in other microbes
Speaker 1: that are controlling our brains in a way. It doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like that, but it does very much appear to
Speaker 1: be true. Yeah, I feel like this is one of
Speaker 1: those things that certainly, over the course of the show,
Speaker 1: here is stuff to blow your mind. You know, we
Speaker 1: just have looked at a case after case where show
Speaker 1: where we're exploring just the power of the microbiome, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's and it's it's integration with with the mind
Speaker 1: and when what we think of when we think of ourselves. Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: these bacteria in us and on us aren't just in
Speaker 1: us and on us. They are us and we are them. Uh.
Speaker 1: The most fundamental thing, I mean, the only way that
Speaker 1: you would really say that they're not us is that
Speaker 1: they have different d NA than we do. But like
Speaker 1: they share the same body space, they're involved in the
Speaker 1: same generation of behaviors as our brain cells are. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so basically we am legion to take him. Yeah, amazing, Like,
Speaker 1: how much of your idea of yourself, your your legion personality,
Speaker 1: your legion identity is a result of effects generated by
Speaker 1: the ecosystem of non human organisms living in your digestive system.
Speaker 1: I positive that this is actually much weirder than having
Speaker 1: a tingler on your spine. I always anytime I think
Speaker 1: about all this, though, I always come back to the
Speaker 1: future episode where Fry eats a tuna sandwich that he
Speaker 1: buys out of a machine in a men's room and
Speaker 1: it causes this. Uh, They're like these little intestinal worms
Speaker 1: to build a colony inside him and like build little cities,
Speaker 1: and and then they start fixing him and they make
Speaker 1: him smarter and so it's essentially like it. It has, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's an inner space aspect to the episode as well
Speaker 1: as the Flowers for Algernon aspect to it. And it's
Speaker 1: a great episode overall and very funny. But but what
Speaker 1: they're portraying in a sci fi sense and an an
Speaker 1: exaggerated cartoony away is essentially some of what's going on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're we're full of these legions of life that in
Speaker 1: many senses control us and or at least exert influence
Speaker 1: over us, and in some ways really truly are us.
Speaker 1: All Right, well, maybe we should take another break, and
Speaker 1: then after we come back we can talk a bit
Speaker 1: more about fear and the scream. Thank thank thank Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. Say what you will about The Tanler, love
Speaker 1: it or hate it, but it has some tremendous screams
Speaker 1: in it. Absolutely, Yeah, And Robert, there was one thing
Speaker 1: we were talking about the day after I first watched
Speaker 1: The Tingler. I came in the morning and when we
Speaker 1: were discussing the quality of screams in movies, and I
Speaker 1: had this reaction to a part of the movie. So
Speaker 1: my question is, why do some screams feel so much
Speaker 1: more disturbing than others when you hear them, Like there's
Speaker 1: one screaming session at the beginning of The Tingler that
Speaker 1: felt like something that was not out of a nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties movie. It felt more like the Texas Chainsaw Masks
Speaker 1: with some great screaming in that film. Courtesy of Maryland Burns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's just like the pure sonic quality. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was nothing about what was happening on screen. It's
Speaker 1: just the sound of it felt extremely disturbing and almost unbearable.
Speaker 1: It had this weird, kind of forbidden or pornographic quality
Speaker 1: to it. And this is purely to do with what
Speaker 1: it sounded like, the auditory qualities and nothing else. Most
Speaker 1: movie screams, especially from the horror movies of the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: feel kind of sanitary. They're kind of stagy and clean.
Speaker 1: But this scream at the beginning of The Tingler feels
Speaker 1: wrong and you wanted to stop. And the only reason
Speaker 1: I could really identify was that something about it sounded.
Speaker 1: The word that came to my mind was ragged. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah? Absolutely, this Yeah,
Speaker 1: this kind of like ragged like screaming. No, you know,
Speaker 1: no intention of retaining your voice for the next set
Speaker 1: of takes um and you do. And when you do
Speaker 1: encounter it in a film, it it does just add
Speaker 1: to the the intensity of the horror um And you know,
Speaker 1: only a few films really come to mind. I instantly
Speaker 1: think of Texas Chainsaw Mascre. I think of House by
Speaker 1: the Cemetery, in which you have a small child disturbingly enough,
Speaker 1: who is screaming its head off in a similar fashion
Speaker 1: where it has this raw intensity. Yeah, and it's it's
Speaker 1: like a I was honestly shocked by how disturbing it
Speaker 1: sounds just to hear a scream like that that, like,
Speaker 1: even with no context at all, because no story is
Speaker 1: happening at this point in the movie. There's just like
Speaker 1: just before it starts, they're just like, we'll throw some
Speaker 1: screams at you. And it really, it really like hurt
Speaker 1: to listen to. And so I was thinking about that, like, Wow,
Speaker 1: what's going on with that scream? And well, one read
Speaker 1: could be Joe that it's causing your tingler to relax,
Speaker 1: and uh, I like my tingler inflated. Oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: what if what if this were the case? What if
Speaker 1: what if the Tingler does not relax does not react
Speaker 1: at all to fake screams. It has to be like
Speaker 1: a significantly believable scream. And therefore, like a lot of
Speaker 1: our horror movie viewing is ultimately pointless because you're no
Speaker 1: good Catharsis to it, Like, it's not actually going to
Speaker 1: relax the Tingler that is that is slowly um, you know,
Speaker 1: exerting this death grip on our spine. Yeah, it's one
Speaker 1: of those smooth, polished, stagey screams that just does nothing
Speaker 1: for your Tingler. Yeah, but I can set around all
Speaker 1: day and discuss the ramifications of if the Tingler was real. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's get back to just the nature of screams in
Speaker 1: our reality. Okay, Well, I've got that question, So we
Speaker 1: can table that for a second about like what is
Speaker 1: it about the sonic qualities of that scream that felt
Speaker 1: so different than most movie screams, especially at that period.
Speaker 1: The other thing is just the question of like why
Speaker 1: do we scream? Is there a biological answer of what's
Speaker 1: going on? The The second question I think is is
Speaker 1: not a super complicated one, Like the leading theories about
Speaker 1: why we scream are just not very surprising, right, Uh.
Speaker 1: Screaming in response to fear is most likely some kind
Speaker 1: of instinctual alarm call. When you see something dangerous, you
Speaker 1: kind of scream automatically, and this serves the purpose of
Speaker 1: communicating the threat to others because we're social animals, right,
Speaker 1: and we see animals that do this to communicate with
Speaker 1: members of their own species. We see animals that do
Speaker 1: this seemingly to communicate with with other species as well. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: And this could serve several different biological functions, maybe all
Speaker 1: at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive. One is
Speaker 1: to immediately request help, you know, like I need air support. Uh,
Speaker 1: You scream to request help from friends and kin and
Speaker 1: other protectors or even other types of animals in your environment,
Speaker 1: especially help from adults. If the scream comes from a child,
Speaker 1: I think that's like a very specific kind of thing,
Speaker 1: like you know, you hear your kids scream, and there's
Speaker 1: like this automatic, powerful and mediate response. Yeah, And that's
Speaker 1: another reason why House by the Cemetery Lucio Foolsey's film
Speaker 1: is probably so disturbing, because you're getting this very authentic
Speaker 1: scream from a young child, and there's also the sense
Speaker 1: that they just terrified a young child. Yeah, I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it's especially bad because they sound actually scared. Um.
Speaker 1: But a couple of other possible biological functions the scream serves,
Speaker 1: again not mutually exclusive. Another one is to maybe worn
Speaker 1: nearby can of danger, reducing their own risks. So you
Speaker 1: share some genes with them, you scream, and that warns
Speaker 1: them of danger. They're also in reduced danger because now
Speaker 1: they're on alert. Right. So if I wandered away from
Speaker 1: the rest of the tribe and a large predator jumped
Speaker 1: out at me, well I got that one good scream
Speaker 1: in so I may be toast, but at least there's
Speaker 1: a shot of the rest of my people hearing my
Speaker 1: death cry and reacting to save their own skin. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then another perhaps secondary maybe possibly in some cases
Speaker 1: this is what's going on, could be defensive. Some predators
Speaker 1: or threats might be frightened or held at bay by
Speaker 1: a sudden, very loud noise. Yeah, I mean, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is this is true. I mean you one of the
Speaker 1: things that is advised and encountering, say a bear in
Speaker 1: the wild, is to be loud, to make a lot
Speaker 1: of noise exactly. Yeah. But but there are also some
Speaker 1: interesting finds. So so like the question about why we
Speaker 1: scream biologically, that doesn't seem like a big mystery, that
Speaker 1: that seems like one of those pretty straightforward evolutionary stories,
Speaker 1: is at least as far as we know. But there
Speaker 1: are some very interesting scientific findings about what happens in
Speaker 1: our brain when we hear a scream. And so I
Speaker 1: was reading about a study by by Luke h rn
Speaker 1: All at All in Current Biology and called human screams
Speaker 1: occupy a privileged niche in the communication soundscape. And so
Speaker 1: essentially what the authors here found is that the brain
Speaker 1: has a different, dedicated pathway for processing screams, and this
Speaker 1: pathway is sort of separate from the way it processes
Speaker 1: other sounds and other types of auditory communication between people. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so they did some brain imaging and it revealed
Speaker 1: that most of the time, incoming audio is perceived by
Speaker 1: the ear, of course, and leads to activity in the
Speaker 1: standard auditory processing centers. But screams, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: are heard and then they sort of bypass normal auditory
Speaker 1: processing and instead trigger pretty much immediate activation in the amygdala,
Speaker 1: a region of the brain that of course is very
Speaker 1: important for generating the fear response. Now, the brain seems
Speaker 1: to immediately recognize screams as signaling something threatening, and then
Speaker 1: it responds accordingly. It's kind of like it's like a
Speaker 1: short cut in there. You don't need to figure out
Speaker 1: what's going on. As soon as you hear the scream,
Speaker 1: the fear that you know, the the alarm state, wells
Speaker 1: up inside you. And so I was wondering, well, what's
Speaker 1: the acoustic criterion here, Like, how does the brain tell
Speaker 1: what a scream is or how much like a scream
Speaker 1: a sound has to be before it triggers this react action.
Speaker 1: And the researchers found that the main criterion activating the
Speaker 1: sphere response in the brain was was a quality of
Speaker 1: the sound. That was that they called acoustic roughness. And
Speaker 1: this means how rapidly the amplitude of the sound is modulated. Uh,
Speaker 1: it can be kind of hard to explain, but basically
Speaker 1: it refers to if the loudness of the sound rapidly changes.
Speaker 1: So think about a smooth sound kind of like a
Speaker 1: single tone alarm, you know, deep versus those rapidly pulsing
Speaker 1: alarms that might play the same pitch maybe even at
Speaker 1: the same volume, but suddenly but like rapidly pulsing loud
Speaker 1: between loud and quiet, and it takes on this kind
Speaker 1: of rough, ragged, kind of auditory quality. And I think
Speaker 1: this might be the reason I'm okay with normal movie screaming.
Speaker 1: But sometimes a scream in a movie sounds real, and
Speaker 1: it sounds wrong, and it sounds upsetting. I think that
Speaker 1: quality of raggedness that I was trying to put words
Speaker 1: to might at least be partially rooted in this quality
Speaker 1: they're talking about in the paper of acoustic roughness. This
Speaker 1: is really this is really interesting. It makes me think
Speaker 1: too about music that incorporates like a lot of like
Speaker 1: primal yelling and screaming um. And obviously they know intense
Speaker 1: metal such as death metal, and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of that is going to fall into the category of
Speaker 1: kind of movie scream territory. Whereas there are particular artists,
Speaker 1: the one that comes to mind is the vocalist Jen's
Speaker 1: Kidman of Sugar, who, at least in some of the
Speaker 1: tracks we have, not really just collectively in all the tracks,
Speaker 1: is able to really bring out this this guttural raw,
Speaker 1: like vicious ragged nous to the things that he is
Speaker 1: screaming in in the songs, and it's a and and
Speaker 1: it's it's tremendous. I mean, it's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: where like I don't listen to a lot of death metal,
Speaker 1: but I'll I'll listen to my Sugar and then I'll
Speaker 1: I'll think about how much I appreciate it, and then
Speaker 1: I'll try out other artists and I'll often just listen
Speaker 1: to it and be and think, well, that's not really
Speaker 1: scratching the same itch, and I wonder if that's part
Speaker 1: of it, Like I'm not it's not activating the same
Speaker 1: circuits in my brain because it's a different level of vocalization.
Speaker 1: So you want your metal to be like more directly
Speaker 1: activating of the fear circuits in your brain. Or yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if I'm listening to you know, if I'm listening to
Speaker 1: something called chaos fear you know, or something you know,
Speaker 1: or or New Millennium Cyanide Christ, it needs to have
Speaker 1: it needs to connect with that fear network otherwise it's
Speaker 1: it's disingenuous, right, Yeah, that's interesting. Well, another interesting thing
Speaker 1: that they found in the study was that it wasn't
Speaker 1: just human screams, Like the same auditory qualities came through
Speaker 1: in like alarm sounds, like people found synthetic alarm sounds
Speaker 1: more disturbing if they had this quality of acoustic roughness
Speaker 1: that sounds kind of like raggedness to us, you know,
Speaker 1: the rapidly modulating volume. Right. So I'm not positive, but
Speaker 1: I'm I'm like nine percent sure that's what's going on
Speaker 1: in my reaction to the screaming session at the beginning
Speaker 1: of of The Tingler. It's got acoustic roughness that most
Speaker 1: movie screams don't have. But of course, in the movie
Speaker 1: The Tingler, individuals don't just scream. Uh. There's also this
Speaker 1: idea of of of dying due to the inability to scream,
Speaker 1: the idea of just being scared to death, and that's
Speaker 1: another that's that's another like fun topic to unravel. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so in the movie, the explanation is can you be
Speaker 1: scared to death? Because when you get scared and you
Speaker 1: can't scream, the Tingler crushes your back, breaks breaks your spine,
Speaker 1: and that's like what gets uh Vincent Price's character really excited.
Speaker 1: There's that part where he says, like, I've thought about
Speaker 1: not for two years, but the breaking of spines due
Speaker 1: to fear. But obviously that's not what is happening in
Speaker 1: actual human beings. No. Though. The question I guess is
Speaker 1: can you actually be scared to death? And the answer
Speaker 1: is absolutely yes, that you absolutely can and this does happen.
Speaker 1: I found a good article about this from Scientific American
Speaker 1: that was consulting with an expert named Martin A. Samuel's
Speaker 1: who was chairman of the neurology department at Brigham and
Speaker 1: Women's Hospital in Boston, and so uh so so Samuel's
Speaker 1: talks about these cases and basically there are tons of
Speaker 1: documented instances where a sudden terror causes somebody to die.
Speaker 1: But the big question is we know that when people
Speaker 1: die of fright, it's not because something like living in
Speaker 1: them crack their vertebrae. Something else must be going on,
Speaker 1: So what is it? Well, according to Samuel's, the primary
Speaker 1: mechanism of death when people are scared to death seems
Speaker 1: to be damaged to the vital organs, particularly the heart,
Speaker 1: by a toxic surge of stress hormones, primarily adrenaline. So
Speaker 1: when we experienced terrifying stimuli, our bodies kick off a
Speaker 1: familiar process that you've almost certainly both heard of and
Speaker 1: felt for yourself, which is the fight or flight response.
Speaker 1: And this is a response within the autonomic nervous stem
Speaker 1: that reacts to a threat by preparing the body for
Speaker 1: life saving actions. So the heart rate increases, it's pumping
Speaker 1: more blood, more blood flows to the muscles, perspiration increases,
Speaker 1: the pupils dilate, meaning they you know, they get bigger
Speaker 1: to let in more light. Uh, the normal background workings
Speaker 1: of the digestive system sort of go on. Hold. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's like loosening of the of the lower bowels and
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff. And this automatic response is
Speaker 1: of course very useful if you have to take immediate
Speaker 1: physical action in response to a threat, as the fight
Speaker 1: or flight name implies, So this response primes you to
Speaker 1: either you know, to freeze up, take in sensory data,
Speaker 1: and evaluate the situation as quickly as possible, then neither
Speaker 1: runaway as fast as you can or get ready to
Speaker 1: fight for your life. But of course, it's funny so
Speaker 1: many of the situations in which our bodies choose to
Speaker 1: deploy this type of response in normal life, because so
Speaker 1: many of the things that trigger the fight or flight
Speaker 1: response to us are not physical threats. They're not something
Speaker 1: we need to run from or fight. They're like you know,
Speaker 1: you've got an email that upset you or something like that.
Speaker 1: Paper tigers is the term we often use. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: same fear response that we would have to an actual
Speaker 1: physical threat we have, we still experience those, but it's
Speaker 1: to these these things that are not that are that
Speaker 1: are not physical threats or at least not directly, you know,
Speaker 1: like there's several degrees of separation between uh, this letter
Speaker 1: you got in the mail and like physical incarceration, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: And so the nervous system, of course, it triggers this
Speaker 1: fight or flight response by by by releasing, by flooding
Speaker 1: the body with stress hormones, uh, one of which, of
Speaker 1: course the primary one is adrenaline here, and adrenaline is
Speaker 1: good at the good at this job. It causes this
Speaker 1: rapid response throughout any different parts of the body, gets
Speaker 1: us ready to engage in urgent survival behaviors. But according
Speaker 1: to Samuel's in this article, adrenaline is very toxic in
Speaker 1: high concentrations. Like flooding of adrenaline can damage organs like
Speaker 1: the kidneys or the liver over the long term, but
Speaker 1: the most immediate threat is the damage it can cause
Speaker 1: to the heart. And this happens when surging adrenaline forces
Speaker 1: the muscle cells in the heart to contract uncontrollably, and
Speaker 1: this leads to fatal alterations in the rhythm of the heartbeats,
Speaker 1: such as ventricular fibrillation, which is when patterns of contractions
Speaker 1: in the ventricles actually prevent the heart from pumping blood correctly.
Speaker 1: And if the heart doesn't pump blood, suddenly our tissues
Speaker 1: stop getting oxygen and we die. And so according to
Speaker 1: Samuel's anybody can die of fright, but pre existing cardiac
Speaker 1: conditions like heart disease can make you more vulnerable. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so a weird way of thinking about this issue
Speaker 1: is that our fight or flight response could also be
Speaker 1: imagined metaphorically as a kind of Tingler like but whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like this thing within us that's there
Speaker 1: for ancestral reasons. It got in us many many generations
Speaker 1: ago when it served a purpose. But now the fight
Speaker 1: or flight response like most of the time, I mean,
Speaker 1: unless you live in like a very violence or cumstances,
Speaker 1: the fight or flight response is generally parasitic on you.
Speaker 1: Now it is it is an instinctual parasite that is
Speaker 1: serving its own purpose, which is mostly obsolete and meanwhile
Speaker 1: killing your body in the process. Yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: think about this a lot dealing, you know, since I
Speaker 1: deal with in a certain amount of anxiety myself. But
Speaker 1: like the anxiety, if I think of the anxiety, is
Speaker 1: the tingler, Like the tingler kind of takes on different
Speaker 1: forms and like whatever the thing is that's bothering me
Speaker 1: at a particular time, I kind of at times stop
Speaker 1: and realize, what's the same force. You know, it's the
Speaker 1: same creature, but it's wearing a slightly different skin. It's
Speaker 1: just dressed in in some other in the skin of
Speaker 1: some other paper tiger. To uh, that's going to disrupt
Speaker 1: my day? Yeah, I mean I I wonder if it
Speaker 1: is actually I haven't seen the study about this or anything,
Speaker 1: but at the risk of getting a laugh here, I
Speaker 1: wonder if it could actually be helpful to or soonify
Speaker 1: your anxiety to like to give yourself a visual metaphor
Speaker 1: to think about your anxiety through. It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be a tinkler, but a tingler might be an especially
Speaker 1: funny one if you're trying to disempower your own anxiety
Speaker 1: response to things that aren't actually gonna hurt you. Well,
Speaker 1: on one hand, I come back again to the psychedelic
Speaker 1: themes of the Tingler, you know, the sparious psychedelic accounts
Speaker 1: of psychedelic experience in which fears or even anxieties are personified.
Speaker 1: Is something that can then be banished. But then also
Speaker 1: like this is this is tantamount to uh many religious faiths,
Speaker 1: you know, get the behind me Satan? Uh you know,
Speaker 1: I mean that's so what is that but taking your
Speaker 1: fears and anxieties or temptations or something, you know, so
Speaker 1: whatever your your your negative emotional baggage happens to be
Speaker 1: and putting it in the form of this, uh, this
Speaker 1: this this non human entity that then can there then
Speaker 1: be interacted with or fought? Can they can be farted at?
Speaker 1: If say, if you're Martin luth there exactly well, well yeah,
Speaker 1: to to what does he say to the devil? I
Speaker 1: give the affart? Yeah. I think the Tingler might be
Speaker 1: a good one. It might be a good one to imagine,
Speaker 1: because the Tingler actually is not very scary, Like I mean,
Speaker 1: if you cut out the parts of the movies with
Speaker 1: the screaming that's actually kind of disturbing. The Tingler is
Speaker 1: very funny. Uh, And so I wonder if you you
Speaker 1: listeners out there who have problems with anxiety, try this experiment.
Speaker 1: I want to hear about the results when your anxiety
Speaker 1: flares up when a paper tiger has got you sweating,
Speaker 1: when you you know you're you're experiencing that that full
Speaker 1: body stress response, and the adrenaline is flowing and the
Speaker 1: cortisol is flowing, and you know your organs are restraining
Speaker 1: under the weight of this thing that's not actually physically
Speaker 1: a threat to you. I think it's just the Tingler.
Speaker 1: It's just a Tingler in there, and and see if
Speaker 1: that makes you laugh and helps you get over it.
Speaker 1: Before we close out here, I do want to come
Speaker 1: back just just to to William Castle's gimmickry here. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a whole line of thinking on this
Speaker 1: that that I don't think I would have even considered
Speaker 1: had we we not just done a multi episode look
Speaker 1: at photography and motion pictures on our other podcast, Invention.
Speaker 1: It's especially easy to watch a film like The Tingler
Speaker 1: and to laugh at its manipulation of audience reactions, right
Speaker 1: and uh, and perhaps a bit challenging to view The
Speaker 1: Tingler and feel anything approaching legitimate fear but of course
Speaker 1: we have to you know, couch the film within the
Speaker 1: context of its time, etcetera. But another thing that I
Speaker 1: was thinking about was there were some studies that we
Speaker 1: touched on in those Invention episodes. Uh, particularly regarding a
Speaker 1: researcher by the name of Talma Hendler, founder and director
Speaker 1: of the Functional Brain Center at Tel Aviv Sarowski Medical Center.
Speaker 1: They found that certain scenes from Black Swan this is
Speaker 1: a film from two thousand ten Darren Aronofsky, Yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot of kind of Suspiria esque Ballerina Shenanigans and Hitler
Speaker 1: found that this film produced results that quote compared to
Speaker 1: a schizophrenia like state, with the cognitive and emotional centers
Speaker 1: of the brain operating dramatically in and out of sync. Now,
Speaker 1: this is of course a much more modern film we're
Speaker 1: talking about here, and certainly one that showcases a much
Speaker 1: more ambitious and technically proficient cinema. But I think it
Speaker 1: underlines the idea here that films induce a kind of
Speaker 1: alternate cognitive experience, maybe even an alternate cognitive reality in
Speaker 1: and of themselves. Uh, you know, they're not that different
Speaker 1: in some respects. Uh, you know, compared to a psychedelic experience.
Speaker 1: And so it's it's interesting to to think about cinema
Speaker 1: in that regard that we're taking this medium that that
Speaker 1: messages with your brain, that changes how you're perceiving reality,
Speaker 1: and then on top of that, we're going to just
Speaker 1: fill it with fear and death and terror and see
Speaker 1: what happens. Yeah, that's funny. I mean, um, I agree
Speaker 1: with you. I do think you could legitimately think of
Speaker 1: watching a film as a form of entering altered state
Speaker 1: of consciousness. I don't think that's actually a stretch at all.
Speaker 1: It does bring us back to this question, you know,
Speaker 1: why why people do enjoy horror movies? I mean, you
Speaker 1: and I both enjoy horror movies? Like why is that fun?
Speaker 1: Like you would think that you just, uh, you would
Speaker 1: think that you would never want to provoke negative arousal
Speaker 1: states like fearfulness without needing to, because I mean, there's
Speaker 1: enough stuff in life giving us anxiety. But I think
Speaker 1: we talked about this when we went as guests on
Speaker 1: Movie Crush with with Chuck Bryant over on that show.
Speaker 1: If you haven't checked that out, we're we're on some
Speaker 1: episode of it. It was like an October episode yeah,
Speaker 1: but we talked about our love of horror movies, and
Speaker 1: you know, I totally have the opposite experience. For me,
Speaker 1: for some reason, watching scary movies seems to to decrease
Speaker 1: my level of anxiety about normal day to day stuff.
Speaker 1: And I don't know exactly why that is, but I
Speaker 1: think it's that, you know, it's sort of like, um,
Speaker 1: it gives you a kind of low stakes practice environment
Speaker 1: to sort of observe your fear in a controlled setting
Speaker 1: where you know that nothing is actually going to threaten you.
Speaker 1: But you can also think, perhaps maybe this is a stretch,
Speaker 1: but you can think of this anxiety inside of us
Speaker 1: as this you know, this autoimmune function that is there
Speaker 1: to deal with actual threats. And when when those threats
Speaker 1: are not there, I mean, what what does it do?
Speaker 1: What does it have to feed on? In the same
Speaker 1: way that, uh that if you are isolated from stimulive
Speaker 1: you are saying solitary confinement, the senses may pick up
Speaker 1: on sensory data that is not quite there and extrapolated.
Speaker 1: So perhaps on on some level, it's like we don't
Speaker 1: have enough real concrete threats to fear in our day
Speaker 1: to day life. Actual tigers, you know, actual boulders falling
Speaker 1: up from the cliffs onto us. But we're we're still
Speaker 1: hardwired to deal with those kind of threats, and so
Speaker 1: without those kind of threats, we end up fearing all
Speaker 1: these other things. And then a horror movie, a good
Speaker 1: one anyway, gives us something else to feed to the
Speaker 1: tingler in our mind. Yeah, somehow a monster is is
Speaker 1: a nice compromise there. It's like something that you can
Speaker 1: focus this fear response on, but you know, it's not
Speaker 1: actually real. Now. One thing I will say is that
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm really a fan of when
Speaker 1: I watch a horror movie that's so good and so
Speaker 1: effective that I walk out kind of looking over my shoulder.
Speaker 1: It doesn't happen much anymore. Used to happen more often,
Speaker 1: I guess when I've just seen fewer horror movies and
Speaker 1: I was less exposed to it. But well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I remember seeing the original American remake of The Ring.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and I was basically up all night after that.
Speaker 1: At the time, that was not a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: But I look back on it fondly because I had
Speaker 1: such an authentic, you know, emotional, fear based reaction to
Speaker 1: that film and it's it's just something I rarely experience
Speaker 1: with a movie. The same can be said for a
Speaker 1: lot of psychedelic experiences, though, you know, you hear people say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't fun at the time, but I
Speaker 1: learned something from it. I had the exact same reaction
Speaker 1: with with the American remake of The Ring when I
Speaker 1: was young. I don't know how old I was. I
Speaker 1: must have been I don't know, eighth or ninth grade
Speaker 1: when I mean I I was technically like an adult
Speaker 1: at the time, and I still stayed up all night,
Speaker 1: you know, unable to shake it. Yeah, it's certainly made,
Speaker 1: like TVs pretty freaky. Anytime after that you turn on
Speaker 1: a TV and static pops up, it's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe after a return to The Ring in
Speaker 1: the future. I know we've talked before about potentially exploring
Speaker 1: something related to like superstitious ideas about technology. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd love to do that, you know, I will report.
Speaker 1: I still think it actually is a pretty well made
Speaker 1: horror movie. Like a lot of the imagery is pretty
Speaker 1: inventive and creepy, and it kind of holds up. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I rewatched it more recently and
Speaker 1: it didn't have the same effect anymore. And now parts
Speaker 1: of it made me laugh. But not to say it's
Speaker 1: not that it's like bad. It's just like I you
Speaker 1: know somehow, especially in the context of my memory, is
Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff, the scare moments in it
Speaker 1: have become funny. Yeah, And of course it was an
Speaker 1: influential film, so it's kind of had a chance to
Speaker 1: delude itself through popular culture, I imagine. But it's still
Speaker 1: got Brian Cox in it so that you can't fall
Speaker 1: can't go wrong with Brian Cox. Put Brian Cox in
Speaker 1: every single movie, it'll be better, all right. Well, on
Speaker 1: that note, we're gonna go and close this one out.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously we'd love to hear from anyone out there.
Speaker 1: Have you seen The Tinler? Uh? Do you have you know,
Speaker 1: some some fond memories of this film, perhaps you even
Speaker 1: saw it in the theater. If you saw The Tingler
Speaker 1: in the in an actual theater like original production or
Speaker 1: even you know, more recently, but definitely if you were
Speaker 1: in a vibrating chair, we we totally want to hear
Speaker 1: about that. Likewise, if you have suggestions for future episodes
Speaker 1: of stuff to blow your mind in particular, if you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for future movie episodes that we do, we
Speaker 1: would love to hear from you. In the meantime, heading
Speaker 1: over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that's
Speaker 1: we will find all the shows and if you want
Speaker 1: to help us out, the best thing you can do
Speaker 1: is to rate and review Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: wherever you have the power to do so. Huge thanks
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producers Seth Nicholas Johnson and Maya Coole.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest
Speaker 1: topic for the future, for just to say hello, you
Speaker 1: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
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