The original in the theater

I have a relative who saw this movie in the theatre as a child and he said that yes, the seats were rigged so that people would get an electric shock.

Electric shocks? Think about it for a minute ... how would you get insurance against fatally electrocuting some of the customers? Did teams of electricians follow the movie out on the road with generators and miles of wiring? How much would it all cost? This is simply an amusing piece of film folklore, probably invented and fed to the press by that master of publicity William Castle. There's a watered-down version of this legend that says it was really only some kind of vibrating gizmo fitted to the seats, but that seems to be subject to most of the same objections. Still, I've never been so scared by a film in my life, albeit that was at the impressionable age of 15, and I was seeing it on TV without benefit of electric shocks. The ordinary shocks were good enough.

Yes, there was. They talk about it on the DVD. The director was known for doing things like that. He had a skeleton fly through the audience when House on Haunted Hill came out.

I don't remember feeling any sensation through my back, but in my theatre
they definitely had the armrests rigged, so that I felt a mild electrical sensation through my forearms every time the "Tingler" went on one of its rampages.

I do believe it was just a vibrator seat.

It was a buzzer type of device that vibrated the seats. It was NOT raw electricity. As someone else stated - think about it - electricity and lawsuits. Castle was a great promoter, great at coming up with gimmicks to drum-up press on his movies, but he wasn't stupid. He wouldn't risk lawsuits or the bad press of someone being injured or dying.

Further, it would require raw wires on the seats to give people a shock - it would've been visible. The buzzers attached to the bottom or back of the seats would've been far less visible, far easier to install and much easier to operate. The buzzer/vibrator gives the impression of a shock especially when you see someone getting shocked on the screen. It's just like the old joy buzzers that would "shock" someone you have a handshake too - it only buzzed & vibrated - no electricity - they were wind-up toys. It's all the power of suggestion.

The same sort of thing is used in haunted houses and amusement parks today. Show a dummy "getting electrocuted" with it jerking around, some buzzing, maybe even some sparks, then put a vibration through a platform others are standing on or the railing they're holding onto and voila - everyone's convinced they're being shocked.

John Waters called The Tingler the fondest moviegoing experience of his youth. He saw it every day and he talks at length about the Percepto device in his book, Crackpot.

A Tingler was an organism that lived in everyone's spinal column. A cross between a lobster and a crab, it came to life only when a person was frightened. The only way to kill this little bugger was to scream. In the film, the Tingler breaks loose in a movie theater and kills the projectionist. In real theaters where the film was playing, the screen would go white at this point and a voice would announce, "Attention! The Tingler is loose in this theater. Please scream for your life." Naturally, the audience responded by shrieking their lungs out but this wasn't good enough for the Master of Gimmicks. He came up with "Percepto," "the newest and most startling screen gimmick." Similar to a handshake buzzer, Percepto was nothing more than little motors installed under theater seates and activated by the projectionist at teh exact moment the audience was in a frenzy. As the patrons got their asses buzzed, the theater would erupt in pandemonium. Castle estimated in his autobiography that he buzzed more than 20 million American asses.

Naturally there were problems. In Philadelphia one beefy truck driver was so incensed that he ripped his entire seat from the floor and had to be subdued by five ushers. In another city, the management dutifully installed the percepto equipment the night before the film was scheduled to open. That night the smart alecky projectionist decided to test the fanny buzzers on a group of older women who were watching The Nun's Story on the last night of its run. I'm sure Audrey Hepburn never got such a vocal reaction before or after this "electrifying" screening.

I know a guy who installed these back in the '50s WITH William Castle when the film first came out. Castle's company bought vibrators from an army surplus store (the kind that were attached to plane wings during the war to de-ice them). There was no shock of any kind involved whatsoever. Anyone who remember is like that is remembering wrong.

It's also interesting to note that not all theaters did the vibrator trick-- only theaters in big cities or towns or in place where Castle was touring in person. The chances of having seen the film in person with the vibrator gag was pretty slim, but the blackout effect in the film was enough for any delinquents to do their own mischief comparable to the buzzers.

-J. Theakston
http://centraltheater.blogspot.com