10 Memorable Vincent Price Characters

Dr Chapin is a character only Price could play: he’s slightly camp, slightly sinister and slightly twisted - and he’s the hero. He also takes cinema’s first LSD trip (“The walls! The walls! The walls are closing in on me!”), which is not something that Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee would’ve done.

While researching the effects of fear on human beings, the Doc becomes convinced that “there’s something inside every frightened person that’s as solid as steel.” Using his cheating wife as a guinea pig, he discovers The Tingler, the organism that attaches to the spine in moments of terror and can only be released by screaming. If someone died unable to scream, their body would contain a perfect Tingler specimen….

Enter theatre-owner Martha Higgins (Judith Evelyn) and her louse of a spouse Ollie (Philip Coolidge). Martha, being a deaf mute, cannot scream. She also faints at the sight of blood and Ollie, unbeknownst to the Doc, is planning to do away with her. Can you see where this is going?

In the film’s most famous sequence, the screen goes blank while Price tells the audience, “Do not panic….but scream! Scream for your lives! The Tingler is loose in this theatre! Keep screaming!”