Sundance Report: Fascinating Documentary 'Tickled' Exposes True-Life Tickle Monster
The Sundance documentary Tickled — summarized with the logline “a New Zealand reporter accidentally stumbles upon an underground competitive tickling contest” — sounded like a barrel of laughs. But Tickled is not at all what it seems. Instead David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s fascinating film reveals a dark and ominous tickling world ruled by a shadowy and sinister creep who shall hereby be known as the real-life Tickle Monster. You just can’t make this stuff up, which is exactly what makes Tickled a must-see documentary.
The story is told from the perspective of co-director Farrier, an Auckland-based pop-culture reporter who specializes in the “weird and bizarre side of life.” His discovery of ads online for a “Competitive Endurance Tickling,” in which young men are lured to Los Angeles with the promise of an all-expenses paid trip plus other payment, falls squarely within his beat. If the first footage of the “contest” they show — which finds a brawny young man strapped down to a mat while straddled by other equally fit men tickling him from all angles — seems like we’re heading into fetishist territory, it’s because we are.
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Farrier’s inquiries into the contest are met with a string of offensive, threatening emails from a woman named Debbie J. Kuhn, a representative for the event’s organizing body, Jane O'Brien Media. “I’ve never heard threats like this, and all over tickling,” Farrier cheekily admits. It’s then that Farrier and Reeve decide to go the documentary route. And soon enough Jane O'Brien threatens a lawsuit and dispatches three representatives from the U.S. to New Zealand to vehemently dissuade the filmmakers from continuing. Clearly the tickling enthusiasts have something to hide, which further motivates Farrier and Reeve.
What the directors ultimately find in the States is beyond troubling. They encounter young men who turned to tickling to make a quick buck, but had their lives destroyed by Jane O'Brien Media when they attempted to leave the hustle behind. One brave soul and former participant, known as “TJ,” explains how he was lured into the tickling business when he was told the private videos were being used for consideration as a “military tactic.” When he found one of his videos live on YouTube with his full name, he had it removed by the streaming service. And then Jane O'Brien unleashed hell on him. The group uploaded videos of him on every major streaming site on the Net, launched other pages that revealed his personal information, and wrote letters to his family members and employers that attempted to out him as a gay porn star. The bullying of participants by Jane O'Brien was par for the course, Farrier and Reeve discover.
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Not everyone in the world of tickling-as-pleasure is this cold. Farrier introduces us to Richard, an amiable Florida man who runs “MyFriendsFeet.com” and speaks openly and candidly about his fetish-friendly operation. But as the documentary unfolds, it becomes obvious that the bulk of the world’s tickling business is ruled with an iron fist (and some furious vengeance!) by Jane O'Brien, along with Terri DiSisto, a “strange rich brat” who made torture-tickle videos otherwise known as TerriTickle, and another menacing figure who emerges. I won’t ruin it for you here, but a plot twist ties all these seemingly sadistic folks together and outs the true identity of the aforementioned Tickle Monster.
What’s so surprising about Tickled isn’t that there is a vast world of tickling fetishists — there’s a fetish for everything, so no judgment here. It’s how the secret world behind tickling could be so full of villains and victims, power and deceit, and shocks and surprises. You’ll never look at tickling the same again.
Editor’s Note: Post updated with spoiler removed at the request of the film’s publicist.
