Month: January 2023

Lesbian Vampires Part III – More Modern Examples

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So here’s a little look behind-the-scenes on ye old blog. Since starting this thing, I’ve been compulsively checking Google Analytics to see if anyone is reading it.  Most weeks I get about 15-30 visits. On a low week it can hit single digits and on my best ever, I managed 77. And so I have some sense of what visitors seem to respond to. One other interesting metric I check is how often different posts have been viewed over time. It’s here that I came upon something interesting the other day. Back in August, I did two posts on the often artsy, sometimes exploitative, always beloved subgenre of the “Lesbian Vampire” film. Far and away, “Lesbian Vampires – part II” has somehow gotten more action than anything else I’ve written (far more, for some reason, than part I).

Well, as all the films I covered in those two posts were from the seventies or earlier, and I had long been planning on returning to check out some more contemporary fare, I’m going to follow what seems to be the will of the people and dig into a few more Lesbian Vampire movies – this time, all from the 1990s or later. These will all be first time watches for me, so I’m curious about a few things. Something I love about the films previously discussed is how they take place at what I think Stacie Ponder (of the blog, Final Girl, and the podcast, Gaylords of Darkness) termed the ‘intersection of arthouse and grindhouse’) – at once gorgeous, deeply felt art pieces and trashy b-movies peddling flesh and blood. Does that enticing aesthetic still carry into future endeavors? Most of the older work clearly falls within the bounds of ‘exploitation cinema’ and however much those films may (and I think they often do) carry out a progressive/feminist/emancipatory project, they were all clearly made by men for the titillation of a presumably straight male viewership. In more recent times, does the work still maintain that typical perspective of a ‘male gaze?’ Does it somehow upend it? Can you actually find a good Lesbian Vampire movie written/directed by at least one LGBT+ female-identifying person (I want to cast as wide a net as possible), and if so, beyond it being good for people to be given the room to tell their own stories, does it change anything in how those stories are told?

So, let’s find out…and, as always, there will probably be some spoilers, so be forewarned…

Nadja (1994)

This one had been on my radar for quite a while and I’m glad to have finally checked it out. But I’m also relieved I didn’t do it before last summer when I wrote about Dracula’s Daughter as it is a direct remake. Really, it’s an interesting case in terms of looking at film history, and specifically this subgenre. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda (and with David Lynch tellingly signed on as an executive producer – he also has a small cameo), this is a surprisingly faithful retelling of a film from the 30s, which embraces the dreamy qualities of a subgenre from the 70s, but is so much a product of its time – an early 90s black and white arthouse picture, frequently talky and surreal, some of it shot on a lo-res toy camcorder (when not really striking high contrast cinematography), alternatingly dwelling in genuine existential angst and cool ironic detachment. It is groovy and surreal, philosophical and pretentious, dreary, dreamy, and often quite funny. It’s a little bit of everything.

And generally, I’ve got to say it works, though in the beginning, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. Especially the first time there was an ultra low-res sequence (they seem to coincide with moments when a character is under vampiric influence), I wondered if I had it in me to get through the whole thing. But somehow it is really very watchable, even captivating – striking a delicate balance between its circuitous but deeply felt philosophizing and its offbeat sense of humor. It’s atmosphere is just as rich as any of the beautiful seventies pictures that come to mind when I think of Lesbian Vampires, but it is a different kind of richness: more a heroin chic fugue state, the mind impossibly trying to muddle its way through essential questions of death and love and hate and attraction, trailing off and staring into the middle distance for a time, before sardonically joking it off and lighting another cigarette.

In terms of plot, it is very similar to its source, but there are some modernizations, some additions, and some subversions along the way. Among other things, the attraction between Nadja (the titular daughter of Dracula) and Lucy is able to be explicitly acted on in a way that would not have been possible in 1936 (the MPAA rated it R for “bizarre vampire sexuality”). Lucy is married to Jim, the nephew of Van Helsing, who (as in the original) starts the film having just been arrested for driving a stake through the heart of this seemingly harmless immigrant from Transylvania (using public domain shots of Lugosi from White Zombie).

Lucy also describes how she has lost all contact with her family as they didn’t “approve of her lifestyle” but now she’s married so they should be ok with her. She and Jim, especially under the heightened emotions of hunting and being hunted by the undead, repeatedly declare their love and need for each other, but their marriage feels barren and empty. In one night of real attraction (if not passion), she gets bound, physiologically and emotionally, to the magnetic, soft spoken Nadja, striking beneath her cowl, who happens to be into a bit of menstrual blood play. Not entirely happily (no one in this film is ever really “happy” – it’s not that kind of picture), Lucy falls under her spell.

And the film as a whole casts a mesmerizing spell as well, especially in terms of its look and sound and feel. It can be just so sumptuous sometimes, inky blacks and ivory whites cast into stark relief. Visually, it harkens back to its 1936 progenitor while also prefiguring A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (maybe I’m overstating it and it’s just that all three are b/w movies about a vampire girl in a cowl). But also, the toy camera sequences which had initially distanced me can be very effective, creating a hazy, deeply pixelated effect, which is ugly and modern, but produces a visual fog familiar for a contemporary viewer. It’s utilized in moments when a character is not in control of their mind, of their perception, and it successfully pulls the viewer into that muddled, frustrated headspace. It’s not “pretty,” but it is effective.

Returning to comparison with the 1936 film, though more explicit, this feels less focused on the element of sexuality. In that film, Countess Zaleska was driven by her relationship to (and abhorrence of) her vampirism, and her blood lust was clearly a metaphor for other desires that might have been deemed ‘unnatural’ at the time. The implication of her attraction for the fairer sex dominated the film – both forbidden and alluring – never directly spoken of, but so, so present, and her whole focus was freeing herself from her ‘curse.’

In this more recent outing, Nadja goes home with this woman who probably never should have married a man and their relationship doesn’t need to be coded. Even though Lucy speaks of past trouble with her family, in the eyes of the film, the sexuality of their encounter feels more commonplace and therefore less significant, less dominating. When her father dies, Nadja speaks of being able to make a fresh start, but I never really get the sense that she wants to stop being a vampire – or to stop being attracted to women. It’s nice that she doesn’t have to be a tragic closeted person, desperate not to be herself, but there is an erotic charge missing – being tempted by the forbidden. I wonder if in our more enlightened times it is still as possible to generate the allure of the taboo. In Nadja, we rather dig into the allure of ironic cool and poetic ennui. Ultimately, Nadja perhaps gets a better ending than Zaleska – she at least lives, but in the body of her brother’s lover, her identity now subsumed into that other woman’s. Maybe continuance is worth it, and maybe it would have been better to be murdered by her familiar and die as herself.

Ultimately, I don’t know that this moody, poetic piece really caused me to plumb the depths of our modern listless existence, but I did rather appreciate the viewing experience. Just as much a reflection of the time and place in which it was produced as Vampyros Lesbos or The Vampire Lovers, this is both a solid 90s experimental film and a surprisingly fun little vampire flick.

Blood of the Tribades (2016)

This ultra-low budget feature (approx. 20,000 USD) from Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein took me a bit by surprise. Clearly an homage to the work of Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, and Hammer Studios, it is a crowdfunded labor of love, full of crumbling stone edifices, diaphanous gowns,  bloody breasts, and gendered violence. It may not succeed on every level, but its love for the source material is obvious and the filmmakers do a lot with what they have. As described on their Kickstarter page, the intention was to embrace the style and atmosphere of the early 70s subgenre, while including explicit socio-political messaging. Generally it is successful on both counts. It is also one of the very few examples I’ve been able to find of a Lesbian Vampire flick (co-)directed by a woman.

The film’s premise is that 2000 years ago, the vampire Bathor established a small town of vampires as a kind of utopia and then went off to conquer the continent. Since then, the undead residents have lost their way, dividing along gender lines and seemingly having purged the village of racial others. A group of men (who all drink from a fountain of Bathor’s blood, which seems to actually be making them sick) have started hunting down the women for causing their illness, being irreligious harlots, tempting them with their flesh, and not giving them sufficient offspring. For their part, the council of women’s leaders underplay the threat and try to keep the peace, though their members keep getting crossbow bolts in their hearts whenever they disrobe. Finally, two women escape the carnage with some outcasts (who I believe had been excluded based on race), and we learn that one of them can actually read the ancient words of Bathor and return the community to its founding values (if she doesn’t get staked first).

Socio-politically, it’s not subtle (men, and at least one woman, motivated by religious zealotry, attacking women for their sexuality, murdering them for making them feel inadequate – a (white) women’s movement, which fails to include women of color and pushes for a kind of moderate incrementalism, thus enabling the men’s violence – religion being corrupted and weaponized to subjugate minority populations and punish sexual/gender expression), but it more or less works. One thing I would take issue with though is the implication that the political element is a novel addition. I think the filmmakers behind the classic 70s Lesbian Vampire films may not have brought very intentional messaging to their films, but regardless, the films themselves were deeply infused with politics, often expressing feminist sentiments, even if a given director was just trying to make something lurid to sell tickets, or simply indulging in his own personal peccadillos. For example, the climax here is directly political in its language, but at the same time, it seems to directly recreate the blood ritual of The Blood Spattered Bride, a film whose politics may have been ambivalent, but no less urgent – the politics was always there.

The question this prompts for me is how much weight should be given to intent. If Franco or Kümel created something just because they wanted it to be beautiful or sexy and along the way it happened to communicate emancipatory feminist ideals, is that less valuable than a work where that was the intention from the get go? Or is art more ‘pure’ when made without seeking to make a statement (even though a statement can so freely be read therein)? I honestly don’t know.

If anything, the film’s body politics is given increased parity. For example, while there are plenty of bosoms on display, there is easily as much male nudity. The vampiric men’s rights activists have a tendency of assailing one of their own for being insufficiently fervent in his misogyny, stripping him down, strapping him to a large bondage X and whipping him bloody with roses. It all has a vibe of repressed desire being redirected into a kind of homoerotic sado-masochism, and along the way, there are rather a lot of penises (one even flies through the air, impaled on a crossbow bolt).  On the other hand, until the final, more bloody, sexual, and tragic-romantic ritual between the two remaining ladies, while the women are often nude, there was surprisingly little suggestion of eroticism (the “tribades” of the title being an archaic word used before the inhabitants of Lesbos became unanimous with the idea of female same-sex attraction) – rather, there is a lot of child-like frolicking about. Now, did this circumvent a male gaze, freeing the female vampires from objectification (though when in this state, there are usually leering male figures, waiting to kill them) or does it infantilize the women, robbing them of sexual agency? I’m not sure, but it is a change, one which many critics focused on, stating that the film ‘subverted the sexist tropes’ of its progenitors.

One other difference is the lack of seduction. A recurring trope of the earlier films is the older Lesbian Vampire (often Carmilla) luring the young ingénue to the dark side of both vampirism and sapphism, along the way, turning her against the (often abusive) man in her life. While seductive and freeing, this could also be read as presenting an older, predatory lesbian, preying on and turning younger women. That element is wholly lacking in this case, particularly as every character in the film is already undead. There is perhaps a political merit to this, but I regretted the absence of temptation.

I came to rather like this one, but I think it’s important for a viewer to comprehend its budget in advance and therefore temper expectations. I was initially put off by what I’d deemed the “cheap” look of the film – there is some exterior photography that’s quite attractive, aided by the available locations, but the interiors suffer, particularly the men’s headquarters in which the walls are just covered with sheets, masking whatever modern space they had to work in. Past that, reading the performer’s bios, it seems that most came out of the local Boston art community, specifically, the burlesque scene, and that few had much previous film acting experience. However, knowing more about the project, I appreciate its successes more and can more easily overlook its failures. To be fair, many of the early 70s films also had quite low budgets, but benefitted from working in Europe, where there’s a desolate castle around every corner, and shooting on grainy film, which can cover shortcomings in an artful haze. It’s harder to pull off this kind of picture in the States on high def digital.

The only criticism, I would really make is that there is rather a lot of world building (the whole history of the vampire village, its founder, the religion, etc.) and I think a strength of the originals was their disinterest in logically explaining anything, instead dwelling in a space of Eros-Thanatos psycho-sexual tension. While this film commits to its inspiration’s vibe, often succeeding far better than the toy crossbows might suggest, I think the exposition undercuts some of its potential power.

Still, this was a charming watch – doing so much with limited resources, and evincing an understanding and love of what made those 70s films so special. The passion that went into the project feels somehow more palpable than with many more polished, higher budget creations.

Bit (2020)

Brad Michael Elmore’s film is just tremendous fun. If I was missing the element of seduction in the previous film, this one has it in spades. However, it is less about the allure of some mysterious woman (though there’s a bit of that), than it is that of vampirism, of power, of ‘the night’ – and the night life. Temporarily leaving aside the “Lesbian” part of the equation, something I always appreciate in my “Vampire” content is fun. I remember slogging through Interview with the Vampire, irritated with Louis’s constant moaning, only to then pick up the second book, The Vampire Lestat and feel such a breath of fresh air – Lestat loved being a vampire – it’s sexy and powerful and a really good time and he wasn’t complaining about having those things. Elmore’s movie takes a similar tack, also bringing to mind such films as The Lost Boys and The Craft.

As in those two examples, the film centers around a young person, Laurel (Nicole Maines), who comes to a new city and falls in with a gang of exciting, young supernatural types (in this case, a group of radical, feminist, lesbian vampires who (mostly) hunt predatory and/or irritating men). We understand that Laurel has been through a hard time, particularly during her just completed, final year of high school. But it’s never exactly stated what that hard time was. I’d assumed coming out, but having read later that the actress is trans, I suppose it could have been transitioning. Either way, it’s clear that leading up to this, things had been emotionally and psychologically hard and that, unsure of the direction she wants to go in her life, she needs to take some time (in this case, crashing with her older brother in LA) to find her way.

When Laurel finds herself a vampire, and further, in a like-minded community, it is thrilling and empowering – it’s also just fun. Sure – she’s a protagonist of a teen vampire movie, so she’s reluctant to kill people and comes slowly to the whole blood drinking thing, but being a part of this group just feels so good. There’s a lovely scene where after some bad stuff has gone down and Laurel has had her first kill, thus completing her transformation, she’s on the roof with the leader of the group, Duke. After filling Laurel in on some personal history (and essential exposition for the narrative), Duke offers to show her one more thing. Laurel declines, saying she can’t handle any more changes tonight, but Duke insists, saying something like, “you’ll like this – everyone likes this.” And then she shows her how to fly. And it is so sweet. It’s Lois and Superman. It’s Peter Parker swinging around the city for the first time. It is a young person who’s been through such difficulties feeling lifted and free and strong.

And before this, I have to say, I actually loved the exposition (not a sentence I often write), which was all presented in a kind of disco dance sequence as we learn of Vlad, Duke’s sire. An ancient vampire, he’d held her, and a bevy of other ‘wives,’ in his thrall for decades before she was finally able to overcome him and free herself. I loved how lame he seemed. We keep cutting to Vlad on the dance floor, surrounded by his collection of sexy ladies who have been magically made to love him, with their costumes changing periodically over the years, and he just never looks cool. There is no way he could be surrounded by women without magic. On one level, it’s just funny, but on the other, it underlines the domination, the slavery at work – which is at the heart of Duke’s socio-political drive. She’s learned the hard way that power is not safe in the hands of men.

Of course, there needs to be a story, so as in The Lost Boys and The Craft, our protagonist has to be thrust into conflict with the leader of the pack, in this case, Duke. I would rather that hadn’t been necessary, but where the story goes is still enjoyable, so ok – I’ll take it. And I appreciate how the arc of the vampire storyline is rooted in emotional character issues. Laurel struggles to balance her need to find and live her truth and fulfill her responsibilities. We learn of past suicide attempts and know that she’s had a support system of family and at least one close friend. But there is a tragic inability to do right by those that have stood by her if she is to go off and become her own complete person.

Caught up in the joys of her new un-life, she irreparably fails a dear friend. Reluctant to give into her newfound bloodlust (not letting herself fully be herself), she tries to repress it and accidentally strikes out at those she wouldn’t have normally chosen, ultimately hurting a member of her family. In refusing to hunt as Duke and the others do (going after, e.g., rapists, right wing internet trolls who tweet at young girls to kill themselves, and pretentious faux ‘allies’ who talk a big feminist game for cultural cache), Laurel inadvertently ends up breaking the key rule of ‘bite club’ and turning a man (the biggest no-no for Duke – who has a nice line about how nice it would be ‘to make every woman a vampire and let men be scared to jog at night’), which pushes the story into its final act conflict. While I would have loved to stay in the space of joyful power and sexy discovery, I do like that this turn really grew out of the character in emotionally significant ways.

Another aspect I really enjoyed is that though efforts were made to film the women and their relationships and attractions without a lecherous ‘male gaze,’ the film does not feel neutered. There is still an element of desire and sexuality. Elmore is able to establish and dwell in a space of sexual tension, playing out the flirtation and seduction without it feeling like the camera is leering. It’s a tightrope walk and I think he’s quite successful.

This is a crowd-pleasing (for the right crowd) take-back-the-night party, and it does as well by its vampirism as it does by its diverse LGBT+ characters. It’s also striking the extent to which it manages to wear its socio-political viewpoint on its sleeve without ever feeling preachy or propagandistic. Balancing the emotional truth of its protagonist, the dictates of its narrative, and its progressive perspective, it successfully delivers an equally entertaining and moving, contemporary Lesbian Vampire picture.

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So, there we have a few ‘modern’ examples of the genre. To answer my question from earlier in this post, I didn’t really find any made by a female and LGBT+ identifying person, which is a shame, but I’m glad I did watch these three. Still, I know I’ve skipped a great deal and there is still more homework to do. There is a huge gap between 1994 and 2016. I have the impression though that the Lesbian Vampire kind of disappeared into a general late night Cinemax “sexy vampire” for a stretch of the 90s and early 2000s (and many of those flicks just don’t look that interesting/good); however, she’s somewhat resurfaced of late. Also, recently, between social advancements opening doors for more people to tell their own stories, and the extent to which digital has made filmmaking so much more affordable, leading to a boom of micro-budget independent work, there is so much more explicitly ‘queer horror’ (though, for whatever reason, still vanishingly few “Lesbian Vampire” movies made by out-queer women). I wonder if this sub-genre, with one foot forever in 70s exploitation cinema, has much of a place in the current filmmaking landscape, or is it only approachable as something to either subvert or homage? I don’t know, but there are still a few other examples from the last 15 years I’d like to check out. But I’ve also watched very little Jean Rollin, and life is so short…

Elvira’s Haunted Hills: Camp, Shtick, Homage, and Boob Jokes

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The last couple of weeks have entailed a series of connections. Thanks to a Christmas present, I went on a run of Vincent Price movies. That led me to take in some of Price’s work with Roger Corman. And in turn, watching some of those great old Poe pictures, I got an itch to revisit something I’d first seen only a few months ago, a loving parody of those films, Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001). When I first watched it in October, featured on the Joe Bob Briggs Halloween special on Shudder, with Cassandra Peterson (the performer behind Elvira) as a guest, it took me quite a while to get into it. I was enjoying the interview portions of the show, hearing Peterson’s stories of her career and the hard and costly road of making the movie, but the humor of the film just wasn’t landing. But somehow, over time, I started to get it. I hadn’t seen the movies it was lampooning (generally, the Corman Poe cycle, with a pinch of Hammer Horror thrown in), but I started to catch what was being sent up and by the end, I kind of loved it.

Having finally watched a few of Corman’s flicks, I really wanted to give this another watch and see how it played with more knowledge of its inspiration.  So, that’s what we’re doing today. There will be some spoilers, but I think that is less troublesome in a work of parody such as this.

Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001)

Elvira is an interesting figure in the horror landscape. A horror host since 1981 (before that having worked with a wide range of big names, from Elvis to Fellini), her act walks a line between Borsht Belt shtick with endless cheesy one liners; a kind of camp sexuality wherein she puts on exaggerated characteristics of femininity in a manner not dissimilar to a drag queen, all the while making a constant joke of it – at once, selling and sending up the “sexiness” (there’s no situation she won’t turn into a joke about her chest); and always warmly, lovingly celebrating the Halloween of it all – the fun play with spookiness and the macabre.  It’s an odd and unique balancing act, and maybe it doesn’t always work, but that’s where the camp comes in – I think it isn’t always supposed to work – the joke not landing is sometimes part of the bit (and sometimes the failed joke is the actual gag) – there is an irony at the heart of it all that shines through even when a superficial laugh falls flat (insert boob joke here).

Generally, that all applies to this film – it is cheesy. The jokes often fizzle. It goes for the lowest hanging fruit possible – both in its “parody” and in its “bawdiness”; but there is a secret kernel hidden at its center: something knowing, a genuine love of the movies it purports to make fun of, a brave, open-hearted willingness to do the absolutely stupidest things for a laugh. All of this makes it kind of infectious, and surprisingly loveable.

We follow Elvira (basically as her anachronistic “valley-girl” inspired self) travelling to Paris to star in her can-can revue, waylaid at a spooooky old castle filled with nods to (and direct rip-offs of) characters from the Corman Poe films (having only seen the three so far, I can’t track every reference, but it draws largely from House of Usher and Pit and the Pendulum). Family patriarch who can’t stand loud sounds? Check. Someone walled up in the basement? You betcha. A spot of catalepsy? Better believe it! Torture chambers, the dark burden of family history, revelation of marital betrayals, a crumbling ancient mansion, tainted by genealogical evil, waiting to sink into the ground, and prose as purple as sweet plum wine? You want it – we got it! Even the opening credits, with abstract paintings undulating behind the text, suggests the kind of thing Corman was doing in the early 60s.

It turns out that Elvira is a dead ringer for Lady Elura, the first wife, ten years dead, of the long suffering Lord Hellsubus (Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror Picture Show), but she also seems to sometimes actually be Elura reincarnate, or somehow her descendant – it’s not quite clear, which sets in motion a series of attempted murders, explorations through hidden, cobweb infested passages, and shocking reveals. All the while, Elvira is simply trying to catch a ride to continue on to Paris to do her show (though she is happy to be momentarily delayed by hooking up with the ridiculously hunky and poorly dubbed, Fabio-esque stable boy). By the end, she is of course tied to a slab with a sharpened pendulum swinging above her, but also of course, as the rope tying her down goes over her ample bosom, it gets cut before she does and she manages to escape (there really aren’t any “haunted hills” in this film – that’ s just another boob joke too).

But this movie is not that focused on plot, so much as setting up scenarios to indulge in the silliest gags imaginable. Lord Hellsubus can’t endure loud sounds so there’s a slapstick routine of Elvira and her assistant, Zou Zou, bumping into every suit of armor, knocking over ever vase and hitting every gong. Elvira runs through a graveyard, only to see a spider in its web and scream, see a raven fly past her head and scream, see a bunny sitting sweetly in front of a tombstone and scream.

After having Zou Zou add more bubbles to her Jacuzzi (by blowing into a hose), Elvira is about to get out of the bath when she admonishes the camera operator to look away cause she doesn’t want to “blow the rating on this picture.” She even gets a big, music hall number, with singing and dancing and an applause sign on her tush.

Some of this is pretty funny, and regrettably some of it isn’t. It’s a bit strange, but I think I actually enjoyed the movie more on my first watch when I’d not yet seen the films it was referencing. Having watched them so recently, some of the referential comedy comes off as just that – trying to get a laugh for recreating exact scenes and dialogue from its referents without always coming up with its own jokes. Text frequently feels directly pulled from House of Usher or Pit and the Pendulum. It’s closer to Mel Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It than it is to his superior Young Frankenstein; the later really making its own characters and comic situations out of the source material, and the former depending much more on recreating (in a silly fashion) specific moments from Dracula films (generally Coppola’s 1992 picture).  When I didn’t know the original films, I picked up on the joke that it was sending up a kind of film, a kind of melodramatic, over-the-top, old fashioned, but beloved work. Now, it feels more like it is just redoing bits (but with more slapstick, boob jokes, and sound effects that go “boing!”). It is still enjoyable and lovable in its intentional ridiculousness, but it doesn’t feel as inspired in its stupidity as I’d originally taken it to be.

Also, some elements suffer in comparison. The first time I watched it, I’d imagined that O’Brien’s Lord Hellsubus was affectionately aping a kind of performance one might have found in the originals, and I really got a kick out of just how madcap he went, his performance really growing on me over the film and staying with me afterwards. He was going on a wild ride, and I loved going there with him. However, having just watched some of the Corman movies, I can see how the big choices O’Brien is making are actually the opposite of what Price had done 50 years earlier with a parallel role. Where Price gets quiet, O’Brien gets loud; where Price stays grounded, O’Brien goes round the bend; where Price tenderly touches emotional depths, bringing forth a horrific, subtle shudder, O’Brien waves his arms about and shouts his head off.

That said, I don’t want to be unfair to this actor – what was he supposed to do? Try to recreate Price’s performance beat for beat (and almost certainly fail) – isn’t it better to go in his own direction? And what he’s doing is unquestionably appropriate for the loony tunes world his role exists in – something as gentle and whole as Price had done could have been lost amidst the sight gags and double entendres. Maybe playing it this way just serves to better homage Price’s talent (the movie is dedicated to him), highlighting the surprising and oh-so-successful choices he made by showing the path not taken.

 As a whole, this movie is such an odd duck. I really do have affection for it, but I wonder who they thought they were making it for. It has a goofy sense of humor that perhaps a nine year old could best appreciate while it revolves around references to a series of movies no nine year old is likely to have seen. It’s full of allusions to horrific acts (with just a little bit of cartoony gore thrown in at the end), but it is not remotely scary. It leans hard on sex jokes but it still comes off as entirely wholesome. It approaches its source material with such inane absurdity, but it is obvious how much it adores those earlier films. It really does feel like a labor of love, which I understand it was for Peterson and her team. Apparently, she had trouble getting financing, poured loads of her own money into getting the picture finished (partly funded by mortgaging her home), and then couldn’t really get it distributed and took a huge financial loss – in the end, she mostly ended up screening it as a part of AIDS fundraisers she was involved with.

Of course, before she gets stretched out, a character appreciatively comments, “nice rack!”

In the end, for all its faults, I still feel like championing this picture – I think it’s been little seen and while the cohort who will really appreciate it is probably quite small, I really hope those people find this movie. Their inner vaudevillian, sixties-horror-loving child will thank them for it.

Poe, Corman, Price: House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death

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Sometimes when I mention to people that I’m a horror fan and even more, that I have a horror blog, I get the response of, “hey, I like horror movies, what’s good?” and I so rarely know what to tell them. I’m stymied by not knowing how to curate the best suggestion for this person in this moment. Furthermore I expect they often want something new – what’s in cinemas now, what’s just hit Netflix – and I’m always out of date. One reason for that is that I always have so much catching up to do. I feel like I’ve watched so many films, read so many books, and yet there is always so much more (so much of it, essential viewing) that I’ve not yet seen. It’s a kind of fractal experience – no matter which point you choose to dive into – any can yield endless, recursive depth to monopolize your attention, and the alternative is to surf ad infinitum upon the surface, sampling bits and bobs and still missing out on so much (Letterboxd informs me that there were 1,269 feature length horror films released in 2022 alone). So right now, I’m in the midst of a project to somewhat fill-in one significant gap – exploring more fully the works of Vincent Price – one of horror’s biggest names, whom I had previously seen shamefully little of.

So now, having thoroughly enjoyed him in Dragonwyck, House on Haunted Hill, Witchfinder General, and Theatre of Blood (all of which I’d seen previously), and House of Wax, The Last Man on Earth, and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (which I watched for last week’s post), I’m pretty excited to finally try out some of his work with Roger Corman in the iconic (if pretty loose) Poe adaptations. I’m really looking forward to this as a) I’ve really been enjoying his painstakingly mannered, and yet gently rounded performances, and b) while I still won’t be any kind of expert in his oeuvre, I at least feel like I won’t embarrass myself at a cocktail party (people can judge you harshly upon learning that you’ve never seen 1964’s The Tomb of Ligeia). So join me as I indulge in House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). As always, there will be spoilers, so be forewarned.

House of Usher (1960)

The first of this cycle, I understand this was a departure for Corman, who had been in the habit at AIP (American International Pictures) of producing/directing two black and white films back to back, for a small budget in about ten days, intended to be released as a double bill. Wanting to paint on a larger canvas, Corman convinced those holding the purse strings to increase the budget and filming time by about 50% and let him do it wide screen in color, to go after a different corner of the market and get a larger return. Let me preface this by saying that I loved this film, but with my 2023 sense of audience tastes, I’m surprised that this was the project they chose to roll the dice on, that they were sure it was a good bet. It probably says something about how audiences have changed (for the worse) that I can’t imagine a general audience today having the patience for this slow, steady, atmospheric, beautiful picture. And the target audience was reportedly teen boys (Corman thought they’d be into it because Poe was being taught in schools at the time)! But I’m so glad they did, because House of Usher is just gorgeous.

Adapted very loosely by Richard Matheson (who wrote last week’s The Last Man on Earth), the story is incredibly simple (again – it’s hard to imagine this being a hit today – almost nothing happens). A young man, Philip Winthrop, travels through a desolate landscape to a crumbling old mansion somewhere in New England to see his fiancé, Madeline Usher. When he arrives, her brother, Roderick (Price), who has a heightened condition of the senses such that he cannot bear loud sounds, rough fabrics, or food more flavorful than a bland mash, tells him to leave as she is very ill, carrying the taint of evil that has run through the family for generations, which has furthermore corrupted the house as well as the very land itself. With her hereditary predisposition to madness and cruelty, marriage and children are quite out of the question. Roderick orders Philip to leave the two siblings to die in their rotting abode such that the curse might pass with them. Philip refuses, but after a spell of catalepsy (in which she appears dead), Roderick has Madeline prematurely buried to ensure the two will not marry. This ends badly, as you might expect.

This is not a scary film. Nothing jumps out at you, and there is no real supernatural menace. Still, the three main characters all inhabit a space of horror made physical, both in terms of pathetic fallacy, and how they are trapped and haunted by what they perceive around them. Philip has come to a house of madness wherein Roderick imprisons and attempts to murder the woman he loves – from Philip’s perspective, Roderick is a dangerous, abusive psychopath. Madeline’s whole life has been lived under the dark cloud of her brother’s horror stories, and now she finds herself caged, not allowed to live and love as she will (also, being buried alive is unpleasant and apparently drives you to madness and bloody rage). Finally, Roderick carries the most refined and tragic sense of horror, certain as he is of his dark fate and responsibility, haunted by his family’s cruel past, his fear that it might resurface making him the gentlest, most sorrowful monster imaginable.

The other actors are fine, but this is Price’s picture through and through and I think it’s my favorite performance I’ve seen from him yet. His Roderick is surely the villain of the piece, but he plays the part without a single drop of malice. Rather, suffused with warmth, tenderness, and deep resignation, he is a fully tragic figure – acting only out of his sense of ‘the good,’ making the terrible decisions he alone understands that he must make, following his sense of duty, of morality, to commit the most heinous acts, taking that sin on his shoulders because he must. Just beautiful. And so softly played.

One element of that softness is rooted in his condition, such that he cannot abide loud noises (and compared to him, Philip really seems to be shouting throughout the film – such an irritating, earnest young lover), and the delicacy with which he approaches every moment is exquisite –it is as if every second of lived experience is painful to him. But beyond the simple sensory tortures he must endure, every action and every emotion is handled with a similarly light touch. This is a very dramatic story, but Price plays it all so small, so richly but sincerely. There is no melodrama in his work – no scenery is chewed. And the result is just magnetic whenever he speaks and I lean in to catch each small inflection.

This surfaces in heartbreaking little moments, such as an interchange between Roderick and Philip viewing Madeline in her coffin before she is interred:

-At least she has found peace now.
-Has she?
-Why do you say that?
-Because I do not believe that for the Ushers there is peace hereafter.
-Is there no END to your HORRORS?
-No. None whatever… for they are not mine alone. Mere passage from the flesh cannot undo centuries of evil. There can be no peace without penalty.

If I had just read the script, I would have imagined something so different from the quiet, soft, deeply, deeply sad line readings that Price delivers here. I might expect emotions that rage like the storm incessantly buffeting his aging homestead, but his choice is so much more effective.

In the end, before the house and the family line fall to fire and are swallowed by the blackened land, Philip learns that Madeline is not yet dead and races to the cellar to free her from her tomb, and as he descends, Roderick calls after him so quietly, so defeated, “No, don’t go down there. Let her die.” And in this moment, this monstrous figure, this abusive older sibling, this dangerously crazy man, just breaks your heart. What a picture…

Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

As I continue my journey through Corman’s adaptations of Poe’s stories, I think this next entry offers a good opportunity to discuss these films as ‘adaptations.’ Also penned by Matheson, Pit and the Pendulum takes as its starting point the famous Edgar Allan Poe tale in which a man is tortured by the Spanish Inquisition, held in a chamber with a great pit in the center and a bladed pendulum swinging above. It is an effective and exciting story, painting a rich sensory picture of the terrifying ordeal, but it’s quite short. We never really learn why he’s being tortured thus, so much as we just go on the ride of his terror. Now, this “adaptation” does feature a climactic scene in which there is, in fact, a bladed pendulum swinging above a great pit – in the last ten minutes of the movie. The seventy minutes before that are entirely the work of Matheson and Corman, and while the tale does revolve around Poe-esque elements of guilt (familial and personal), premature burial, mystery, and madness, it is really its own thing (this is generally true of all their “adaptations”). I understand Poe was a commercial draw, but literary purists should probably stay away from these films. These days “fan culture” can be so critical of any departures from source materials (especially if, heavens forbid, you make a formerly white character black) – well, anyone griping on the internet about the new iteration of their favorite work from the eighties should probably be forced to listen to a Poe fan in the sixties detail the indignities they endured and they’ll find that they don’t have it so bad.

That said, this movie was an absolute blast! Whereas the first film was slow and evenly paced, depending so utterly on the strength of Price’s central performance, this is a pretty quick moving mystery that really engaged me in unraveling its threads and guessing after the culprit before building to a dramatic, spectacular climax (pit, pendulum, etc.) and closing on a wicked final laugh.

In short, a young man, Francis Barnard, travels to a Spanish castle to learn how his dear sister, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele, from the great Bava film, Black Sunday), had recently died there. Nicholas Medina (Price), her widower husband, is clearly still distraught at her death, but is also a shifty character, caught in lie after lie as he tries to cover the shameful family secret that he believes led to her demise. Concurrently, he is being haunted by her apparition, rooted in his suspicion that he may have inadvertently interred her before she was actually fully dead. A mystery ensues as Francis; Medina’s sister, Catherine; and Medina’s closest friend, Doctor Leon, uncover secret passageways, dig up the buried past, and try to determine who or what is behind the odd goings on which are slowly but surely disintegrating Medina’s mind, his sanity devoured by guilt and loss.

I don’t want to go into detail as I really did enjoy the mystery of it all, but it results in a satisfying revelation which catapults us into delightfully over-the-top territory in the final sequence, both in terms of a great horror set piece and the leaps of character that Price gets to take.

In a way, it is as if he plays two characters. The first is the pitiful, broken Nicholas Medina, crushed by the loss of his beautiful young wife, tormented by what he considers to be his own responsibility for her expiration, and haunted by a dark, shameful family secret which has scarred him since childhood. Then, late in the film, he (sort of) becomes Sebastian Medina, Nicholas’s cruel father who maintained a torture chamber in the cellar and reveled there in unhinged feats of sadism and mechanical engineering. The wild swing between the two poles of character, from Nicholas’s soft, fearful sorrow to Sebastian’s maniacal, evil vengeance is a treat to behold and is surely worth the Price of admission (that was terrible – sorry). Seriously, it is tons of fun – less nuanced perhaps than the performance in Usher, but no less captivating.

But in this case, that performance exists in the context of a truly entertaining, wild film, full of betrayal, murder, torture, and a more confident and experimental style of filmmaking than had been on display in House of Usher. Corman’s use of color and camera movement, as well as the modern, unsettling score, all tap into a feeling of something beyond mere realism. This still feels like a work of a bygone era (especially with its early gestures towards psychedelia), refined in spite of its low budget and preoccupation with the macabre, but it is easier to see how this could be a hit with its target audience: perverse, playful, and well-paced as it is (and a tidy 80 minutes, no less).  

Masque of the Red Death (1964)

The most artistically ambitious of the three I’m considering today, this film, the seventh entry in the Poe cycle, was a (comparatively) larger budgeted piece and less of a commercial success. That’s not too surprising as, for all that it is a striking, intriguing, visually stunning film that makes bold moves and is full of character and story, it feels less commercial – it is more theatrical, having traveled further afield from naturalism, and at times, even contemplative.

In his most villainous turn out of these three, Price plays Prince Prospero, a sadistic and explicitly Satanic nobleman in medieval Italy during a time of plague. He is introduced laying waste to one of his own villages, burning the place to the ground like a wealthy jerk lighting his cigar with a roll of hundred dollar bills to show just how much he doesn’t care about money. Along the way, he collects Francesca, an innocent peasant girl, taking her back to his castle for the pleasure of corrupting her and turning her from her simple, pure faith. Soon after, he learns of the spreading ‘red death’ and along with a collection of favored nobles, locks himself in to revel in decadence and debauchery until the threat beyond has passed.

His court is a wild, ridiculous, cruel place (or at least it is intended to be – some bits, such as when Prospero orders his courtiers to play animals, are meant to feel degrading, but feel pretty tame through modern eyes – but still, it is easy to see the root of characters like Game of Thrones’s King Joffrey in Price’s fickle, affably evil performance). Much of the film concerns Francesca navigating this wicked world, both threatened and tempted by its sinfulness. Along the way, we also meet a dwarf jester out for revenge (taken from another Poe tale, Hop Frog) and Prospero’s wife Juliana, who, threatened by the young girl’s presence, seeks to complete her initiation into the Satanic cult, thus securing her position and favor. By the end, as in Poe’s story (which is considerably shorter than this post), the plague gets in during a masquerade ball, and all of Prospero’s power, wealth and Satanic dealings can do nothing to protect him or his guests from the bloody disease.

These characters are all given a lot of story along the way, and the court feels fully realized, but at the end of the day, Prospero’s tale is really the heart of the film and it is a simple one. Everything else feels more than a bit peripheral. His is an interesting study – as, though the character is openly “evil,” Price often takes a gentle, warm approach, making some of his whimsical cruelty more chilling for how ‘normal’ it feels. Prospero has come to great power in a world of meaningless death and brutality. He is no more barbarous than the world around him – he is simply more powerful – he’s just better at it. And always charming and genteel, Price never needs to twirl a mustache to communicate the depths of his nihilistic inhumanity.

I was really struck by the Satanic element. An addition to the Poe story, I found it fascinating that it is never really demonized or punished. In the end, death reigns supreme and any deals Prospero has made cannot spare him, but god never shows up. Prospero, his wife, and his guests never seem judged by the film for choosing to give obeisance to the Devil. We abjure the ugliness of his monstrous sadism, but I don’t feel that Corman really wants us to recoil at Prospero taking Francesca’s cross from her and trying to cure her of her pointless peasant’s faith. In the end, he is castigated for hubris, but the devil worship just seems a natural element of this world, part and parcel with Price’s warm, genial portrayal of villainy.

And as mentioned above, this is a visually beautiful film, rich in color scheme and cinematography (by Nicolas Roeg of Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The Witches). A classic element from the original text is Prospero’s series of rooms, each in a different color, with a different feeling, and they just pop on film so vividly, as do all visual elements of the sets and costumes and lighting. From a genuinely spooky scene of Francesca in her room, terrified of the wind and shadows and distant Satanic chanting, to surreal portents of doom in the final black room, to the village burning to the ground, to the titular masque, with its masked dancers lithely filling these monochrome chambers with bawdy lasciviousness, this whole film is such a vibrant, sumptuous space in which to dwell – as well it should be.

But while I loved this artistic splendor, I can see how it might not have performed as well with its intended audience. For example, the final sequence of the Red Death’s appearance at the masquerade ball plays out with a kind of beautiful artifice, theatrical and balletic as the partygoers begin to bleed through their skin but never play the horror of the moment. They dance silently, elegantly, as a desperate Prospero tries to escape his doom, delivered by a crimson apparition that wears his own visage. It is poetic and it lands thematically – his great power and privilege rendered so powerless, even pathetic, against the inevitable. But it’s not scary, or particularly exciting. The climax of this lavish B-picture is pure arthouse. I love it for its daring, artsy choices, but I could see how it wouldn’t be for everyone.

—

I think the artful nature of particularly this last picture highlights another aspect of Corman’s CV. Sure, he has directed and produced loads of low-budget exploitation features, but he was also the American distributor of Fellini, Berman, Truffaut, and Kurosawa. There is an artistic temperament there, and I think these three films reveal a tension between the low budget impresario of melodramatic thrill-seeking fare and the artist who found that he had more freedom to create interesting work by remaining in the world of independent genre cinema rather than subsuming his creativity to a Hollywood machine that evens everything out, making it all more the same, more palatable for the widest possible audience.

I think in this work, Vincent Price was a perfect collaborator. Throughout these three films (and I’m assuming this to be true in the other four Poe flicks Price did with Corman), as well as all of the work I’ve seen from him so far, he consistently brings a balance between artful class and high melodrama, maintaining a tension between a campy wickedness and a genuine, authentic warmth and groundedness. The way he can portray such an over-the-top villain as Prospero while leaning into an affect of tender gentleness resonates with this film’s presentation of a perverse, thrilling horror show while ruminating in nigh meditative, if also nihilistic, manner on the futility of wealth and power and the passing nature of life’s trials and tribulations.

Catching Up With Vincent Price

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I’ve been a horror fan for quite a while and take some pride in having reasonably expansive knowledge of the genre. And yet, I must admit some significant gaps in my horror education – films which somehow I’ve just never gotten around to. For example, I’ve only taken in a handful of Hammer horrors; I’m always out of date on the most recent releases; and I’ve seen precious few films starring Vincent Price (I have many more gaps of course – this is merely a sample).

That last one particularly stands out for me as this Christmas I received a thoughtful gift from my folks. Unbeknownst to me, Price had a cooking show back in the 70s and also published a few cookbooks. Knowing my love of both horror and cooking, I was given one of these, “Cooking Price-Wise.” And yet, I could probably count on one hand (maybe two) the number of his films that I’ve seen.  All of them I’ve really enjoyed, or at least I enjoyed him (House on Haunted Hill, Witchfinder General, Dragonwyck, and Theatre of Blood all made deep impressions), but though growing up in the 80s, he was always around – a lovable, velvet-voiced public character inextricably linked with the macabre, he is still a huge blind spot for me (he made over 100 movies and I’ve seen perhaps 10).

So this week, I want to start remedying the situation and finally catch up on some of his most known works, thus assuaging my guilt for not having seen them thus far while having the gall to label myself a ‘horror blogger.’ Be warned that there will be spoilers.

House of Wax (1953)

As I understand, Andre DeToth’s film, the first color-3D and stereo movie produced by an American studio (and only the second studio 3D film ever), kicked off the second wave of Price’s career, in which he became a horror icon. He had worked in film since the 30s, playing a range of parts from young romantic leads to drug addled roguish villains (again, Dragonwick is striking), and he had been involved in some Universal horror films (Tower of London and The Invisible Man Returns), but it wasn’t until House of Wax that his silky gentility was first fully tapped in service of horror. And serve it he does – in his unique fashion. The root of horror is the Latin ‘horrore,’ meaning to shudder or tremble, and while this is not a terrifying film by any means, it, and specifically Price’s performance, do get under the skin, delivering a delicate and delicious occasional shudder.

Throughout the role, he brings a kind of warmth, not overselling the villainy, and this element is key to his success. At the beginning, he is Prof. Henry Jarrod, a kindly sculptor of wax figures who only wants to capture beauty, refusing his partner’s demands to produce crowd pleasing torture chamber scenes, but who is also more than a little off. He loves his figures as his own children, talking to them sweetly and seeming to hear them respond. Again, he doesn’t overplay it and in the first scene where he speaks lovingly to his prized figures in front of a potential new investor, it plays like quirky, sweet idiosyncrasy more than anything particularly off-putting. But when his partner burns down his creations for the insurance money, leaving Jarrod for dead in the blaze, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to him completely snapping and becoming a psychotic monster.

The initial burning is quite shocking – one of the biggest horror set pieces of the film. Though they are only wax figures, watching them char and melt, their glass eyes dropping out of their sockets, is still disturbing and grotesque, and seeing the callous way that Jarrod’s partner tries to kill him in the bargain so that he alone can collect the insurance kicks off the film on a bracingly dark note.

It isn’t long before Price’s sculptor, his hands ruined, returns as a burned monstrosity, no longer shying away from scenes of sensationalistic violence, now murdering those whose likenesses are well suited to his wax subjects so that he can dip them in paraffin and use them to people his new exhibit (as well as murdering anyone who get in his way – they too can go in the wax). Seeing him (and of course, listening to him), in typically affable, urbane fashion, lead an audience around the displays, affectionately describing his newest artworks (which we come to understand are actually posed corpses) is both delectable and honestly creepy (reminiscent of the vocal work he would later do for Alice Cooper’s “The Black Widow”). When inviting the female lead, Sue, to model for his new rendition of Marie Antionette, “what I need is you – nothing else will satisfy me,” his manner belies none of his true intentions (she won’t actually be modeling so much as she will be the model). His gentle sweetness is not in quotation marks. But as we understand him more fully (and as she already has her doubts about his new Joan of Arc figure which far too realistically resembles her murdered friend, Cathy), it is all the more chilling.

Past that, it’s a fun spectacle of a movie, a crowd pleasing bit of Grand Guignol which is at once an elegant period piece, a gimmick laden, schticky 3D flick which outdoes Friday the 13th part 3 for ridiculously out of place moments of objects flying at the screen (such as two scenes with a paddleball wielding barker, whacking the ball at our faces or an extended can-can girl performance which gets pretty up close and personal with what’s under their skirts), a periodically exciting thriller with Price’s deformed killer chasing Sue through the streets at night, a surprisingly lurid picture with (implied) nude female victims screaming, bound to a table to be coated in boiling wax, and high melodrama as Price waxes poetic (see what I did there?) on how these deaths are justified to bring his art to life.

My only gripe is that in the final, climactic moments, I wish Jarrod had been able to go down more grandly. I mean, of course you know he has to die – in 1953, the Hays Code was still in full effect –bad guys couldn’t win until ’68. But after such a rich, textured performance, where so much could be savored, I felt he was finally dispatched with so little fanfare and I wanted more. Regardless, this was tremendous fun and I expect it will be one to revisit over the years.  Also, it’s fun seeing a young Carolyn Jones (Morticia from the Addams Family TV show).

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

This is an interesting piece – not always entirely successful, but when it is, it’s quite chilling. The first filmic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (which I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never read…), it carries notes of post-apocalyptic ennui, zombie movie spooks, personal tragedy, and a Twilight Zone-esque final act reversal of perspective. We open on an empty city, littered with corpses. The city is never named but has a monumental feel (I’d first thought it was DC, and later learned it had been filmed in Rome – more on that later). This sort of imagery just always seems to work, whether here or in something later like Night of the Comet or 28 Days Later.

Price plays Dr. Robert Morgan, a scientist who had been researching the plague which has basically eradicated humanity, including his wife and young daughter. As far as he knows, he is the only remaining living person on earth, with everyone else either killed off or reduced to shambling, undead monsters (here they are presented very much like zombies, but I understand in the book and the 2007 film with Will Smith – I’ve never seen the Charlton Heston fronted The Omega Man – they are more like quick moving vampires). Three years into his isolation, his days consist of acts of mere survival – eating bland canned foods, keeping the generator running, carving new stakes, clearing the corpses out of his driveway and burning them in the local mass grave, and hunting down at least a few more vampires each day before they can harry him by night, when he locks himself in and drinks till sleep comes.

The first act of the film is, I think, the strongest. Watching Morgan go through his days in desolate loneliness, boredom, and bouts of drunkenness, with the looming doom waiting outside his boarded up door, it is easy to get caught up in the gloom. Also, the way he carries out some of his more grizzly tasks, like collecting and burning corpses, brings an ugly weight to it all. And to top it all off, while one clearly sympathizes with his need to hunt down the undead by day, it looks more like he’s just murdering poor derelicts as he hammers stakes into the hearts of these daylight enfeebled ‘creatures.’

But then we hit the second act and an extended flashback to the before times as the plague was hitting and he was somehow spared, and all of a sudden I started to notice how out of sync the sound was. This is when I discovered that this was filmed in Rome with a mostly Italian cast and crew – of course the dub is bad! Regrettably, this middle stretch drags. Whereas the first act consisted of basically wordless action with Price’s rich voiceover giving narration, now there are extended scenes of people stiffly speaking with each other and while the actual story that plays out is at turns tragic and horrifying, the atmosphere and energy of the filmmaking takes a significant dip. I read that Matheson was so underwhelmed with the finished project that he had his name taken off as screenwriter (apparently he’d been told that Fritz Lang would direct – that clearly didn’t happen). He also reportedly felt Price had been miscast, though he’d valued his performances in their other collaborations (Matheson also wrote the screenplays for many of the Roger Corman produced Poe adaptations that Price starred in).

Not having read the source material, I can’t say for sure, but I can imagine a different intended vibe for the character – more of a typical sci-fi leading man perhaps. But I really like the qualities Price brings to the table – he is a weary, broken figure, given to drink and dulled to violence. In the final act, he finds one other survivor, a woman who is infected and not yet turned. She initially runs from him, but convinced she thinks him one of the vampires, he chases her down, shouting that he’s not going to hurt her. The image of this older man chasing this terrified younger woman, grabbing her and dragging her home, where he essentially detains her against her will, is disturbing. But I think this works in the film’s benefit. There is no intimation of possible romance between these two remaining humans – he is just desperate to grab hold of another living being, but he is really a domineering threat. He is, in fact, the monster. The legend told among what has become of humanity that kills by day, hunting down weak, innocent people, some of whom have not yet turned. In the final twist, we learn that a new society is developing, built by the infected who have learned to live with their condition and there is no place in this world for this violent, dangerous relic who will never be able to accept them as anything other than mutated freaks.

I think Price brings a kind of sad menace to the role that ultimately, even if not what the author had originally intended, serves it. His Dr. Morgan is not a good man, and the journey we go on with him is richer and more horrific thanks to that. This was a fascinating, if uneven, watch, with strong notes of horror and an oppressive, fatalistic weight – I think Price’s contribution is a large part of its success.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

What did I just watch? What is this film? I mean, it is…interesting, filled with so much baffling, committed, over the top weirdness. But it’s also static and utterly lacking in dramatic tension or momentum. In the end, I think the glory of its peculiarity outweighs the leadenness of its dialogue and drama, but it is an odd duck to say the least. Set in 1925, it took me a half an hour to realize that fact as it began with a colorful sequence that just felt so very 1970s, like something out of Flash Gordon  or Doctor Who. For the longest time, I was wondering why their cars were all so old fashioned…sometimes I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

We start the film with a 10 minute wordless sequence. A shiny, hooded, cloaked figure rides a pipe organ up out of an underground chamber, pounding it dramatically while bathed in red light. Then he descends into his lavish Art Deco ballroom, turns a key and conducts his clockwork orchestra before a woman in a fantastical white dress enters (I guess it could be period appropriate – but it could also be from a sci-fi movie). They dance a bit before he lowers a covered birdcage into a hole in the ground where the same woman, having instantaneously undergone a costume change, receives it, packs it into a car and chauffeurs the cloaked figure away. Next we see a man cozy in his bed. The skylight opens, and the birdcage is lowered in and out of the room, having been opened. A shadow flits by and then another. The man is scared. He looks down and sees one (fruit) bat crawling up his chest. Another is on the pillow beside him. A look of absolute terror. A series of close ups on the bats faces – and they’re real cuties – not scary at all, just wriggling along, licking their noses with their adorable little tongues. Look of abject terror. Cut to black. Back at the homestead, the clockwork band strikes up again. The mysterious man rides his organ back into the ground as the woman silently watches. The next morning, a housekeeper finds the former sleeper in his bed, surrounded and devoured by bats.

This might, maybe, sorta give some small taste of what this film is like. Past that, when we finally see Price (who utters his first line 32 minutes into the film and largely gives a silent performance), it’s clear his face is not his own, having been crudely spirit gummed into place. His silent assistant is a mystery – I had expected her to be a more sophisticated clockwork, but by the end of the film, when she dies in surprising fashion, it’s evident she’s been a real girl all along. Who is she? Why doesn’t she speak (we come to understand why he doesn’t)? Why is she helping him murder all these people? Furthermore, motivated to revenge by the death of his beloved wife, why is Phibes carrying on with this young woman anyway? What’s with the little vignettes and dance scenes the two of them periodically share? Also, Phibes is taking his revenge on the 8 surgeons and 1 nurse who unsuccessfully tried to save his wife’s life four years earlier, killing them in the style of the 10 Plagues of Exodus – but while there can be some variation in tellings, I’ve never seen a Haggadah (the text recited on Passover) with a plague of ‘bats.’ And isn’t ‘death of the first born’ typically last, and not ‘darkness?’

Frogs are pretty standard though.

But all of the above is really what makes the film such a great, singular ride. I had an acting teacher my first year of college who always insisted that we should “dare to fail gloriously,” and I can’t help but love any artwork that follows through on that ethos. Sadly, it shares the screen with an unfortunately clunky police procedural, riddled with attempts at humor that (for me) simply didn’t land, such as Investigator Trout often being mistakenly called “Pike.” Hilarious, right? The problem with this half of the film is that it seems to exist only to give us the exposition of why Phibes is doing what he’s doing. We just go from one murder to the next, meeting victims for the first time in their death scenes such that we never know them or particularly care that they die, and it never feels like there’s any chance that the police will somehow be able to intervene. Thus, we end up giving over maybe 40% of the run time to characters who have no real narrative agency. They just show up after the fact and help us understand the whys and wherefores, but they can’t really do anything. On the other hand, we do get the police sergeant uttering the classic line, “A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon – words fail me gentlemen.” (You know, from the plague of unicorns!) So that’s something.

But I really don’t want to come off as negative – while the film is far from exciting, it has so much in it that is unique and special, even if it never clicked for me as a story. And, as the whole point of this was to dig into Vincent Price’s oeuvre, he really delivers a mad, zany, delightfully arch, and yet still sophisticated and controlled, performance. As I mentioned, he mostly doesn’t speak and when he does, it is by holding a cable to his throat (his mouth can’t move – he also drinks a martini through a tube in the side of his neck – this is a weird movie…) and what we hear is actually overdubbing. Thus, he really is giving a silent performance and it is very effective.

Some of the best moments of the film are when he has some small, subtle reaction: a passing look of disdain, a moment of sadistic appreciation, an expression of satisfaction with his baroque methods of vengeance (such as an exquisite frog mask that crushes the wearer’s head, or coating a sleeping nurse in plant-based goo so that locusts eat her face down to the skull), or a look of tragic despair as he sits at the altar of his dead wife, pledging that his work will summarily be done and he will soon return to her side in the darkness. He manages to balance two extremes here – on one hand, all of his gestural and emotional work is so delicate, careful, and nuanced – and on the other, it is all so very, very, very over-the-top and melodramatic. The inherent tension of those two poles makes for a captivating performance. Sadly, the rest of the film didn’t have any real tension to match it. But maybe that doesn’t matter and we should just appreciate the diamond we’ve found and not complain that it’s surrounded by coal.

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And so there we have our first foray into the works of Vincent Price. He really is a fascinating screen presence – so consistently classy with just the right amount of camp, bringing solid emotional work while maintaining a calculated, almost cerebral mannerism, not always chewing on the scenery (though for that, do check out Theatre of Blood (1973)– it’s great!), but often nibbling on it, savoring every little bite.

And so, let’s keep going. Next week, I plan to continue filling this gap in my classic horror knowledge and also kill a second bird with this particular stone as I have, shamefully, never watched any of Roger Corman’s 1960s Poe flicks. As Price was in 6 out of 8 of them, and these are some of his most iconic works in the genre, I think I should watch a few post haste.