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 For example, I’ve only taken in a handful of Hammer horrors; I’m always out of date on the most recent releases; and I’ve seen precious few films starring Vincent Price (I have many more gaps of course – this is merely a sample).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?’
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.