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

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 Furthermore I expect they often want something new – what’s in cinemas now, what’s just hit Netflix – and I’m always out of date.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:

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.

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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.