Tag Archives: Vincent Price

Price, Corman, Lovecraft: The Haunted Palace

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After the interminably long gap between my last two posts, this time, I really wanted to just jump in to something fun that I was sure I could write about immediately, and today’s film certainly fit the bill. Back in the winter, I went on a run of Vincent Price films, particularly digging into some of his appearances in Roger Corman’s Poe cycle. And just last week, I sang the praises of an excellent Lovecraft adaptation, From Beyond (1986). Thus, seeing that Corman’s The Haunted Palace (1963) had recently shown up on Shudder, I leapt at it as a good opportunity to continue in two veins (Price/Corman and Lovecraft). Generally included in the Poe cycle (it stars Vincent Price and takes its name from a Poe poem, two stanzas of which are recited in the film), it is actually more historically significant in the annals of horror for being the first direct filmic adaptation of a work by H.P. Lovecraft, in this case, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”

At the outset, I will say that while both different in style from the other Poe films and a very loose adaptation of the Lovecraft story, it did not disappoint, so let’s get into it. There will be some spoilers, but I doubt they would actually ruin your appreciation of the film, so don’t let them stop you…

The Haunted Palace (1963)

Apparently, Roger Corman had wanted to take a break from the Poe films when he chose to adapt Lovecraft’s tale, originally giving it the title of “The Haunted Village,” but higher ups at AIP felt the Poe brand was too valuable to eschew and insisted on the name change. Beyond the title, it does share certain surface qualities with the films of the Poe cycle, while very much being its own beast. Corman sets the tale earlier than Lovecraft, capitalizing on the period vibes of his other films, and contrives to place a deteriorating castle (the eponymous palace) in its New England locale, the fictional town of Arkham, the aging structure a familiar sight (and knowing his budgets and cost conscious practices, possibly allowing him to re-use previous sets). There is also a kind of literary, low-budget-classiness about the whole affair – it just feels different from the harsher roads horror would be treading by decade’s end. Finally, there is the recurring element of a house and a family cursed by the past, of horror, of evil being something to inherit.

That said, very loosely adapting a novella by Lovecraft (as opposed to very loosely adapting the works of Poe), The Haunted Palace really does have a different character – pulpier, more spook house than quasi-historical art house. More fog is pumped in front of the camera, more spider-webs are draped over the furniture, more distressing animals randomly startle someone (why is there a large snake slithering in the presumably chilly New England kitchen cupboard?), and more fearful villagers carry torches to rid their town of a terrible evil than you can shake a stick at. There are one or two jumps, though I wouldn’t call it “scary” per se, but there is tons of autumnal, Halloweeny atmosphere; it is a fun, old fashioned horror-show and I think it could be just a perfect movie for a rainy October Saturday afternoon, bundled in a blanket on the sofa.

Following the source material, Price plays dual roles: Charles Dexter Ward (though he bears no resemblance to the young, bookishly obsessive title character of Lovecraft’s novella) and his great, great grandfather, the eeeevil Joseph Curwen, a researcher in the black arts, burned as a warlock centuries earlier. Having inherited a decrepit castle in the small town of Arkham, Ward and his wife, Ann (Debra Paget in her last screen role) come to check the place out, only to be warned at every turn to shove off and go back from whence they came (seriously, I hope to one day open the door to a tavern and have everyone go silent and watch me with such terror and concern – that’s a life goal right there). I particularly enjoy an interchange when the Ward couple questions the idea of a “palace” in America, and an angry villager explains it had been brought over stone by stone “from Europe, somewhere – no one knows – no one wants to know!” This friendly New Englander doesn’t only hate accursed necromancers – he also apparently can’t stand the idea of Europe.

They take against Ward so immediately because he’s a dead ringer for his sorcerous ancestor who had cursed the town as he burned, and whose arcane experiments generations earlier (involving breeding the mesmerized women of the community with deep, dark things from another realm) are the reason that Arkham has an inordinately high rate of people with disabilities (being born without eyes or mouths, having green, scaly skin, being an inarticulate, rampaging monster – that sort of thing). When they finally get to the castle, Ward finds a portrait of his great, great grandfather, which somehow bores into his soul and starts to take over his body and his mind.

Without going into too many details, though Ward puts up a struggle for continued inhabitance of his own flesh, it is a futile one, and before long, Curwen is up to his old sinister ways, when he isn’t systematically burning townspeople so that they might feel flames on their tender flesh as once he’d done, or trying to raise his long dead mistress from the grave. Honestly, I felt there was an almost tragicomic thread about how Curwen needs to get back to his true calling, the serious matter of raising some sort of Great Old One and possibly dooming the world (or more), but driven by his all too human emotions of vengeance and love, he gets distracted from this (un)holy task, and that leads to his downfall.

As a Lovecraft piece, though we see or at least have referenced such iconic elements of the mythos as the Necronomicon, Yog-Sothoth, and Cthulhu, this occurs mostly in passing: early 60s Easter eggs for Lovecraft fans. Past that, while Corman includes the portrait and the idea of the contemporary man’s life being taken over by that of his ancestor, most of the story is new for the film. We still do retain the horrific pit in the basement, containing something with an odd number of arms that never comes into focus (it also doesn’t seem to move, so much as the camera just jitters), but I don’t know that Corman exactly captured that unknowable awfulness so characteristic of the author, bringing an unfortunately anti-climactic note to some later sequences.

That may read as a criticism, but this is no more of a departure than the Poe films. Furthermore, I don’t know for sure, but I believe that in the early 60s, Lovecraft’s work was still only appreciated by a pretty fringe readership who didn’t need to be served to ensure commercial success (thus we should be happy with what we can get), and furthermore, while there are many elements here that feel ‘typical’ of a kind of old fashioned horror flick (fog, scraggly trees, creaking gates, secret passageways in an ancient castle, etc.), it also includes a surprising amount of genuine weirdness, much of which (in Lovecraftian fashion) goes unexplained. We are never told how to interpret the blurry glowing thing in the basement; the notion of the town haunted by its own deformity (admittedly, ‘problematic’ (or just plain offensive) from a modern perspective regarding disability) feels specific (though it’s closer to “The Shadow over Innsmouth” than “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”); and the above mentioned reference to Lovecraftian mythos isn’t explicated, leaving an unfamiliar audience possibly scratching their heads about just what is being summoned (though as I’ve mentioned before, I love how this material offers something so other, dangerous, and horrific without recourse to a Christian notion of the “infernal” – Curwen is not a “Satanist” and a cross would do no one any good).

I mentioned that the blurry thing doesn’t move, and I think one weakness of the film is a lack of creative solutions for presenting (or even just effectively implying) this mysterious horror. Clearly Corman couldn’t produce the kinds of wild practical effects available to Stuart Gordon (last week’s From Beyond is really goopy). However, he did have one special effect that can’t be matched, and that is Vincent Price himself. As with Gordon’s film, Lovecraft’s peculiar style best reveals itself not in fantastical visuals, but in the acting. And the qualities Price could bring to the film were both specific to him and essential.

Obviously, he could chew the scenery, and he’s given the opportunity to do so here once or twice, but I don’t think that’s where his talent really lay. Rather, it was in the nuance. So consistently does he take a line that could be big and make it small, so often does he surprise me with a tiny, sudden shift in tone, reacting to something from without or within (a small sound, a passing thought, a toothache – we don’t always see what it is, but the reaction is so alive and specific – he never traded in bombastic generalities). There is a standout moment when Ward first sees the cursed portrait of his grandfather and in the span of a couple of seconds, so much passes across his face: shock, fascination, fear – there is some unheard first contact from beyond the grave, it revolts him, and then he shakes it all off, is a bit embarrassed or puzzled, recovers with a distant smile, reassures his concerned wife, and they move on. It could have been two minutes of melodramatic voiceover, but instead, it’s about 2 seconds of face acting, or less. It is all bigger than life, true – and this is necessary in order to do justice to the source, but it is also so human, so rich; no matter how dialed up the performance, he never tipped over into artificiality, never lost his grounding. The fact that this man never won an Oscar is just proof of how meaningless such awards are. He was a national treasure.

On one level, we see clear differences between his portrayals of Ward and Curwen, the former an affable, friendly, warm, and loving man, and the latter a fiend, but there is more. Price often brings a softness to Curwen’s villainy that makes it all the more chilling. And it’s not just a quiet intensity as some might do (an effective but possibly obvious affect), but rather, it’s often gentle, even tender. This particular monster is not lacking in human feeling and sensitivity, even if he really is just the worst (subjecting the mesmerized women of Arkham to forced impregnation by otherworldly monsters, assaulting Ward’s wife, and you know, possibly trying to destroy the world). In each moment, I feel Vincent Price makes the most interesting choice, and no matter how repugnant the character, he is never less than magnetic to watch. These qualities are why we still know his work today, and this film couldn’t function without him. I understand some had wanted a younger actor (which would have better matched the story), but Corman was right to stick to his guns and keep Price in the role.

So that is The Haunted Palace. Not the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, sure, but certainly an old fashioned good time, totally itself, and enriched beyond measure by Price’s singular talents. October’s just around the corner – maybe find a rainy afternoon and give it a watch.

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Before signing off today, this is the second anniversary of starting this blog and I just wanted to mark the occasion. I think it’s been a good year and there’s much that I’m proud of.

Basic numbers: I wrote about 130,000 words in 39 posts (just a bit shorter than “The Shining”). I added 58 movie reviews and one book review (I have to read more horror – I know). I did some memoiring in sharing a horror themed holiday I had last year, detailing a Halloween performance of the Cabaret I work with, and reconstructing my personal history with the horror genre. I finally put down in words an analysis of King’s and Kubrick’s respective Shinings that I’ve had rolling around in my head for years. In doing some surface level research for a small performance, I roughed out some thoughts on 50s-teensploitation-as-horror. And I also pinned down a few ideas about sleaze, exploitation, camp, and campiness that have been scratching at the corners of my mind for a while. Along the way, I’ve given myself license to devote thought, energy, and care to consideration of horror films new and old, mainstream and more obscure, that give me pleasure. In a life full of many responsibilities, this time is a gift I give myself – I hope its result is interesting, edifying, humorous, or in some other way valuable for you, dear reader.

Though the blog has never taken on a particularly interactive quality, google analytics tells me more people are coming (mostly for the now five posts on the Lesbian Vampire subgenre – what can I say, people love lesbian vampires), so if you are newly here, welcome to my blog. And if you visit periodically, thank you so much for coming back. We may not communicate directly (though I cordially invite you to leave a comment – it’s always exciting to get one that isn’t from Russian spambots advertising porn and casino links), but I’m glad to know you’re out there. Though I mainly write for my own satisfaction, somehow it wouldn’t be satisfying enough to do it every week (or two, or three – keeping deadlines is tough) if you weren’t looking at it. Hope you keep coming back!

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.

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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.

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.

Bad Theatre but a Bloody Good Film

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So not long ago, I had the pleasure of bumping into this Vincent Price vehicle for the first time. His oeuvre has always been a bit of a blind spot for me, but the idea of this one pulled me in, and I’m glad it did.

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Reportedly Vincent Price’s favorite role, Douglas Hickox and Anthony Greville-Bell’s horror-comedy is a deliciously campy tale of theatrical revenge.  Everything about it is fully over the top and entirely tongue in cheek.  What it lacks in narrative suspense, it makes up for in magnificent melodrama.  It may not offer any scares and the plot may be paper thin, but the Shakespearean murders, the weirdness of its characters, the confidence and style of its filming, and Price making such a meal of the scenery at every turn makes it a vastly enjoyable watch.

At heart, this is a very simple revenge scenario.  Shakespearean actor, Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price, obviously having the time of his life), having been spurned by a circle of London critics and denied a coveted award, first dramatically commits suicide (in true theatrical fashion, performing Hamlet’s To be or not to be soliloquy on the parapet outside the critics’ party, as they mock him and carry on drinking within, before jumping into the Thames to drown), is then found and nursed back to health by a band of ‘meths’ (purple tinted denatured alcohol) drinking tramps whom he soon comes to command, and finally, thought dead, sets about murdering each and every one of the critics in a re-creation of a Shakespearean death scene.  This is all carried out with the assistance of his ensemble, ‘the meths drinkers,’ and his devoted daughter/supporting actor/makeup and special effects artist, Edwina (Diana Rigg).

One is stabbed to death by a crowd ala Julius Ceaser. The next is speared and dragged behind a horse as in Troilus and Cressida. A wife wakes next to her decapitated husband, which occurs in Cymbeline. The ending of The Merchant of Venice is improved to ensure the gouging of a pound of flesh, in this case, the heart (after shaving off a few ounces that had been taken in error). There’s a drowning in a cask of wine from Richard III. A jealous critic is driven to murder his wife in the style of Othello (it is presumed that, being elderly, he will die in prison). A woman is burned/electrocuted to death in a hair dryer in representation of Joan of Arc in Henry VI, part I. One critic is fed his beloved dogs (whom he refers to as his babies) in a pie as is done to Tamora in Titus Andronicus. Finally, the last one, having survived a duel out of Romeo and Juliet (which partially takes place on trampolines!!!) almost has his eyes gouged out, the fate of Gloucester from King Lear. Unfortunately, he is spared. The horror, the horror.

In the end, The Police interrupt the final murder and Edwina is killed.  The theatre burning around him, Edward climbs to the top of the building, carrying his dead daughter, and finally leaps to his death, this time, successfully.  The final critic survives to insult more unbalanced theatrical maniacs and the world returns to a semblance of normality.

The above-listed reckoning of murder and mayhem cannot do justice to the infectious joy of this film.  From the extravagant characters that Edward and Edwina portray, such as the flaming hairdresser who leaves his client smoking, or the ridiculous faux-French-poodle-pie serving cooking show host, to the utter weirdness embodied by the largely physical performance of the increasingly inebriated and insane ‘meths drinkers’, to the ostentatious staging of each kill, Theatre of Blood delights in excess. 

There is, of course, much ado about Edward’s performances.  We hear from the various critics how overbaked they were, and from what we see, it’s easy to believe.  Before each kill, he recites some appropriate bit of oratory from the referenced play.  While there is a nigh sensual pleasure in every syllable, it hardly illuminates the text (reportedly, Vincent Price felt constrained by his career in Horror and had always wanted to play Shakespeare). We also hear from one critic, about to die, that Edward’s productions were always obvious and totally lacking in originality.  That, however, is not reflected in what we are shown. 

It would appear that Edward, blinded by ego, had been pursuing the wrong career all along.  He was not the greatest actor of the London stage and the theatre he was responsible for may indeed have been pedestrian and hackneyed.  However, his murdering is exemplary. It is in carnage that his true talent lies.  And, towards that noble end, he repurposes all the tools of his previous trade.  He orchestrates the action of a cast of players, he undertakes an extensive degree of stagecraft, and he still plays parts, and wrings from each, every last sanguinary drop.  At the end, this tragic figure, this creator whose ability could never match his ambition, finally begins to thrive artistically. But in true tragic fashion, having discovered his true strength, his artistic calling, it ultimately leads to his downfall (quite literally, from the roof of a burning theatre).

If there is a weakness here, it is in the fact that the film occasionally wears the face of a crime procedural as the critics and police try to determine who is carrying out these wild crimes.  At the same time, this information is never withheld from the audience, and this creates a kind of lack of tension as we are witness to a mystery that isn’t.  But by the same token, there is some pleasure in watching them squirm.  Also, it is disappointing that the final reviewer escapes with his eyes.  I mean, Edward puts so much work into the set up and therefore, as the real pleasure of the movie is watching him carry out his revenge, the escape of this final boy is more a frustration than a relief.  But, in this, we underline Edward’s tragedy. He had transitioned into a bold new art form where he was at the height of his craft, but he will only be remembered as a failed actor and a madman.

Credit must also be given to Diana Rigg in the role of Edwina. As does her father, she is constantly in one disguise or another and while he is a well-aged ham, pushing every characterization over the precipice of believability (but with such verve and glory!), she mostly disappears into each role, all the while, helping to lead Scotland Yard on a merry chase.  The only character in which she is rather obvious is Edward’s male assistant, a scruffy hippy, leading the denatured alcohol soaked supporting players. It’s a late reveal that it was her all along, but it was also obvious from the first.  But it really doesn’t matter.  She’s great.  He’s great.  The kills are absurdly baroque, and the film as a whole feels like an act of exultation.

Neither the writer nor the director did anything else in the genre, and to be fair, the film never really terrifies, disgusts, or horrifies, though it does serve up a degree of blood and gore. But it is genuinely funny and infectious in its enthusiasm for its characters and the actors who play them, the inherent histrionics of the bard, the delight of a well-staged and filmed murder set piece, and the absolute, shameless grandeur of overkill. Bravo.