vincent price

Tres cines de la CDMX

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I recently enjoyed a weeklong vacation in Mexico City with my family, my first time traveling abroad. It was an indulgent trip that mostly consisted of visiting art museums, shopping for vintage clothes, and eating piles of delicious food. Those may not sound like especially strenuous activities, but they did require long hours strolling in the sunshine, which meant a lot of afternoon downtime for my fellow travelers to recover with a traditional siesta. While everyone else smartly took the opportunity to nap between major-event excursions to the lucha libre show or to Diego Rivera’s studio, I instead ventured out of our apartment on solo adventures to survey the local cinema scene. In total, I visited three of CDMX’s local theaters that week for three unique moviegoing experiences. The films I saw were English-language productions subtitled in Spanish, so the only language barrier was figuring out how to order tickets without totally embarrassing myself; I like to think I failed admirably. Here’s a quick recap of the titles & venues I was able to squeeze into the trip.

Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus (2025) @ Cine Tonalá

The one hip English-language film that screened at every indie CDMX cinema the week I happened to visit was the portrait-of-an-artist documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus. Like most audiences, I was previously only aware of its titular one-hit-wonder through her association with Jonathan Demme soundtracks. It turns out that was for a very obvious reason: racism. After running through about a dozen or so Q Lazzarus in the usual style of more famous artists’ docs, a title card in this new career recap reveals that she’s never had an official record release besides her contributions to movie soundtracks, because contemporary producers decided she was too “difficult to market.” It dropped my jaw. As a rise-to-near-fame story, Goodbye Horses gets intensely friendly & intimate with Q herself as she gets to know documentarian Eva Aridjis on a personal level. The most incredible part of her story, really, is the happenstance of meeting the two directors who’ve popularized her music through cinema—Aridjis & Demme—by picking them up as a cabbie working the streets of NYC, decades apart. For his part, Demme made an all-time classic out of “Goodbye Horses” by placing it in two separate films (Married to the Mob and, more infamously, Silence of the Lambs). Aridjis’s contribution is no less significant, though, since her new documentary includes a 21-track collection of Q Lazzarus songs that have been previously left unpublished.

Just as I knew little of Q Lazzarus’s personal or professional life before watching this new documentary, I also had no idea the documentary itself existed until I traveled to Mexico City, where it was playing relatively wide (partially because it’s director Eva Aridjis’s home town). That widespread distribution gave me plenty of options for cinemas to visit, and I settled on Cine Tonalá in the La Roma neighborhood. The single-screen theater is attached to a proudly laidback cocktail bar & performance venue, functioning as a multi-purpose arts space rather than a popcorn-shoveling corporate multiplex. Its closest local equivalent in New Orleans would be The Broad Theater, except with steeper incline seating and more lounging-around space in the lobby. It’s the kind of cozy spot with thoughtful programming that I would visit every week if I lived in the neighborhood (speaking from experience with The Broad).

The Haunted Palace (1963) @ Cineteca Nacional

The Cineteca Nacional museum in the Coyoacán neighborhood is anything but laidback. Built in the 1970s as a temple to celebrate & preserve the artform, it’s an impressively large & lively venue that was swarmed with visitors on the Saturday evening when I dropped by to see 1963’s The Haunted Palace. The 12-screen cinema was showing an eclectic mix of both repertory titles (including selections from Hayao Miyazaki & Agnieszka Holland) and new releases (including Goodbye Horses), but its public cinema is only one facet of the sprawling facility. The massive complex had a college campus feel, complete with museum exhibitions, appointment-only archives, multiple cafés & vendors, an outdoor market, and a quad area where young cineastes were chilling & chatting. I arrived at least a half-hour early, which allowed me enough time to go DVD shopping, picking up a copy of the Mexican horror staple El Vampiro. If I ever return, I’ll make sure to arrive a half-day early instead, since there was plenty more to explore elsewhere on-site.

Among the few repertory titles being offered that week, I of course went for the one directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, since that’s squarely in my comfort zone. The Haunted Palace is an odd outlier in the Corman-Poe cycle that actor-director duo is best known for, since it only recites a few lines from an Edgar Allan Poe poem and mostly pulls its inspiration from Lovecraft instead. It’s also out of step with the typical payoffs of a classic Roger Corman creature feature, since its central monster doesn’t move an inch and Lon Chaney Jr. gets all of the best jump scares in a supporting role just by . . . hanging around. It’s only a pleasure for audiences who enjoy lounging in spooky castles and fog-machined graveyards while flipping through pages of the Necronomicon (or listening to its Vincent Price audiobook version), not in a rush to get anywhere. That is to say that I very much enjoyed seeing it screened big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd, even if there are far better titles in the Corman-Poe cycle that would’ve been a better use of the time & space (primarily, The Masque of the Red Death). In local terms, the experience was comparable to The Prytania’s recent afternoon screening of The Fall of the House of Usher, except the venue was a half-century newer and the audience was much fuller.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) @ Cinemex

If Cine Tonalá is the Mexico City equivalent of The Broad and Cineteca Nacional is the Mexico City equivalent of The Prytania, then Cinemex is the local equivalent of an AMC palace. I must’ve passed by a half-dozen locations of the corporate franchise while exploring different parts of the city, so it was hilarious that the one located closest to our apartment was called Casa de Arte, as if it were an independent arthouse. It’s the same way that AMC arbitrarily labels some of its offerings as “Artisan Films” even though they’re wide-release, major-studio productions with massive budgets (no offense meant to the artistry behind AMC Artisan titles like Sinners & The Phoenician Scheme). Cinemex does not offer a one-of-a-kind arthouse experience. It offers the same-as-it-is-everywhere multiplex experience, which is a different flavor that sometimes tastes just as good. It’s about as artisan as a cup of Coca-Cola.

It was in that downtown multiplex that I caught the latest (and possibly last) installment in the Misión: Imposible franchise, The Final Reckoning. Perhaps due to the lack of enthusiasm with the previous entry in that franchise, Dead Reckoning, the three-hour epic does a lot of sweaty scrambling to connect its story to the larger, decades-spanning Mission: Impossible narrative arc before then settling into the tension of two lengthy Tom Cruise stunts: one in which he raids a sinking submarine and one in which he pilots an upside-down airplane with his foot. The resulting picture is one hour of aggressively incomprehensible crosscutting & flashbacks followed by two hours of old-school movie magic. I would say that it’s the kind of classic movie magic that you can only find in Hollywood, except the movie was mostly shot in England and I personally watched in it Mexico. There really isn’t anything especially recommendable about it beyond the excuse it offers to escape the summer sun for a few hours with a lapful of overpriced junk food, which is the only reason anyone would visit an AMC or a Cinemex anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

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In my review of The Spiral Staircase, I mentioned Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers, and that I expected I would soon be getting to #61 on that list, Roger Corman’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” It is the only film from Corman to make the list, and although I am reviewing it last in my Corman/Poe series of reviews, it’s notable that this was only the second of these adaptations, following House of Usher by about a year. It was itself followed by Premature Burial, and having viewed those out of order, I made a joke in my Usher review that it and Burial follow a fairly similar and specific sequence of events. I’m glad I didn’t watch them in release order, because I might have given up on Burial, given that Pendulum follows almost the exact same stations of the plot. 

As the film opens, a man approaches a seaside castle (different from Usher and Burial in that the character does not approach the lead’s home from across a foggy moor), knocks upon the door and demands to see the home’s owner, and is initially rebuffed by the servant who answers the door, but is then allowed in to the home by the sister of Vincent Price’s (and in the case of Burial, Ray Milland’s) character. It’s genuinely shocking that so little effort was made to differentiate this from its immediate predecessor, and that the film that immediately followed would adhere so closely to the same structure. Here, our hero is Francis Barnard (John Kerr), who has come to see the widower of his late sister Elizabeth (Barbara Steele). He is allowed entry by his sister-in-law, the Donna Catherine Medina (Luana Anders), who tells him that her brother Don Nicholas (Price) is resting, but allows him inside nonetheless. Barnard asks to see his sister’s grave, but Catherine tells him that she is not buried in some churchyard and is instead interred in the crypts beneath the castle; as she escorts him to Elizabeth’s resting place, the two pass another room in the catacombs from which a great racket emerges. Nicholas exits the door and tells Barnard that it conceals a contraption, the ceaseless operation of which he is responsible for. 

Although the Medinas are reticent to reveal every detail of Elizabeth’s death, the arrival of family friend Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) leads him to drop some information that prompts Barnard to demand explanation. As it turns out, although theirs was a good and loving marriage, Nicholas’s beloved bride was ultimately affected by the evil that is present in the Medina estate, as Nicholas and Catherine’s father, Sebastian (also Price) was a member of the Spanish Inquisition. An untold number of people were tortured and killed in the castle’s catacombs, where Sebastian’s implements of torture remain. Apparently, the sleepwalking Elizabeth made her way to this chamber and somehow got herself stuck in an iron maiden, and when she awoke there, she died of heart failure from the fright of it all. Of course, Nicholas himself fears that Elizabeth was not truly dead when she was buried (again, just as in Usher and Burial), despite Dr. Leon’s willingness to stake his reputation on his confirmation of her death, and that her spirit haunts the castle as a result. There are spooky things about, after all. Elizabeth would play the harpsichord nightly for her husband, and when the instrument is heard late at night and one of her rings found atop it despite the apparent absence of any people or even a way in or out of the room, it raises questions. A kind of explanation is found when Barnard discovers a series of secret passageways that connect locked rooms to Nicholas’s own chambers, with Nicholas himself fearing that he may be losing his mind and performing as Elizabeth. 

This one is pretty fun, and it probably is the best thriller of Corman’s Poe cycle. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers as much as I can for these but I don’t seem to be able to find a way to talk “around” another of the recurring elements here, so I’ll just have to come right out with it: it’s very strange how often the resolution to the apparent mystery is that Vincent Price’s character’s wife isn’t as in love with him as he was with her, and also that reports of her death are greatly exaggerated. As in The Raven, we’re never given any reason to think that Elizabeth here, Lenore there, or Emily in Burial are anything other than the loving, adoring spouses that they appear to be, until the sudden revelation that all of the gaslighting being performed against the lead is being done by his wife. And it’s Hazel Court two of those times! (She also appeared in Masque of the Red Death, but her villainous nature is on display from her first moment on screen therein.) It stands to reason that making eight of these movies in four years would be bound to lead to some recycling of plots, especially given that the specific Poe works being “adapted” also have large Venn diagram overlaps in their narratives, but viewing this one as the finale in an attempt to save the best for last ends up doing it a disservice. It’s not a bad movie, but it feels repetitive, which isn’t fair to hold against Pendulum because it was only the second one of these that Corman made and is thus responsible for setting the standard which was copied, not vice versa. But hey, at least the Medina castle doesn’t get burned to the ground at the end.

One of the recurring elements present here that really works is the use of the oversaturated nightmare sequence, although here it’s more of an oversaturated flashback. As Nicholas reveals the details of the halcyon days that he and Elizabeth had together, everything is bathed in greens and blues, which turn to purple when Elizabeth “takes ill.” There’s also a fun iris-in transition to this flashback, which happens again when Catherine reveals to Barnard that Nicholas actually bore witness to the murder of his mother and uncle Bartolome at the hands of their father, who discovered his wife and brother were adulterers. In this sequence, the saturation color turns to a bloody, angry red, and it works remarkably well. (For those like me whom I would lovingly refer to as “Belle & Sebastian-pilled,” think of it as going from the cover of The Boy With the Arab Strap to Write About Love to If You’re Feeling Sinister.) Of course, this all comes back around when it’s revealed just who’s behind everything, only for Nicholas to fall backward down some stairs in fright at the sudden reappearance of Elizabeth and, concussed (or more), descends into the belief that he is Sebastian and that Elizabeth and her lover are the late Mrs. Medina and Bartolome and exacts his revenge accordingly, not entirely unlike Dexter Ward being overtaken by the spirit of his ancestor in The Haunted Palace. 

Another notable element of these, now having seen all of them, is how variably effective they work as mystery thrillers. Other than Masque with its large ensemble, the cast of all of these films has been relatively small, in line with Corman’s notoriously spendthrift nature. As a result, the extremely limited number of characters can curtail the film’s ability to provide sufficient red herrings or otherwise conceal the identity of the film’s villain or villains. Pendulum certainly does the best job of keeping one guessing as to what’s really happening in the stately mansion in which all the events occur, playing things close enough to the vest that the reveal of Elizabeth’s co-conspirator feels satisfying but not obvious. That’s probably why Brode selected this one for inclusion in Edge of Your Seat, even though I wouldn’t call this the best of the Corman-Poe cycle overall. In his “also recommended” section, however, I found that he agreed with me overall, writing “Among the other Poe adaptations, by far the best two are The Masque of the Red Death […] and Tomb of Ligeia,” the latter of which he calls “an intelligent, restrained suspense tale.” 

You may be asking yourself where the pendulum is in all of this, or the pit, for that matter. For that, my friend, you will have to watch for yourself.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Raven (1963)

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Fair warning: The friend with whom I have been watching these Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work hated this one. I pointed out that the presence of Peter Lorre here should have been an early indication that this was going to be a more comedic outing, like Tales of Terror, but this was still a disappointment to him even with that qualification. During the viewing this was referred to as a “Scooby Doo ass movie” and the final verdict from my friend was “I like Looney Tunes; I don’t like Scooby-Doo.” Take from that what you will, and keep it in mind for your viewing decision. 

This movie is so much fun. From the film’s opening moments, in which Vincent Price’s dulcet tones recite Poe’s “The Raven” while we see him fiddling his fingers around in the air and drawing a neon bird in the room with magic, I was enraptured. Within moments, a raven appears at his window and taps at it; upon being let in, said bird begins talking with Peter Lorre’s voice, identifying himself as a fellow sorcerer and demanding assistance with being returned to human form. Once he’s back in his true body (after an interlude in which insufficient potion ingredients rendered him back into Lorre-form, but with bird wings), he introduces himself as Dr. Adolphus Bedlo, while Price’s character is revealed to be called Dr. Erasmus Craven. Bedlo recognizes the name and identifies Craven as the son of the late leader of the wizard order and asks him why he has never sought to take his father’s place, instead allowing the organization to be controlled by the late elder Craven’s lifelong enemy Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff). Craven demurs, saying that since he lost his wife, he’d really rather stay home near her body and do little magic tricks rather than any powerful sorcery. Upon viewing her portrait, Bedlo swears he has seen the late Lenore that very night at Scarabus’s castle. Craven’s daughter Estelle (Olive Sturgess)—who is notably stated to have been the daughter of Craven’s unnamed first wife, not Lenore—demands that she be allowed to accompany them, although Craven only relents when his coachman becomes enchanted and must remain behind. This lack of someone to drive the coach is resolved by the sudden appearance of Bedlo’s son Rexford (Jack Nicholson!), who takes the quartet to Scarabus’s castle. What secrets lie there in wait? 

This is another Corman-Poe feature penned by Richard Matheson, and was apparently based on his desire to do a full comedy feature following how much fun it was to put Lorre and Price together in the “Black Cat” section of Tales of Terror. As you can tell from the preface above, my friend and viewing companion did not find this to be a successful endeavor, while I can say that it totally worked for me. Price and Lorre are once again a terrific double act, and they ham it up here for much of the first half. The audience that will enjoy watching Craven attempt to dress Bedlo in some of his clothes so that they can go and face off against Scarabus may be small, but I’m in it; Lorre’s clear smaller stature trying to pull up the sleeves and hem of clothes designed to fit Price (or even exaggerated from there) is very funny, and it doesn’t hurt that the two of them end the scene wearing the most ridiculous hats one could imagine. In fact, by the time that the quartet of Craven and daughter, Bedlo, and Rexford arrive at Scarabus’s castle, all four of them are wearing extremely stupid headgear, and I got a real kick out of that. 

Where most Poe heads may find greatest displeasure in this one is in just how far it strays from the source material. All of these do, really, but most of them at least maintain some kind of atmosphere and are relatively respectful to the intent of the stories from which they draw their origins; Raven is arguably disrespectful in how it treats Lenore. In a plot that recurs from Pit and the Pendulum, it turns out that Lenore isn’t dead; she simply faked her death in order to move in with Scarabus and learn “greater magic” from him. One can only assume that Lenore initially got together with Craven expecting that he would assume his place at the head of the wizard guild, and when he didn’t, she glommed onto his father’s successor instead, making her a philosopher’s stone-digger from the outset. This becomes more clear at the end when Scarabus’s apparent death leads her to immediately claim that she was with him because she was bewitched and that his death has released her from his thrall, but luckily no one buys it. “The Raven” is a poem that is so deeply about anguish, longing, and grief, one can’t help but find that this subversion of the lost Lenore, whose representation of this feeling is so foundational to western literature that there’s a whole TV Trope about it, to be moderately controversial. 

The nature of this film makes it one that provides little opportunity for criticism. We’ve said it before here, in both reviews and on the podcast, that sometimes a comedy film can be the hardest to review because one simply finds themself recapitulating and restating the jokes within the film that one found funny. With Tales of Terror, that comedy was in the prolonged middle segment and bracketed by more self-serious fare, so there was still much to discuss. Here, this one is a straight comedy all the way through. Where it fails is in its insistence on the insertion of the magician’s offspring. Estelle has little to do here, and although it makes sense that it would be established that Lenore was merely her stepmother so that she’s not as heartbroken as her father is, one could argue that making Lenore her mother might have given the film something more in the way of emotional stakes. Her presence is really only justified in the end so that a threat against her safety is used to attempt to extort Craven into giving up his magical secrets. In turn, Rexford is really only an appendage to her story, padding out the runtime with a sequence in which he’s driving the coach from Craven’s to Scarabus’s and becomes apparently possessed by some wild force before he regains his composure. 

I’d also say that Karloff is underused here. He doesn’t appear until halfway through the film, but when he does, he’s great. His feigned friendliness in his greeting of Craven and his waving away of Bedlo’s charges as being the result of a social visit that turned sour because of the latter’s excessive drinking are fun, but one wishes that he might have been present a bit earlier in the runtime. He is used to great comedic effect in the film’s finale, however, as Craven and Scarabus get into a wizard’s duel that presages wuxia wizard battles in the vein of Buddha’s Palm (in fact, there are some special effects that appear to have been used part and parcel in Buddha’s Palm). It’s magnificent, and even my friend who hated the movie couldn’t help but enjoy himself as Price and Karloff flit around on hovering chairs and turn magic missiles into harmless plastic bats, etc. If that’s all that you’re interested in, you can find that in isolation on YouTube, but I would recommend giving this one a full watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Haunted Palace (1963)

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Oooh boy, this one is a bit of a clunker. Although The Haunted Palace is considered the sixth of Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, it’s not really; it takes its title from a Poe poem that was later incorporated into “The Fall of the House of Usher” but draws its narrative from an H.P. Lovecraft novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. If anything, the misspelling of Poe’s middle name as “Allen” in the credits for this one tells you just how far we’re straying afield for these, and although this was followed in production order by The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia, if you were to tell me that this was the last of these Poe flicks, I would believe it, because it feels like it’s really running on fumes. As always, when it does manage to tread water, it’s being buoyed aloft by the performance of Vincent Price, and he also has Lon Chaney Jr. on site to help (not that they are able to save it). 

In 1760s New England—Arkham, Massachusetts, to be precise—several men in the town notice a young, apparently bewitched woman making her way to a mansion on an elevated cliffside that is known as the home of Joseph Curwen (Price), alleged warlock. Ezra Weeden (Leo Gordon) leads a mob of villagers with pitchforks and torches to Curwen’s palatial home, among them Benjamin West (John Dierkes), Gideon Leach (Guy Wilkerson), and Micah Smith (Elisha Cook, whom you may recall as a sympathetic lowlife in The Big Sleep or one of the creepy neighbors in Rosemary’s Baby). The men force Curwen from his home and burn him alive in front of his mistress Hester (Cathie Merchant), but with his dying breath he curses them and their descendants. Precisely 110 years later, Charles Dexter Ward (Price again) appears in Arkham with his wife, Anne (Debra Paget in her final film role, with her penultimate role having been Mrs. Valdemar in Tales of Terror), having inherited the home of Curwen, who was his ancestor. The people of the town (all of whom are played by the same actors as in the prologue) are unfriendly and refuse to help him find it, other than Dr. Willet (Frank Maxwell), who becomes the only friend that the Wards have in town. Once they let themselves into the mansion, they are greeted by the caretaker, Simon (Chaney), who shows them a portrait of Curwen and notes the resemblance between the two men despite the generations that separate them. Although they are prepared to leave, Simon encourages them to stay; the longer that they remain, the more the spirit of Curwen attempts to possess the body of his distant progeny. 

This one clocks in at only 87 minutes, but it feels a lot longer than the others. Part of that is that this one has a repetition problem; in order to demonstrate that they house has a hold over Ward, he has to try and leave several times before, at the last moment, being unable to force himself to go, or delayed by Simon juuuust long enough for Curwen to regain control. The film treads water here, and too much of the film passes without much happening. Although I’ve joked about it in every one of these reviews so far, I found myself missing the mid-film nightmare sequence that every other one of these that I’ve seen has, because that would have broken things up a bit in the middle. For most of the second act, the only scene with any life in it is one in which Ward and Anne go into town and find themselves surrounded by several of Arkham’s mutant residents, stated to be the result of Curwen’s “collaborations” between something housed in the catacombs beneath the house and the poor women of Arkham. 

We do get to see this Cthulhu monster, represented by a not-quite-humanoid green dummy with four arms. I assume it’s a dummy, anyway, since we never see it move. Instead, it’s given the appearance of motion by passing warped glass over the lens. It’s not the worst idea of how to represent the madness of seeing but not comprehending, and it almost works. The make-up effects to represent the maladies of the mutant descendants, which Curwen was breeding in an attempt to allow the Elder Gods entry back into our world, ranges from passable to comical, and one gets the impression that Corman simply got a really good deal on some almost-expired foam latex and wanted to use it quickly. There’s no one to root for, as the descendants of the eighteenth century mob are all mean drunks, and although they have good reason to fear Curwen’s potential rebirth, when we find one of them has his mutated son locked in the attic like Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre, our sympathies lie with the prisoner, not his warden/father. Debra Paget is another in a long line of Corman/Poe ladies who’s just kind of there, serving as witness to the proceedings just like Madeline in Usher, Kate in Premature Burial, Francesca in Masque, and Rowena (although she’s a more active participant) in Tomb of Ligeia. There are make-up effects in use on Chaney from the start and intermittently with Price that indicate Simon has long since been completely subsumed by his Curwen-accomplice ancestor and that show when Ward is being possessed by Curwen. The performances between the two are notably distinct, so that this is a necessity to show when Curwen is “active” but pretending to be Ward, and it’s fine enough. 

There’s simply nothing to get too excited about here, and it feels like a half-hearted effort. The deaths of the mob’s descendants in the 19th Century “present” are fine enough as horror moments—Weeden is killed when his monster son is released from the attic and seeks vengeance, Smith is burned alive just as Curwen was—but this one lacks the things from some of the others that make them transcend their American International Pictures roots. The palace is, of course, burned down at the end, and we don’t even get a shot of the fire from the matte painting town like we have in others. Notably, this one also ends on an almost identical surprise ending freeze frame as X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, which premiered only three weeks later, so it might be that Corman was spreading himself a bit thin in the summer of 1963. Since it isn’t even a Poe movie, even the completists amongst the readership can be assured that they can skip over this one without missing anything of note. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

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As I noted in my Tales of Terror review, I’ve been skipping around in these Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe features based on what I can get my hands on most immediately at any given time. I didn’t have very high hopes for The Tomb of Ligeia, as it’s not a title that I think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about, and its position as the Corman/Poe flick that was the least financially successful (and which thus was the last of these to be made) didn’t bode well. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to see that despite being the last trip to this particular well, the cast and crew clearly still had the juice. 

Verden Fell (Vincent Price) lives alone, save for a single servant, in the attached vicarage of a dilapidated and overgrown abbey. Years before, Fell insisted that his late wife Ligeia be laid to rest on the abbey’s grounds, despite the fact that the priest claims that interring Ligeia among the Christian dead is an insult to them and that her very presence beneath the soil will deconsecrate the holy ground. This seems to have been the case, and Fell lives a solitary life alone amidst a be-cobwebbed rectory, surrounded by recreations of Egyptian archaeological finds and tomb sculptures. That is, until the day that his brooding is interrupted by the sudden arrival of the beautiful Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd), the daughter of a neighboring lord, who became separated from her father’s fox hunt when she was distracted by the abbey. Unfortunately, the sudden appearance of Fell from behind a tree spooks her horse, landing her in a bed of asphodels that grow atop Ligeia’s grave. Despite seemingly being engaged to lifetime friend Christopher Gough (John Westbrook), Rowena is immediately drawn to Fell, and begins seeking him out, slowly drawing him out of his protracted mourning until the two finally wed. When they return from their honeymoon, they find that Fell’s plan to sell the abbey and move on with his life with Rowena has hit a snag; it seems the abbey and the property are both in Ligeia’s name, and because the land straddles two counties, certification of her death fell between the cracks. Legally, Ligeia is still alive and is the owner of the abbey, but Fell is insistent that her body not be disinterred to confirm her death, as he cannot tolerate her tomb being disturbed. 

Now that they’re back at the abbey, Fell begins to behave strangely. Multiple nights, Rowena seeks him out (the two appear to be living in separate quarters since the validity of their marriage may also face legal scrutiny, with Ligeia’s lack of a death certificate potentially annulling their union), only to find his bed empty and Fell himself nowhere to be found. Throughout the film, there has been some implication that Ligeia’s spirit may inhabit a black cat that lurks around the property, as it has on separate occasions slashed Rowena’s face when she was flirting with Fell, lured Rowena into the belfry and then attempted to make her fall by ringing the bell, and generally behaved as if acting upon an unknown motive. At one point, Rowena awakens to find a dead fox in her bed, presumably brought there by the cat, as it had previously made off with her father’s slain fox in an earlier scene, and she finds a saucer of milk next to the bed as well. When she seeks Fell, she finds him on his balcony, with no real sense of where he is, seeming to indicate that he has some kind of sleepwalking issue. What’s really happening in that abbey? 

I didn’t expect to be expressing this, but Tomb of Ligeia is easily the equal of Masque of the Red Death. Whereas that film drew its production value from its elaborate sets and huge crowds of revellers, Corman knew what he had on his hands when he got the opportunity to film at Castle Acre Priory, some of the best preserved monastic ruins following the dissolution of most monasteries in the 1500s by Henry VIII. As a shooting location, this place lends Tomb of Ligeia an immediate sense of gravitas. There are no in-studio “moors” full of machined fog and spindly little trees here, but a real, tangible sense of something manmade being reclaimed by nature, something historical but decayed. Scenes take place at Ligeia’s graveside, dialogue scenes are shot dynamically as the camera follows participants walking the grounds with columns passing in the foreground, and one particularly lovely shot finds Christopher and Rowena dining outside, framed by one of the priory’s arches. It lends the whole proceeding a real air of class and distinction that is often lacking. The interior scenes are likewise a departure, as the main chamber of the rectory features a large stained glass window at the rear of the stage, which allows for several atmospheric shots that feature Rowena appearing behind a meditative Fell in the middle distance, the light from the window giving her the appearance of an otherworldly beauty. It’s top notch stuff. 

Screenwriter Robert Towne would go on to quite the career after this, winning an Oscar ten years later for Chinatown, being nominated again for Shampoo (with co-writer Warren Beatty), and co-writing both the John Grisham adaptation The Firm and the script for the first Mission: Impossible film. There’s a great economy of narrative in this one (which clocks in at a scant 81 minutes), and Towne, like other Poe adaptors under Corman’s direction before him, draws in elements from other short stories to give this one a little more punch. In the original story, titled simply “Ligeia,” we find ourselves receiving the story via narration from a typically unlikeable character. The unnamed man upon whom Fell was based was truly and deeply in love with his deceased wife and married his second wife, Rowena, apparently out of social obligation rather than any real interest. Our narrator is a self-confessed opium addict who barely tolerates his second wife, who herself is not terribly fond of him, and thinks her family foolish to have married her off to a kook who lives the way that he does. When she dies of some withering disease or other, he watches as she seems to struggle to revive herself. With each revival, she appears more and more to be Ligeia rather than Rowena, before his first wife appears to overtake his young bride entirely, with the last lines of the story being his horrified revelation of this change. Towne makes Fell much more likeable from the outset; he’s the platonic ideal of a Poe hero, longing for his lost love, but instead of having him resent or dislike Rowena, we get to see him change over time. When the two first meet, he’s cold and indifferent, clearly unpracticed in the maintenance of conversation, but as she refuses to leave him, there’s a kind of Beauty and the Beast story happening here wherein she gains his trust and ultimately wins his heart. 

Another major contributor to the success of this change is Shepherd, whose performance as Rowena is very strong. In most of these, the actresses who have appeared as the love interest (or leading lady) in these movies haven’t risen to the occasion. Myrna Fahey’s Madeline Usher in House of Usher had very little to do other than faint and try and act off of Mark Damon’s stiff and lifeless Philip and every single wife featured in Tales of Terror was completely forgettable, with only Hazel Court’s appearances as the treacherous duo of Emily in Premature Burial and Juliana in Masque of the Red Death being the strongest showings. Shepherd really demonstrates a lot of depth and subtlety here, which is not something that can be said about a lot of Corman productions. Notably, she plays Rowena as fully hot and heavy for this weird, gloomy neighbor from the moment that she meets him. It’s worth noting that Price’s Fell appears first in head-to-toe black, including top hat, coattails, and leather gloves, and wearing a pair of sunglasses that he attributes to a particular malady that renders sunlight unbearable; he’s a full on goth lord living in an abandoned church and Rowena is into it. I love that for her, and I appreciate her desire for this handsome, brooding widower as being something that makes him slowly defrost. If it weren’t for the machinations from beyond the grave, the two of them could really be happy together. 

That’s another point in Tomb’s favor; a lot of these end in death but don’t have a real sense of tragedy, while Tomb does. Of course, the film ends with the vicarage going down in flames (you didn’t think Corman would miss an opportunity to reuse that same burning house footage from Usher and which reappeared in Tales of Terror one last time, did you?), but it’s different. We’re not sad to see the titular House of Usher crumble to the ground, especially not when the last man standing is the aforementioned wooden Philip, and when Leonora rests at peace in her father’s arms in the “Morella” segment of Tales, we’re more relieved than anything else. In Tomb, Towne makes Fell so much more likeable and more pitiable that we’re actively rooting for him and Rowena to make it work, and that he ultimately dies as his house falls down around him, is a truly downbeat ending. Rowena’s survival is a nice change as well, but the film ends with her having been carried to safety and escaping in the carriage of Christopher, sending her off into a potential happy ending that makes the whole thing feel bleaker. 

Another Poe text from which Towne borrows is “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which was previously adapted in Tales of Terror. Specifically, the dubious science of mesmerism plays a major role here as it did in that original text and its adaptation. In Tomb, we learn that Ligeia was a mesmerist and that, on her deathbed, she bewitched Fell into never having another wife, which has fractured him so completely that he’s essentially two different people depending upon whether it’s day or night. Mesmerism comes into play early on when the film is still playing coy with just how much supernatural business is happening around the place, as the cat is still behaving suspiciously and Rowena, in a hypnotic trance, is able to recall a song that her mother sang to her as a child despite having no distinct memories of the woman. Still entranced, she then begins to recite Ligeia’s dying words, which she has no reason to know. It’s a bit of a cheat to explain Fell’s apparent split mind, but it works well enough as a plot device that I won’t complain. How can I when the text is also giving us other surprisingly subtle little bits? When Rowena and Fell first meet, as mentioned above, he’s clad in all black, while Rowena wears a bright red dress that reflects the color of the fox from the hunt she’s peeled away from. At the end of that scene, the hunted fox is presented and then disappears, with Fell saying that the cat must have made off with it, just as Fell himself has already captured the fox-colored Rowena. It’s not Tolstoy, but you don’t normally get that much to really sink your teeth into in these Corman pictures, and I really appreciated the sweat that went into this one. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Tales of Terror (1962)

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As I now find myself approaching the tipping point of having seen more than half of Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, at which point it only makes sense to see them all, right? And since I’m already watching them completely out of order (having watched the third, the seventh, the first, and now the fourth), why not just hack away at them in whatever order I happen to be able to get my hands on them? The next logical step after House of Usher would be to move on to The Pit and the Pendulum, but the video store didn’t have that one in stock when I swung by, so instead I picked up Tales of Terror, which is at some points quite good and at others fairly mediocre, averaging out fairly positively. The film comprises three segments that adapt four Poe short stories, opening with an adaptation of “Morella” and ending with an adaptation of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” with a mash-up of “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” in the middle. 

Tales of Terror opens on a beating heart, the camera’s eye approaching it as Vincent Price intones an introduction. A pastel image of a seaside manse fades into a matte painting of the same, with waves crashing upon the shore. It is to this place that the heroine of the piece arrives. Her name is Leonora (Maggie Field), and she has come to the home of her estranged father (Price) after spending her whole life, virtually since birth, not knowing him. At first her expressed desire to visit him once before she’s “out of [his] life forever” seems to mean that she’s tying up loose ends before marrying, but it eventually comes to light that she’s dying. Her father, who had sent his daughter away because of the dying wish of his wife Morella (Leona Gage), who died in the middle of a party that she attended by her own demand despite being too weak following a difficult childbirth. Leonora and her father bond over the fact that they are both fading away, and when she is murdered by her mother’s spectral spirit, Morella takes over her bodily, while Lenora appears in place of her mother’s corpse. Morella then strangles her terrified husband as the mansion catches fire (reusing footage from the destruction of the house in Usher) and the body swap reverses, with Leonora smiling peacefully in death knowing that her mother has been vanquished. 

Skipping ahead to the final segment, the adaptation of “Valdemar,” Price appears as the title character, who has invited family friend Dr. James (David Frankham) to visit the Valdemar home. Valdemar has a strong relationship with his wife Helene (Debra Paget), but his recent interest in the growing “science” of mesmerism has led him to invite a hypnotist named Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) as well. Valdemar expresses his wish to be placed under hypnosis at the moment of his death, so that some manner of “scientific” inquiry can be made about the potential of life within a lifeless man. His wish is fulfilled, and some months later, he’s now begging for Carmichael to release him from his undeath by ending the trance, but Carmichael’s designs on Helene mean that he refuses to do so unless she marries him. Dr. James attempts to force Carmichael to free Valdemar and Helene enters the fracas. When Carmichael attacks her as well, Valdemar’s corpse rises from his deathbed and kills the villain. Upon the moment of doing so, the hypnosis is released, and Valdemar instantly putrefies upon Carmichael’s prone body.

Both of these segments are fine. As noted in past reviews of other Corman/Poe ventures, Corman’s modus operandi was to pick a Poe story and then treat that as the third act of a screenplay, then craft the first two acts to lead into the adaptation of the original text. There’s a lot less room for that when you’re making an anthology of three short films with a total runtime of roughly ninety minutes. As such, there’s much less room for deviation here. Of the shorts, the adaptation of “Morella” strays the furthest from the original text; there, the primary focus of the story is on the unnamed narrator’s relationship with his wife, an infirm woman who teaches her husband all about her study of the philosophy of the mind, and that her hyperfixation on this was unsettling. She dies in childbirth and bears a daughter that the narrator never names, and whom he raises with a loving affection that he never had for his wife. She’s a strange child, however, preternaturally gifted and wise beyond her years in a way that discomfits the narrator. He never gives her a name, but upon the day of her christening, some compulsion drives him to speak the name “Morella” to the priest, causing the daughter to cry out “I am here” and then die in his arms. It’s not a story that readily lends itself to adaptation, and screenwriter Richard Matheson took the bare bones of it—mother died in childbirth, may possess said child in the moment of their death—and make it something that works better on the screen. That Price’s character has kept his dead wife’s corpse in a bedroom in the manor gives it a touch of the macabre, and having Leonora raised away from her father creates an opportunity for some character exploration between the two, and it works, even if it feels so “of a piece” with both Usher and Premature Burial as to feel derivative. It’s also helped by its brevity. 

The segment based upon “Valdemar” hews fairly closely to the source material, adding only a couple of characters to give the piece some breathing room. The original short story was narrated in the first person by the mesmerist, who is Valdemar’s friend, rather than the villainous Carmichael. In fact, the very format of the title “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and the way that names are redacted within it have led most critics to believe the piece to be a bit of a hoax on Poe’s part mocking the gullibility of the public. Matheson adds a wife and the family friend who is to be her suitor in her incoming widowhood (at Valdemar’s direction before he dies, mind you) so that there is some manner of conflict that the story’s epistolary “dispatch from the frontiers of science” form lacked. The make-up work done on Price to turn him into a corpse that’s failing to rot properly is very good, and it’s a moment of genuine shock when he rises and attacks the man who is forcing him to remain in an unpleasant state of undeath. The instant deterioration of the corpse as seven months of decomposition catch up to it is also a gruesomely fun image, as it appears that Rathbone has been covered in skeletal bones and peanut butter slime. 

Where this one really shines is in its “Black Cat” segment. A drunken character played by Peter Lorre comes home and harasses his wife, Annabel (Joyce Jameson), for some money that he can drink away at the tavern, in between berating her, calling her a liar, and complaining about her beloved cat. She claims there is no more and calls her husband Montresor, which will automatically sound familiar to anyone who has read “The Cask of Amontillado,” but which might be chalked up to being one of those Poe adaptation easter eggs. After all, the narrator of “The Black Cat” and his wife are both unnamed, yet here she is called Annabel, and when Dario Argento had to give the narrator a name in his adaptation, he came up with “Rod Usher.” (Perhaps in reference to Tales of Terror, the wife in Argento’s “Black Cat” adaptation was likewise given the name Annabel.) Unable to come up with a penny to get back to drinking, Montresor takes to the streets and begs for change, until he comes upon a meeting of wine retailers and sneaks in. The guest of honor at the little convention is Fortunato (Price), sealing that this will be a combination of the explicitly named source material and “Amontillado.” Fortunato’s claim to fame is that he is a perfect palate and can name any vintage, which Montresor mocks as he claims to be able to do the same, without any airs. This leads to a drinking contest in which Montresor, surprisingly, is able to go toe to toe with Fortunato when identifying estates, vineyards, and vintages (he can even tell when one bottle came from “the better slope”). 

Of course, as his ultimate goal is to get sloshed rather than prove himself, he succeeds, and Fortunato reluctantly escorts/supports him home. Annabel and Fortunato immediately hit it off, and he begins to see her while Montresor is out drinking, with him little realizing that the reason his wife suddenly has money to give him to go out drinking is because Fortunato is paying to get him out of the house. When this is made clear to him, he returns home and sees Fortunato departing, then he enters the house, where he confronts and kills his wife, then chains her body in an alcove in the crypts below the house. Later, he lures Fortunato there and likewise chains him up, then bricks up a wall to conceal their bodies (in “Cat,” the narrator cites as inspiration “the monks of the middle ages [who] are recorded to have walled up their victims,” while the narrator of “Amontillado” just gets to work). From there, the story plays out just as in “The Black Cat,” with Montresor content that no one will ever find his wife or Fortunato, whom he claims ran off together, until, while allowing the police to inspect the place, he arrogantly slaps the wall that he built and is greeted by the growl of the cat he errantly bricked up inside, causing the police to discover the makeshift tomb. 

This one is a pure delight from beginning to end. Price is playing stoic men in both of the other segments, but here he gets to fop it up real good, and it’s pure magic. The scene in which he dandily polishes a small silver cup that he wears around a chain on his neck and makes a great show of tasting the wines, complete with swishing and hammy fish faces, is priceless. Lorre is no slouch, either, as he plays Montresor with a hapless impotence that makes him pitiable despite his role as the villain of the piece. The two on screen together make for an immediately comedic pairing, as the short and stout Lorre next to the tall and lean Price (Lorre was 5’3” and Price 6’4”) look like they’re two cartoon characters drawn in distinctively different styles. The film does still manage to include the spooky dream sequence that appears to have been all but contractually obligated to be in these films, and instead of using a distinctive color saturation, the film’s image is just “squashed” from the top and the bottom, such that the already vaguely turtle-walking-upright stature and body language of Montresor becomes even more pronounced and humorous. Although it’s bracketed by two other stories that I would label as decent but forgettable, this one makes the price of the whole worthwhile. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

House of Usher (1960)

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In this Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, the first character that we see approaches a decrepit old house across a foggy, desolate moor. Upon arrival, they are greeted by a servant who tells them that, although they have come to see their betrothed, they are forbidden from entering the house based on the orders of said betrothed’s protective sibling. They insist upon being allowed entry and, once inside, they are reunited with their love, in spite of the sibling’s interference. From there, they learn that all members of the family who dwell in the house suffer a particular hereditary malady, which includes a tendency toward catalepsy. Beneath the house lies the family crypt, and the newcomer learns about the family’s sordid history. A character has an oversaturated dream and awakes in a start, and the betrothed is buried alive, before rising from their premature grave to wreak havoc on those who have betrayed them. 

Wait, that’s Premature Burial. Except that it’s also a plot description of House of Usher. The unnamed narrator of the original short story is here deemed Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), and he crosses a boggy tarn amid machined fog to approach the cobwebbed and dilapidated home of Roderick Usher (Vincent Price), who is the next to last surviving member of the Usher dynasty, alongside his sister, Madeline (Myrna Fahey). He is greeted by the sole remaining servant, Bristol (Harry Ellerbe), who at first attempts to refuse him entrance but who is entreatied enough to allow Winthrop to speak with Roderick. The titular house of Usher is a spooky place, bedecked almost entirely in red furnishings—candles, drapes, upholstery, everything—and Winthrop is asked to remove his boots and wear slippers which are provided for him. As the master of the house explains once Winthrop enters his chambers, he is afflicted with an intense sensitivity to all sensory input, keeping the sun out through heavy curtains and insisting that he can hear rats scraping within the stone walls, and the sound of heavy footfall causes him great pain. Winthrop wishes to take Madeline away from this place and back to Boston with him so that the two can get married; Roderick forbids this, telling Winthrop that Madeline has the same maladies as he and that it is his solemn duty to ensure that the Usher bloodline ends with the two of them. Madeline finds them in the middle of this conversation, and she seems delighted to see Winthrop and willing to elope with him, and Roderick thus begrudgingly allows Winthrop to stay.

Damon makes for a very pretty protagonist here, but he’s sorely lacking in screen presence, especially in comparison to Price, who acts circles around the younger man. Likewise, Madeline herself is virtually a non-entity, with Fahey given little to do other than put on pretty dresses and faint. That lack of character depth is particularly unfortunate in a film with only four characters (other than the spectral Ushers of yore who appear in a nightmare sequence), but I did rather like Ellerbe’s nonplussed resignation to the inevitability of the collapse of both the Usher bloodline and home. When giving an extemporaneous interview in one of the extra features on a different MGM Corman/Poe DVD, the director mentioned that his modus operandi when working on these adaptations was to take the story he was “adapting” and treat it as the final act of a standard three act screenplay, and then fill in the first two acts with whatever his writing team could come up with. In this case, that screenwriter was Richard Matheson, for whom I have a lot of fondness as he wrote several great Twilight Zone episodes, the novel I Am Legend, the short story on which The Box was based, and the script for The Night Stalker. There’s nothing wrong with this script, but it’s very clear that, even at a scant eighty minutes, Corman was working to pad out the run time. Thus long walks through hallways run just a little too long to be atmospheric and instead become dull, and this isn’t helped whenever the demands of the story mean that Winthrop and Madeline have the occasional romantic scene that’s so characterless and devoid of any kind of magnetism that the mind wanders. 

That means that much of what there is to enjoy here depends on Price’s performance, which is fortunately rock solid, and that he comes to occupy more and more of the screen time as the film goes on is to its benefit. For the first half or so of the film, his scenes are split up by the aforementioned interminable scenes in which Winthrop confesses his love and Madeline equivocates about running away with him. The best scene the two share is when she leads her beau down into the crypts beneath the house and shows him the coffins of her ancestors, as well as the one awaiting her and which is already inscribed with her name, and even that one ends with the arrival of Roderick to stir things up. Price, meanwhile, delivers his verbose monologues with his usual languid cadence, and does so while looking as pale as a ghost and slightly off as a result of lacking his normal glorious mustache. I particularly loved his recitation of the sins and crimes of Ushers past as he gives a little tour of his macabre portraits of his predecessors, which are garish and strikingly modern, and his gentle reminiscence of the days before his time when the land around the manor was fertile and verdant rather than desolate and barren. Price is also very funny at multiple points in this, especially in places in which the film deviates from the text. In the story, Roderick is a fairly gifted guitar player and the narrator even records the lyrics of one of his impromptu songs in the text, while Price’s Roderick strums aimlessly and tunelessly at a lute, which always sounds awful. I also laughed pretty hard at the moment in which Roderick sees Madeline’s hand twitching within her coffin and he rushes to close it before Winthrop can catch on that Madeline is not truly dead. This too is a change, as Poe’s Roderick truly believed that his sister had passed and only became aware of his error when his sensitive ear heard her screaming in the crypts below to be let out. 

Overall, after now having watched three of these (including Masque of the Red Death), there’s an emerging, discernable formula in what manages to make it into these adaptations. All three films have opening scenes in which a matte painting of a house (or castle) is approached across an in-studio “outdoors.” The lead character then explains their neuroses (or their anti-faith) to the recently arrived naive character, often in a dungeon or a crypt, a character has a trippy color-saturated nightmare, and then we wrap things up with the arrival of mortal or spiritual vengeance. Usher easily outperforms Premature Burial in every one of these individual areas, but it rarely does anything that Masque later imitates better than its successor does. That is to say, despite both of them coming after Usher, Premature Burial is derivative in a way that is detrimental to it, while Masque improves on the already pretty-good Usher, by most metrics. (One place that this outshines it, however, is in Winthrop’s dream sequence, which effectively manages to be both spooky and creepy, and which also manages to capture that feeling we have in dreams where we feel sluggish and ineffectual.) Roderick and Masque’s Prospero are very different characters, as the former is characterized largely by his neurotic behavior and shrinking, withering body language while the latter is a self-assured and assertive man. Nevertheless, one can’t help but see the trial run for later Corman/Price/Poe adaptations to come here, as Price shows his chops by fully committing to every line, delivering each of Roderick’s hypochondriacal and self-pitying remarks with utter conviction, which elevates the whole piece. 

If you are interested, you can read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in its entirety online here. This is a pretty good place to try it out, as I remember barely understanding this particular story when I was in my eighth grade Poe phase. There’s an entire paragraph about all of the literature, art, and religious writings that the narrator and Roderick pore over as their discussions about Roderick’s terrified belief that the house is alive and malevolent, and without the handy footnotes in the version linked above, it’s all but impenetrable. (That’s not to say that the choices of what vocab words to highlight and define in the rest of the text make a lot of sense, as they felt the need to provide meanings for “trepidation” and “pallid” but not “prolixity.”) I rather like it now, especially in its subtleties. The story, like the film, ends with the literal collapse of the Usher’s estate, but before it gets there it incorporates two texts-within-the-text in the forms of Roderick’s song and the fictional chivalric romance Mad Trist, which the narrator reads aloud to Roderick in an attempt to calm the latter’s nerves. That the sounds of a door being kicked down and a large shield falling to the floor which the narrator recites are accompanied by similar sounds elsewhere in the Usher house as Madeline rises from her premature burial (ahem) is a strikingly modern literary device, and the reader gets a real sense of the “irredeemable gloom [hanging] over and [pervading] all.” All that it’s missing is Vincent Price.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

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The Masque of the Red Death may have already been discussed to death on Swampflix. It was Movie of the Month in February 2015 (so slightly before my time), was reviewed in conversation with its 1989 remake (Adrian Paul?!), and served as inspiration for a Mardi Gras costume as immortalized here. But I just saw it for the first time and was completely blown away by it. It’s the exact flip side of Premature Burial, figuratively, and—since they were released together on a double sided MGM Midnite Movies DVD—literally. I couldn’t believe just how cool it was, especially since Roger Corman, despite how dearly I hold him in my heart, does not have a reputation for being a good filmmaker. The set & costume designs were really terrific, and Vincent Price is an absolute great in this role, treating the whole thing as if he’s doing Shakespeare at The Globe. 

Price plays Prince Prospero, whom I always imagined from the original Edgar Allan Poe short story as being a much younger man, possessed of a kind of haughtiness of youthful royalty. Here, he is instead portrayed by the fifty-three-year-old Price, and his indifference towards the suffering of his subjects is not an aristocratic apathy toward the suffering of the poor as he and his sexy friends (as I always imagined them based on their descriptions as being “hale and light-hearted”) wait out an epidemic. Prospero is instead an out-and-out worshipper of the devil who takes delight in committing acts of evil and depravity and who spends much of the film trying to undermine the faith of a peasant girl named Francesca (Jane Asher). As the film opens, Prospero and his men ride carelessly through a village in his domain, narrowly avoiding trampling a child to death in the thoroughfare through the quick intervention of Gino (David Weston). When the prince stops in the village, he takes umbrage at the underhanded things being said about him, and he plans to kill both Gino and another man named Ludovico (Nigel Green), but Francesca intervenes on their behalf and Prospero humors her; he tells her to choose which one will die, but she cannot choose between her beloved and her father (the former and the latter, respectively). When Prospero learns that there is plague in the village, he cuts his visit short and takes all three back to his castle to deal with them later, and orders the village burnt to the ground. 

I mentioned before that Corman wasn’t known for being one of the greats, but what he was known for in his time and beyond is that he was a very economical filmmaker. When writing about Targets years ago, I mentioned an anecdote in which Corman said that he had managed to shoot entire movies in two days; the Corman interview that is the only special feature to speak of on this home video release is pretty illuminating about his process. When talking about American International Pictures’ higher-ups, he says that they learned about a special tax credit that the UK was offering for films shot there. Feeling that they were leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of it, AIP relocated Corman from his normal filming environs and sent him to Associated British Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, England (where Jamaica Inn was filmed!). Corman praises this decision, as it allowed him to hire actor Patrick Magee, whose performance as Prospero’s friend Alfredo conveys both vulnerability and menace in a way that Corman highlighted when meditating on the making of the film. 

Also here in the castle is Julianna (Hazel Court, who was also in Premature Burial), Prospero’s mistress who has heretofore enjoyed the fruits of being Prospero’s concubine without having to commit to marriage. The presence of Francesca (and Julianna’s eviction from her own suite to make way for her) complicates these matters, prompting Julianna to commit to going “all the way” in her dark studies and present herself to the devil as his willing bride. She goes through with the final ceremony and then the film goes into a weird psychedelic dream in which she’s attacked by an entire United Colors of Benetton ad’s worth of international stereotypes before she gets pecked to death by one of Prospero’s birds. This might be part of what makes this one so memorable and novel, as the film has all of the trappings of being a very different, Shakespeare-for-the-BBC, self-serious film, but because Roger’s at the helm, he brings a little bit of that Hollywood flavor to it so we also get to have a series of excitingly violent sequences, including the burning of Francesca’s village, Prospero murdering a guest who arrives late to the party with a crossbow, dungeon-based sword-fighting, a man being burned alive in a gorilla costume, and the aforementioned death-by-bird. What’s also impressive is the scale of this one, as production was completed in a mere four weeks, and yet there are many impressive camera movements around the ballroom where the festivities largely take place while the dancers in the background never lose a single step in their choreography. In fact, Corman said that he considers it to be a 3.5-week picture that just happened to take four weeks to complete because of what he considered to be a slower pace. (James Cameron is still sour about British crew’s slow pace making Aliens, and Stanley Kubrick was likewise vexed by the high number of tea breaks taken during the making of Full Metal Jacket, which is not bad company for Corman to find himself, to be honest.)

I had quite a good time with this one. It’s very well made, has extremely high production values, and is never dull for a single moment. The only really puzzling thing about it is the casting of Esmerelda; without watching the Corman interview that explained it, I would never have known that the child actress was supposed to be portraying an adult little person, especially as they had her in the same scenes with Hop-Toad, who was portrayed by an actual little person (Skip Martin). This confusion works in the context in the first scene in which she appears, as we see that Alfredo talks about her with a kind of lust that helps to illuminate the depths of the depravity that Prosper’s boon companions are filled with. In her only other scene, when Hop-Toad is preparing for his vengeance on Alfredo for striking Esmerelda, he warns her to be ready to flee the castle, and she speaks with an adult voice, which didn’t make sense until Corman admitted in the interview that he couldn’t find a little person actress for the role in England and cast her with eight-year-old Verina Greenlaw instead. Just have that in mind when you check this one out. And you should! 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Tingler (1959)

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It’s becoming apparent that I’ve been foolishly overlooking William Castle’s value as a visual stylist & an auteur. Thanks to my own heroes’ reverence for Castle in works like the John Waters book Role Models & Joe Dante’s Matinee, I’ve always thought of him as a charming huckster & a good anecdote. Most coverage of William Castle’s art understandably focuses on his gleeful love for & exploitation of theatrical gimmicks: 3D tech, plastic skeletons that “fly” over the audience in key scenes, offering insurance policies to the audience, etc. As endearing as those playful pranks are and as big of an impression they made on the young genre nerds who grew up to become the producer’s biggest champions, it’s kind of a shame that they’ve wholly overshadowed his other merits as a filmmaker. After catching the Joan Crawford psychobiddy Strait-Jacket earlier this year and now the infamously gimmick-dependent The Tingler this Halloween, I’m shocked by how little praise Castle gets as a visual stylist, a boldly visionary genre cinema schlockteur. His imagery is often just as vividly memorable as his marketing gimmicks, which is something that needs to be stressed more often when he’s being praised.

1959’s The Tingler is a perfect illustration of the fight for attention between Castle’s visual work & his offscreen theatrical gimmickry. The movie is most often remembered for its so-called Percepto! gimmick – which simulated spine-tingling sensations referenced onscreen with electrically rigged theater seats that would mildly shock audiences during the bigger scares. The titular “tingler” in the film is explained to be a centipedal creature that lives in each of our spines, growing into massive rock-hard spinal obstructions whenever we are stricken with fear. Castle himself appears onscreen to introduce the film, instructing audiences to scream for relief from this rigid-back, tingly spine sensation whenever we get too scared, or else our respective tinglers will become too strong and crush our spinal columns from within. This insane mythology was conceived by screenwriter Robb White when he found himself studying centipede specimens around the time Aldous Huxley encouraged him to experiment with LSD. Castle’s gift was being able to transform those William S. Burroughs-level dark forces in the screenplay into a playful theatrical prank that’s fun for the whole family. And yet, as much as the Percepto! gimmick has aged into kitschy fun, Castle found other ways to accentuate the surrealism of this acid-soaked centipede premise in imagery that borders on legitimate fine art.

Vincent Price stars as a frustrated mad scientist studying the phenomenon of the tingler, increasingly obsessed with extracting the creature from a patient’s spine at the exact moment they’re effectively crippled with fear. In-between struggling for funding, fighting through skepticism from his peers, and engaging in bitter spats with his flagrantly adulterous wife, Price experiments with inciting terror in potential subjects (read: victims) in an attempt to extract a tingler at its most rigid. He starts with performing autopsies on already-executed prisoners, but diabolically graduates to shooting large amounts of LSD into his own arm in an attempt to scare himself and pulling a gun on his philandering wife to frighten her into frenzy. In each case, the subjects’ involuntary screams interrupt the experiment before completion, “releasing the fear tensions” before the tingler can fully take shape. Eventually, though, the mad scientist finds his his perfect specimen in the spine of a mute woman who cannot scream to dissolve her tingler. Once he inevitably frees the monster from her body, it runs loose, causing havoc onscreen and—through Castle’s Percepto! gimmick—in the very theater where the audience is watching the film. The tingler itself is an adorable centipede puppet operated by clearly visible twine, but Castle manages to squeeze more pure entertainment value out of those limited means than any working filmmaker could with big-budget modern tech.

Of course, you can’t entirely separate what Castle achieves as a visual artist from the novelty appeal of his theatrical pranks, since everything onscreen is toiling in service of that almighty gimmickry. Even just the long-winded, convoluted mythology of a fear-feeding centipede that causes spinal tingling in the moments of intense fear is such an over-the-top justification for the Percepto! stunt, making for one of the most delightfully bizarre B-movie plots in history (especially when you factor in Price’s onscreen experiments with mainlining LSD). Once the tingler is loose, though, the film’s formal experiments with theatrical cinema get even more impressively bizarre. The creature sneaks into an old-fashioned silent era movie house to terrorize the audience there, mimicking the theatrical environment where The Tingler would be screening in real life (an effect enhanced greatly for me by catching the film at the historic Prytania Theatre). It crawls across the projector light, revealing a kaiju-scale silhouette of its centipedal body. Vincent Price “cuts the lights” in the theater, shouting encouragements in the dark for the audience to scream in a collective effort to subdue the tingler, lest we suffer the wrath of the Percepto! chairs. Castle’s gimmickry is not a distraction from his visual artistry, but rather a commercial justification for it – finding a wonderful middle ground between surreal art & cheap amusement.

The tingler itself only represents a portion of the visual novelties Castle screentests here. Disembodied heads scream in a pitch-black surrealistic void as a visual representation of fear. A haunted house display disrupts the film’s black & white palette with splashes of blood-red color as one character attempts to scare a tingler out of another. The movie theater itself becomes a confining menace as the projector light shuts off, trapping the audience alone in a room with the monster they paid to see attack fictional others. William Castle’s playfulness extends beyond his imagination for attention-grabbing gimmickry to push schlocky premises into the realm of vividly graphic, surreal art. I have not been giving him the respect he’s owed for that willingness to experiment with the boundaries of cinema myself, and The Tingler’s a perfect example of these experiments’ dual extremes as silly novelty & high art.

-Brandon Ledet

Robbing William Castle’s Grave: The Slow Decline of Nu-Metal Horror

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From the top down, it’s such a great time for horror cinema, big-budget & small, that it’s difficult to remember how grim the genre was looking in not-too-distant memory. Wes Craven reinvigorated the horror movie industry with Scream in the mid-90s, unwittingly giving birth to a new wave of slick, big-budget, teen-marketed monstrosities with nu-metal tie-in soundtracks that festered on the big screen until the (even worse) trends of found footage cheapies & torture-porn gross-outs took over a decade later. Occasionally, an interesting deviation within the big budget nu-metal horror trend would amount to something novel (Final Destination, The Craft, The Faculty, Valentine) but it’s a genre that’s more so typified by slickly produced, routine dreck (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Disturbing Behavior, Urban Legend, Halloween: Resurrection). I was the exact right age to appreciate the 90s teen horror cycle while it was still fresh in the theaters (including the worst of the dreck), but just like how nu-metal rotted on hard rock radio long after it was culturally relevant, its cinematic equivalent stuck around long after I grew out of it. Part of the reason I’m so pleased with the state of recent major studio horror releases like A Quiet Place, Split, and IT, is that there was a period of nu-metal hangover in the 2000s when most well-funded horror films in wide release were about as appetizing as room temperature oatmeal. I was mentally transported back to this time in my recent (re)discovery of a string of nu-metal era William Castle remakes produced by Robert Zemeckis & Joel Silver under the label Dark Castle Entertainment. In the span of just three William Castle remakes, Silver & Zemeckis covered the entire trajectory of big-budget 90s horror’s descent from slick slashers to torture porn grotesqueries & beyond, all while maintaining a distinct nu-metal tinge.

The first film in the Dark Castle remake trilogy starts off as a perfectly distilled mission statement of what Silver & Zemeckis were attempting to accomplish. 1999’s House on Haunted Hill remake stars Geoffrey Rush as a William Castle type in broad Vincent Price drag (in a role originated by Price). An eccentric millionaire amusement park owner, Rush’s evil horror host offers a million-dollar prize to any party guest who can survive the night in his recently purchased old-timey L.A. mental hospital (which is, naturally, haunted by the ghosts of past patients). An art deco space flavored by dramatic organ music & matte painting backgrounds, the house in question is a wonder of detailed set design, a perfect application of Robert Zemeckis’s career-long obsession with special effects wizardry. Rush is also a great heel for the scenario, going big as a carnival barker-type huckster who turns the “haunted house” into a spooky amusement park rigged to scare off his guests – only *gasp* some of the scares are revealed to be “real” and the guests start dying off one by one, not by his hands. This self-described “spook house boogey man bullshit,” combined with Rush’s campy combo of Vincent Price & William Castle showmanship and 90s-specific casting of actors like Taye Diggs & Lisa Loeb, should make for a perfectly entertaining big-budget diversion. Yet, House on Haunted Hill somehow manages to shit the bed. Watching the film devolve from delightful novelty to miserable mess is like watching the 90s die onscreen in real time. Rush’s caustically bitchy rapport with his gold-digging wife (Vera Farmiga) sours the fun early on, a hint of nu-metal era misogyny that’s only intensified by the film’s open leering at gratuitous nudity. Most notably, there’s a terribly rendered Rorschach Test-shaped CGI ghost made up of greyed-out naked women that only exists because the presumed audience is ten-year-old boys starving to see some tits by any means necessary. It’s a bafflingly juvenile choice that’s somehow even more boneheaded than having a CGI Chris Kattan ghost save the day (seriously), the exact moment you’re reminded that Zemeckis’s special effects obsessions are most often used for Evil, not Good.

While House on Haunted Hill starts with the potential to succeed as an over-the-top horror diversion before it devolves into juvenile misogyny, its follow-up begins & ends completely within the bounds of that film’s worst tendencies. 2001’s Thir13en Ghosts (ugh, even the title is miserable) is a relentless assault of all the worst CGI grotesqueries & slack-jawed leering that gradually sinks its predecessor. Matthew Lillard revives his Scream schtick as an overly enthusiastic ghost hunter who attempts to guide several unwitting inhabitants of a haunted house through a night of supernatural terror. A slumming-it Tony Shalhoub, professional Jessica Biel understudy Shannon Elizabeth, and rapper Rah Digga constitute most of the cast of unfortunates under Lillard’s wing, each to varying levels of embarrassment. The underlying tones of racism, misogyny, and general misanthropy that gradually sour House on Haunted Hill are on constant, full-volume blast in Thir13en Ghosts, making for a miserable experience throughout. There’s an early potential for winking, William Castle camp in the film’s setup of an eccentric adventurer/ghost collector who wills a haunted house to his family (another role originated by Vincent Price, naturally), but the film’s hideous CGI, hyperactive editing, and amoral nu-metal aesthetic pummels that glimmer of hope out of existence at every turn. As with House on Haunted Hill, THir13en Ghosts is a special effects wonder of over-the-top, detailed set design – containing all of its haunted house mayhem inside an impossible mechanized structure that resembles a blown-up version of the Hellraiser puzzle box. It even improves on the CGI Rorschach ghost of the previous film with a cast of undead characters that, when not sexually objectified even in their bloodied state, strike a distinctly spooky image worthy of a high-end haunted house attraction. The problem is that any minor progress in production design is drastically outweighed by the film’s hideous nu-metal aesthetics, most notably in hyperactive editing & CGI camera movements that exhaust more than delight. The worst part is that haunted house tour guide Matthew Lillard is on hand to constantly remind you how far this mainstream horror cycle had fallen since its Scream roots.

The third William Castle remake from Dark Castle’s early run stretched beyond the outermost boundaries of the nu-metal teen cycle to spill into the found footage & torture porn aesthetics it replaced. It’s also, confusingly, the best film of the batch. 2005’s House of Wax remake starts like a conventional post-Scream slasher, with the world’s most hateable group of college-age idiots being stalked & hunted by local yokels while camping in the woods. The ways the film attempts to update the 90s slasher aesthetic for the evolving post-90s landscape are universally embarrassing: mixing in shaky-cam found footage techniques to adopt a Blair Witch patina, constructing elaborate torture devices to feed off the popularity of titles like Saw & Hostel and, most cruelly, stunt-casting Paris Hilton as one of the victims only to exploit her real-life tabloid persona by matching the night vision digicam footage of the 1 Night in Paris sex tape that helped make her notorious. The film doubles down on its juvenile titties-leering and even adds casual homophobia to Dark Castle’s list of moral shortcomings in a nonstop barrage of no-homo style jock humor. These are a few of the many sins weighing against House of Wax, but I can’t help but consider it the best of its studio’s big budget William Castle remakes, the only one I’d even consider solidly entertaining. If there’s anything these films share as a common virtue, it’s that the set design of their respective haunted houses is admirably detailed & wonderfully bizarre. House of Wax is the only film of the batch to fully exploit that asset for all it’s worth, accentuating the amusement park quality of its titular attraction at length. Recalling the horrifying 70s curio Tourist Trap, the film is set in a fake town populated almost entirely by wax figure statues, the centerpiece of which is a mansion-like museum entirely made of wax. The Zemeckis special effects machinery is pushed to its most glorious extreme here, with all of the wax figures and the titular wax house of its setting warping & melting in a climactic fire that transforms the amusement park-like town into a cartoonish vision of Hell worthy of both Dante and Joe Dante. House of Wax is far from a great film, but it’s weird enough to be an entertaining one and, although it suffers the worst trappings of its era in mainstream horror, it leans too hard into its strengths to be fully denied.

I obviously wouldn’t recommend that anyone repeat this journey into Zemeckis & Silver’s nu-metal era William Castle remakes; of the three films in the bunch only House of Wax squeaks by as satisfactory entertainment (and then just barely). However, I did find the experience illustrative of mainstream horror’s transformation in the past couple decades from slick post-Scream slashers to more adventurous, thoughtful experiments in genre. House on Haunted Hill devolves mainstream 90s horror from delightful camp to CGI-leaden misanthropy over the course of a single picture. THir13en Ghosts gleefully revels in the Hellish depths where that first film sank, indulging in the worst nu-metal hangover sins of horned-up male angst & hyperactive editing booth antics. House of Wax starts as a desperate attempt for the genre to stay relevant by coopting tropes from its found footage & torture porn successors before instead pushing through to find new, weird territory in its Zemeckis-flavored special effects majesty. It’s with that film that Dark Castle Entertainment abandoned its original mission of robbing William Castle’s grave to instead fund better, more modern pictures. House of Wax director Jaume Collet-Serra even went on to direct Orphan (the to-date best film of his career) for the same company just a few years later, a bizarre-free-for-all that feels much more up to date with the creative mainstream horror boon we’re living in now. You can even feel the nu-metal aesthetic struggling to hold on in the House of Wax’s soundtrack, which interrupts mainstay modern rock knuckleheads like Marilyn Manson, Deftones, and Disturbed with jarring sore-thumb inclusions like Interpol, Joy Division, and Har Mar Superstar. As a collection of big-budget horror remakes of once-campy cult classics, Dark Castle’s initial run of William Castle remakes is a grim, grueling experience. As a snapshot of how post-Scream mainstream horror gradually transformed into the spoil-of-riches horror media landscape we’re living in today, however, they’re extremely useful, functioning practically as a step-by-step guided tour of the nu-metal 90s dying out & fading away. Just like how many corners of modern rock radio are still stuck in this exact nu-metal rut, you can still find modern movies that revert those old ways, but this damned trio paints a picture of a time when this was the majority & the norm – the nu-metal Dark Ages.

-Brandon Ledet