It was mid-August.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,”
I was browsing through the eclectic offerings of a free movie streaming service.
“Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…”
The classic movie listings presented a familiar title to my eyes.
“As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door…“
The Raven, starring Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.
“Only this, and nothing more.”
It not being the first time I’d encountered a title that used Edgar Allen Poe’s works, I decided on the merit of the players and the allusion to one of my favourite authors to finally try this ambitious homage to a great Gothic raconteur.
Keep in mind, the extent of my exposure to Vincent Price was largely his reputation, my own knowledge of his work being limited to his guest starring in one of the goofier episodes of the already very goofy Get Smart show and what was his final appearance as the old inventor on Edward Scissorhands (1990).
Peter Lorre I knew a little better, from several Humphrey Bogart films, where he is always a greasily endearing presence, and his highlight performance alongside Cary Grant on classic Halloween comedy-horror Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). However, this is not about Peter Lorre, as great as he is.
All that to say that on these foundations, I looked past the un-prepossessing plot description for The Raven (rival magicians, yada yada) and plunged right in.
When I resurfaced, writing this today, I have watched eight Vincent Price films.
Just a fraction of his extensive filmography, I know, but I’m just getting started. I will watch more.
But until I find them, let me share this, my most recent obsession with you.
The Raven (1963)
After a stunning recitation of “The Raven” by Vincent Price (rivalled in my mind only with that done by Christopher Lee), there’s a gauche and over-indulgent melancholy to the opening scene of this film. This is carried convincingly by what I have come to recognize as Price’s uncompromising and un-self-conscious commitment to the fiction. His face is so recognizably congruent with horror, so indicative of a capacity for malice in his emphatic features, and yet he plays a soft, grieving and compassionate man so earnestly that one almost feels as though he must be putting one over on you. It was a bit perplexing to open with this maudlin tone, but of course, he is pining for the lost Lenore, as is the narrator of the source poem by Poe.
Well, then, so far they are invoking the spirit of the original work…
Enter, a Raven.
Who immediately breaks the mystery of the moment by answering Price’s sad question of whether he will ever see his wife again with, “How the hell should I know? What am I, a fortune-teller?” in Peter Lorre’s crackling voice.
It’s camp, it’s kitsch, it’s kooky. There are star-crossed young lovers (one of whom is played by Jack Nicholson, some 20-ish years before The Shining) and an epic wizard duel. It’s a very good time. It pokes fun at a range of tropes from a variety of genres, all combined in a story that the author of such spoofs as “Lionizing” and “X-ing a Paragrab” could be proud to be the (very loose) inspiration for.
The Bat (1959)
In keeping with the spooky animal motif, this adaptation of a play which was an adaptation of a novel stars the fabulous Agnes Moorehead, best known to me as Endora from Bewitched. Moorehead plays a mystery writer who is living alone with her female assistant in a large rented house, while a night stalker with a penchant for ripping women’s throats out with his claws is on the loose in the area: The Bat.
The basic setting and premise is straightforward, but there is actually a surprising number of moving parts to the story. There is embezzlement, secret criminal pasts, murder, framing, a hidden fortune, and of course, the aforementioned ripping people’s throats out.
Vincent Price, playing the neighbourhood doctor, early on proves to be a man who doesn’t shrink from violence or hesitate to protect himself. He is an ambiguous presence throughout the story while the mystery writer and her assistant are terrorized repeatedly by the Bat, narrowly escaping several times and having to resort to police protection.
It certainly begs the question: could the Bat be someone they know?
It is a competent whodunnit with unexpected occurences and no shortage of murders. And Moorehead plays a sufficiently competent woman with common sense throughout the whole situation, so that at no time did I feel like yelling at the screen for her to stop being unnecessarily stupid. I would expect no less from Endora.
House of the Long Shadows (1983)
Another one about a writer, it just felt right to me to watch this one next. The young writer of modern, realistic novels (played by none other than Desi Arnaz, Jr.) makes a bet with his publisher that anyone could write a gothic love story in 24 hours, they’re just not that deep.
So, with $20,000 on the line, he rents an old abandoned manor house in Wales to “get in the mood” and write one himself. Things start going hinky from the moment he arrives at the local train station to ask directions to the house, on a dark and stormy night, and his solitary writer’s retreat fast turns into a fully populated horror story.
It’s almost laughable how the characters materialize at regular intervals, striding out of the storm and into the decrepit house as though it is their long-awaited entrance onto a stage: Peter Cushing (applause!), Vincent Price (applause!), and also starring Christopher Lee! (Uproarious cheers!)
None of them are what they seem, with Vincent Price playing the disaffected, debauched elder son of a privileged family, entitled to his status and embittered that it has been taken away from him through a family disgrace 40 years before. To be honest, I was looking forward to seeing Christopher Lee in this, who, despite being such a charismatic force as Sauruman in the Lord of the Rings, I don’t recall ever having seen in anything else. He is magnetic and his interactions with Price become truly brilliant in the end.
While the story and acting have their weak points (I was a bit disappointed to find that Desi, Jr. brought neither the charisma of his mother nor the charm of his father to the screen), the film styles itself a bit of a self-aware defense of the horror genre, and Price is always a highlight while the twists and turns, revelations and developments keep interest throughout.
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
Sharing a title with one of my favourite of Poe’s stories, I just had to watch this one when it came up. However, this tale has its own shocking plot that unfolds in medieval Spain when a man journeys from England to investigate the circumstances surrounding his sister’s sudden death. Her widower husband, played by Vincent Price, is a man wracked with guilt, blaming the unhealthy air of his castle for his wife’s illness and ultimate death. But even as some questions are answered, others take their place as more of the castle’s history as an instrument of the Inquisition is revealed and the presence of the dearly departed starts to be felt once again.
Drawing on generational guilt, psychological phenomena, and childhood trauma, this film gives an unexpectedly deep and memorable significance to the standard fare of secret passages, ghostly apparitions, and dungeon mausoleums. I was, frankly, unprepared for Price’s absolutely brilliant performance, because he begins it, again, much in the same soft and maudlin tone as that with which he begins The Raven, with much the same premise. In hindsight, though, I know why this was the unexpected hit that launched more Poe-inspired movies, most with Price involved.
This has to be my favourite Price film so far, with the best-laid plot twist and denoument of any of them.
House on Haunted Hill (1959)
One of the most well-known of Price’s films, it is also, I found, the template for many a subsequent horror film. Who has not seen some variation of the plot wherein a group of strangers is invited to and/or trapped in a house together by an eccentric millionaire for unknown but probably nefarious reasons? Most probably, they start to get picked off one by one. This one is no different.
With an ensemble cast and an especially suave Price, this story has a good, old-fashioned murder mystery feel to it. There are some really creepy moments, puzzling motivations, and everyone is a suspect, with a satisfying conclusion that explains everything…or does it?
I can see where it gets its popularity as a representative horror film of the period, though it didn’t completely stand out to me overall.
Shock (1946)
Featuring a younger Vincent Price, looking a bit underdressed sans moustache, the terror of this story comes in the form of psychological trauma and the increasing desperation of a murderer to get away with his crime.
When a woman witnesses a murder, it puts her in a state of catatonic shock that her husband is desperately trying to find the reason for. Unknowingly, he places her in the care of a psychiatrist, Price, who is the very man who committed the crime. The tension in the story becomes the efforts of Price to prevent the witness from ever telling what she knows, while he goes to ever-increasing lengths to conceal his crime.
This is still early days for Price and he plays quite a tempered and realistic character, in keeping with the story that is rooted in the reality of the aftermath of WWII. It is a drama of an ill-fated crime of passion and the ruin it wreaks on its doer’s life and sanity as well as others’, though it has a good Hayes Code ending where the villain is punished for his misdeeds.
If only Price wasn’t so darned sympathetic.
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Another famous title, I wasn’t eager to watch this one for various reasons. Firstly, survivor stories are not my favourite things, though I have enjoyed some of the ones I’ve been compelled to watch or read. Secondly, the last survivor of a global pandemic… well, it’s still a bit close for some of us.
But I knew Vincent Price would be able to carry it, so I finally gave in and watched it.
The opening scene had me cold: views of an abandoned cityscape changing to shots of bodies lying in the streets, tattered clothing lifting and falling with a desolate wind.
And then, the introduction of the main character, waking by alarm clock to establish some sort of structure on his life, with the opening line of his already weary internal monologue:
Another day to live through. Better get started.
The Last Man on Earth
Well, it couldn’t have been more apt.
It is an absurd tale, with the illness turning its victims into zombie-like, lumbering vampires unless their bodies are incinerated. And yet, Price’s humanity–his ingenuity, his paranoia, his defiance, his bitterness, but above all his desperate yearning for connection with something living after three years of solitary struggle against the living-dead–shines through as a tragic and indomitable force even as it is superceded by the inevitable adaptation.
There’s something there, something reminiscent of my university film class analyses that captured my imagination. After all of that, I think this might be my second-favourite of Price’s films so far.
The Tingler (1959)
A patently silly title, this is far from a silly film. It has its silly moments, prefaced by the director encouraging the audience of the theatre watching to participate by screaming, as some of them will experience a “sensation” at certain parts of the film, facilitated by what amounts to joy-buzzers in their seats. Gimicky it is and gimicky it says on the poster. He is no Alfred Hitchcock.
Yet, it has a compelling unfolding story, starting in the morgue of a prison where the pathologist, Price, is performing an autopsy on an executed man. Finding the man’s spine crushed, he hypothesizes about a creature that grows on a person’s spine when they feel fear. He calls it, in a moment of levity, the “Tingler.”
But the lightness is short-lived as he becomes obssessed with finding physical, irrefutable evidence of its existence. The only way, he thinks, is if someone were literally frightened to death, unable to scream to release the tension. The scream, he posits, is what debilitates and shrinks the Tingler, which is why there is no trace of it left after death aside from the crushed spine.
He shows himself to be a man who will do almost anything to succeed, risking his own life, and perhaps even willing to create the circustances for a particularly promising experimental candidate to be frightened to the point of death, without a sound. Eventually, of course, the beast does emerge.
The themes of silence and sound are interesting, emphasized by the setting of a silent film theatre run by a deaf and mute woman. There is also a subplot between the pathologist and his wife, her sister and the pathologist’s assistant that lends a lot of real stakes and emotion to what could be a solely campy monster flick. The sequences in which a character is being progressively terrified to death are actually scary in that we are uncertain if they are real–technicolour red blood flows in an otherwise black and white film for startling effect.
And that concludes the summary of Vincent Price films I’ve watched in the past two months. It snuck up on me how much I enjoy his work–the variegated range of his performances are convincing on some level no matter what the tone.
I think, perhaps, his characters are a bit of an anomalous congruence of real horror and humour that is so prevalent throughout human experience. Like Poe, he has a willingness to explore the macabre and twisted chambers of a human heart, brimming with blood, while recognizing the innately ridiculous and farcical nature of things, from circumstances to our own egos.
It got me thinking, I may have to watch the new series The Fall of the House of Usher (2023).
Or I could find a place to watch House of Usher (1960) starring Vincent Price instead…
And then Tales of Terror (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) in close succession. It sounds like a good rest-of-October plan. What’s yours?
Fictitiously Yours 