After doing Lovecraft last week I figured I’d finish this Halloween series with my other favorite American Horror writer, Edgar Allen Poe as portrayed through the team of Roger Corman and Vincent Price. Corman did a cycle of eight Poe adaptations with Price through American International Pictures with scripts by Richard Matheson. I can’t say this batch were the best of the lot but I persevere.
The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe’s story of cursed families, madness and premature burial was never my favorite Poe story. The last time I read it it left me wondering if anyone ever checksd for pulses in the eighteenth century, but it still has one of the best gothic moods of his work.
In this adaptation, House of Usher, Vincent Price plays Roderick Usher with an aloof cold dignity and arrogance. It is this arrogance that drives the plot of the film including taking his sister to the family crypt and then locking her away in her coffin when her fiancé realizes she’s not quite dead.
Despite it’s inherent cheesiness this was a fun film despite it’s low budget it has a nice aesthetic to it courtesy of wonderfully creepy portraits of Usher ancestors by Burt Schoenberg
The next film on my list, Tales of Terror was done a triptych of three of Poe’s stories, Morella, The Black Cat and The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar with an all star cast including Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre.
Most of this film didn’t impress me that much, but I enjoyed the Black Cat sequence. Pretty much that’s all that left of Poe’s Black Cat story is the name and takes much more from the The Cask of Amontillado” with Lorre in the position of the narrator who incases his wife and her lover into the wall (along with the cats)
Lorre and Price have excellent chemistry with Lorre as the murderous drunk and Price at his hammiest as a foppish wine taster and Lorre’s Victim. (It’s mostly played for laughs)
The cat was adorable
