Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Vincent Price in “The Raven”

Boo!

Halloween is upon us, which means that a scary movie or two is almost required viewing in every American household. It’s also a time when lovers of literature tend to take out their volumes of Edgar Allan Poe to dip into the macabre stories and poems of one of America’s first full-time professional writers. But, if you are anything like me, you might want to mix the two pleasures by indulging in the rather odd series of films based on Poe’s work that were made in the 1960s by one of cinema’s most iconoclastic directors, Roger Corman. The combination of Poe’s wildly imaginative moral parables, often seen by the Victorian public as lurid and depraved, with the maverick filmmaker Corman, is one of the all-time great collisions of artistic sensibilities.

Edgar Allen Poe had a brief but remarkable career as a writer, editor, and critic in the early part of the 19^th century. Multiple tragedies in his life, coupled with alcohol and drug use, led Poe to have an unstable and frequently bleak outlook on life. Nevertheless, he is often credited with creating the detective story with “The Purloined Letter”, and science fiction with the novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”. His poem, “The Raven”, remains enormously popular and frequently quoted. Yet, by most accounts, Poe is best remembered for his short fiction tales of death and terror. It is these stories that, more than a century later, found their way to Roger Corman.

Corman was a filmmaker known for bringing his projects in on time, and under budget – which made him very popular with producers! He was a principle director for American International Pictures (AIP), a low-budget film studio which made movies for the teenage crowd of the 1950s. While adults were staying home watching television, it was teens and college students who comprised the majority of the movie going public at the time. AIP films generally featured action, violence, fantasy, and opulent dialog. When the studio executives discovered that Poe’s stories were in the public domain, meaning they were free of royalties, the decision was made that they were perfect material for AIP. Corman was the logical choice to oversee these productions, since he had a proven ability to make quality pictures on a small budget.

The first film in what is now known as The Poe Cycle was “The House of Usher”, released in 1960. Corman convinced the studio to shoot the picture in widescreen CinemaScope color. With atmospheric sets and sweeping camera movement, the film looked like it cost far more than its modest price tag. Corman also cast Vincent Price, an aristocratic and cultivated actor with a trained voice, as his lead. He was the ideal choice to project a sense of seriousness and class to the movie, and Price already had a reputation for horror films. The success of Usher guaranteed that Price and Corman would work together on more Poe inspired films.

Ultimately, there were eight films in The Poe Cycle made by Roger Corman.

1. “The House of Usher”
2. “The Pit and the Pendulum”
3. “The Premature Burial”
4. “Tales of Terror”
5. “The Raven”
6. “The Haunted Palace”
7. “The Masque of the Red Death”
8. “The Tomb of Ligeia”

All but “The Premature Burial” starred Price.

With each subsequent film, Corman was able to demand higher budgets, and other famous names from horror films were added to the casts. Boris Karloff, who originated the role of Frankenstein’s monster, appeared with Price, veteran character actor Peter Lorre, and a young actor named Jack Nicholson in a film inspired by Poe’s poem, “The Raven”. When shooting on that film was completed, and three days remained before the sets were to be torn down, Corman took advantage of the situation and made an entirely new movie starring Nicholson and Karloff employing the same film crew.

Corman had a unique gift of finding just the right collaborators. Most of the scripts for the Poe films were written by Richard Matheson, who ultimately had a lengthy and hugely successful career writing science fiction, horror, and fantasy for films, television, and books and magazines. Nicholas Roeg, who went on to be one of England’s most distinguished film and stage directors was the cinematographer for the Poe/Corman film “The Masque of the Red Death”. In fact, Corman is credited with giving many famous actors and filmmakers their start in motion pictures, including directors Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and Ron Howard. In addition to Nicholson, actors who first got their break working for Corman include Peter Fonda, Robert DeNiro, Charles Bronson, Dennis Hopper, and Sandra Bullock.

If you watch any of these movies today, no one could fault you for thinking that they are a little…odd. They aren’t particularly faithful to Poe’s original work. “The Masque of the Red Death” comes the closest in that it actually adheres to Poe’s plot and theme. The rest of the films more or less begin with some aspect of Poe’s story, add an atmosphere of gloom and terror, and then veer off in very different directions. In the case of “The Raven”, the movie is actually a rather silly comedy.

You’ll also notice that Price is frequently overacting. The term most often used is that he is a ham actor, or hamming it up. It comes from the Cockney slang of London for (h)amateur actor. Matheson wrote flowery dialog for Price to deliver in that manner, and Corman directed the actor to deliver his lines this way. It was an attempt to wink at the audience, and assure them that the movies weren’t to be taken too seriously. Because of the violence and lurid nature of the films, the studio had to take this approach to prevent censors from cutting out large sections of the films, or banning them outright.

The result is eight classic films rich in style, hugely entertaining, and more than a little bit peculiar. They are, however, perfect Halloween entertainment.  

Photo by Tom Simpson from Flickr