Octoberfilms: "The Raven" & "The Comedy of Terrors" (1963, '64) — We're killin' 'em here

Producer/director Roger Corman's biggest critical and commercial successes were his moody adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe classics for American International Pictures. Starting with 1960's House of Usher and 1961's The Pit and the Pendulum, the series elevated Corman's status as a filmmaker of skill and economy, and permanently engraved Vincent Price's face on horror cinema's Mt. Rushmore.

After the first handful of these, everyone agreed that it was time to lighten up and have some fun. Corman had directed comedy already, a low-low-budget mock-horror film with Jack Nicholson, 1960's Little Shop of Horrors. In '62 he teamed up Price with Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone in a Poe anthology film, Tales of Terror, where he again revealed a light touch. For The Raven in '63, he went for outright whimsy in a giddy spoof that brought together Price, Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Nicholson. The following year saw Corman casting Price, Lorre, Karloff, and Rathbone in Comedy of Terrors.

Both The Raven and Comedy of Terrors took advantage of the gothic look of the "AIPoes" courtesy of Corman's in-house designer Daniel Haller and photographer Floyd Crosby. Also carried over was screenwriter Richard Matheson. These once-over-slightly comedies are the very definition of "lightweight" and feel aimed more at kids than ostensible grownups. But they show off a screwball side of their heavyweight castmembers, who were all naturally gifted at comic shenanigans. As Matheson says on a supplement filmed for MGM's "Midnite Movies" two-fer disc, "no one realizes how these so-called 'scary actors', how funny they could be."

These titles offered no pathbreaking contributions to either horror or comedy cinema, but they do serve as a pair of mints before we dig into the best of Corman's richer fare, The Masque of the Red Death ('64) and The Tomb of Ligeia ('65).


Entertaining fluff, The Raven takes Poe's most famous poem and doesn't so much adapt it as dress it up in a clown nose and silly hat. It puts a cartoon spin on Corman's melodramatic Grand Guignol Poe style while sending up its stars' status as the "Titans of Terror."

Price is Dr. Erasmus Craven, a retired sorcerer mooning over the death of his wife Lenore two years earlier. As he gloomily recites Poe's lines of lamentation, a raven flies into the room. The raven is talky and obnoxious — "Will I ever see my lost Lenore?" the wizard entreats, "How the hell should I know?" quoth the bird — and some hocus-pocus turns it into pudgy Dr. Bedlo (Lorre). A low-rent conjurer, Bedlo reports that he'd been turned into a raven by rival sorcerer Dr. Scarabus (Karloff), and that at Scarabus' castle he saw a woman who looks like Lenore.

Craven and Bedlo ride to Scarabus' castle to investigate. They're accompanied by Craven's daughter (Olive Sturgess) and her boyfriend, who's also Bedlo's son, played with gee-whiz boyishness by Jack Nicholson, who was all of 26 but looked 18. Even when he's under the thrall of Scarabus' "diabolical mind control," it's hard to shake the cognitive dissonance of Jack freakin' Nicholson posing like Batman's Burt Ward in a castoff Ren Fair costume. (His scene with Lorre at movieclips.com clues us in that the Jack we'd come to know five years later in Easy Rider and beyond is nascent there in his voice.)

This past May, at a Vincentennial film fest, Corman spoke about his experiences collaborating with Price, and mentioned that during the shooting of The Raven the gracious elder-statesman actor was generous about mentoring his young colleagues such as Nicholson. Jeff Owens at downrightcreepy.com caught on video Corman's 45-minute chat with Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas, and it's well worth a look for his memories of the whole Poe-Price series. Once again it reminds me that Corman, now 85, has always struck me as Hollywood's most good-natured, unaffected, and approachable long-time honcho.

At Cinefantastique Online, in another centennial celebration of Price, Corman recalls that...

On the set of THE RAVEN, Vincent had to adjust to the presence of two veteran co-stars, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff, as well as a new young actor, Jack Nicholson. He showed extraordinary flexibility in working harmoniously with Jack (trained in the Method), Boris (schooled in the English classical style) and Peter, who did anything that came into his mind at any given moment!

Peter Lorre's great talent was for improvising, which he did with great wit and panache. This on-the-set spontaneity did not sit well with Boris Karloff who was nearing the end of a long and distinguished career, and expected to do his scenes precisely as written. Inevitably, there was some friction between these two strong personalities. Fortunately for me, Vincent was able to strike a balance in his own acting style, adapting to Peter’s looseness but also playing scenes with Boris that were models of the classical approach. His personal graciousness in bending to the demands of two conflicting egos was a great help to me in what could have been difficult circumstances.

It turns out that "lost" Lenore (Hazel Court, of established cleavage fame) faked her death to take up with wealthy and powerful Scarabus. Craven's confrontation with his rival escalates to an elaborately staged duel of wizardly magic that's wrought with colorful and precision-ridiculous special effects:

A Duel to the Death

I suspect that when their old colleagues at Hogwarts hold a class reunion, the invitations for these two are always inexplicably "lost in the mail."

The Raven is pleasurable in a Saturday-morning-with-a-bowl-of-Fruit-Loops sort of way, and isn't much more substantial than the sugar-tinted milk left in the bowl. But one of its pleasures is the clarity that its cast is having a relaxed, high old time. Karloff has more presence here than in Comedy of Terrors, and proves again why he was the one true voice of the Grinch. For his part, there's a time or two when Price looks ready to crack up giggling from the goof he's having.

Corman was always a master of the bottom line. Because he brought the film in ahead of schedule, under budget, and with three days left on Karloff's contract, he shot another quickie with Karloff and Nicholson on the same sets, The Terror, a precursor of Peter Bogdanovich's first film, Targets.




Comedy of Terrors has no connection to Poe, direct or tenuous, though it still tends to get placed under the Corman-Poe flag because ... well, by this point because why the hell not?

In this outing, unscrupulous undertaker Price realizes that business needs a pick-up. Aided by his put-upon assistant Lorre, he connives to boost demand by sneaking into the bedrooms of wealthy old men and smothering them in their sleep, then being on hand to manage funeral arrangements (which includes re-using coffins) when the relatives arrive. Price hits some heretofore new funny-nasty strides when verbally abusing his opera-screeching wife, Joyce Jameson, and her dotty old codger father, Karloff.

Basil Rathbone takes an appropriately hammy spin as the Shakespeare-spouting landlord. After he comes to Price demanding the past year's rent, the film occupies itself with Price trying time and again to do in Rathbone, who won't stay dead even when laid out at his own burial service.

Everyone here is good fun to watch playing against type. Karloff is a snoozy old duffer who burbles on about historical funereal rites; Price's villainy is spiky and booze-soaked rather than his usual silky and genteel; and 60-year-old Lorre, of all people, gets to be the love interest. Price and Lorre refine the Laurel and Hardy duo begun in The Raven, a pairing that might have had real legs if they'd kept it up for more films.

Clearly it takes two actresses to make up for the lack of Hazel Court. This time stripper Beverly Powers ("Miss Beverly Hills") makes her screen debut as the amply cleaved widow Mrs. Phipps. Unlike Jack Nicholson's, hers was not a long career that found a start with Corman, with later titles such as Brides of Blood and The Island of Living Horror just not conveying that Academy-attracting je ne sais quoi. Casting both Powers and Joyce Jameson in the film for identical reasons (two actresses, four parts, so to speak) guaranteed repeat business from 15-year-old boys who'd tell their parents they were headed to the matinee for just a harmless comedy.

On the other hand, that's indeed venerable Joe E. Brown (who got the last word in Some Like It Hot) in a memorable bit as a crypt keeper.

There's some fine comic interplay, and this time Corman hired genre-shaping director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Night of the Demon) to keep it all looking good and moving forward. And once again versatile composer Les Baxter proves that he can adjust to fit along with the rest of Corman's band of brothers.

Nonetheless, this is an 84-minute film spun from 42 minutes worth of material. If you've seen Neil Simon's Murder by Death you're already familiar with the tone here, and before long the experience alternates between enjoying some funny bits and checking the Time Remaining clock.

MGM's "Midnite Movies" double-feature disc delivers both films in their original 2.35:1 widescreen. They look marvelous. Each shows off rich color and nearly flawless prints. Audio comes in DD 2.0 monaural that's perfectly strong and clear. The Raven has some moments when the audio suddenly becomes a bit noisier and less robust, as if it's from a different source print, but it's nothing serious.

MGM sauced its Corman Poe discs with extras. Here that includes a two-part featurette made in 2003, Richard Matheson: Storyteller, which points the camera at the prolific and self-described "offbeat" screenwriter/novelist, who fondly praises the cast, Corman, and Tourneur, and waxes philosophical about writing and the Nature of Being. Another mini-docu, illustrated with behind-the-scenes shots, is Corman's Comedy of Poe: The affable Corman discusses The Raven's conception and development, as well as working with Nicholson, and notes that it's one of his personal favorite films.

Music: Nina Simone, "Pirate Jenny"
Near at hand: The World of Christopher Marlowe by David Riggs

Octoberfilms: The Haunting (1963) — In the night, in the dark....

There's a select handful of movies Elizabeth and I watch ritually every year for the Halloween season. Here's one that's been a list-topper for as long as we've been married. Early in our relationship, when we were first dating, we surreptitiously checked out each other's bookshelves and movie collections to see what, if anything, we had in common. Along with the science fiction and Sherlock Holmes, the graphic novels and the P.G. Wodehouse, there was The Haunting — both the movie and its source novel — among the titles that convinced us, individually, that maybe we had a good match going on here.

Of course, get any group of veteran movie-lovers talking about Haunted House films — the childhood favorites, the best-directed, the most effectively creepy — and two minutes won't pass before someone mentions The Haunting, then others nod in enthusiastic agreement before recounting whichever scene in this 1963 benchmark most freaked the bejeezus out of them. Last October at The Daily Beast, Martin Scorsese, no slouch as a suspense-film buff, ranked The Haunting #1 on his list of 11 scariest movies.

Genre film fans who came of age cinematically during or after the 1980s may find The Haunting too traditional in its narrative, too restrained in its use of the sort of visual or editing tricks that have come to define "scary" movies since the slasher-film and CGI wave. Then again, I'm not far from that generational zone myself and yet here I am. Still, if such a corrupting blind spot exists, I'd hope that double-featuring this movie with its 1999 remake would adequately serve to catalog everything so right about the 1963 version and all that can go so wrong with the post-Freddie Krueger product. Granted, arguably that's an unfair comparison given the sharp distinction — literarily and cinematically — between terror and horror, with the 1963 version embodying the former and the 1999 thudbucket failing to do justice to the latter.



Robert Wise directed this brilliantly executed exercise in restraint and atmospherics between his two all-stops-out musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music. The contrast couldn't be more startling.

A sober, faithful interpretation of Shirley Jackson's genre-defining novel, The Haunting of Hill House, it easily ranks among the most well-regarded supernatural suspense films ever made, perhaps second only to The Innocents (1961) in its use of mood, suggestion, and not showing what's behind the door to achieve a level of creeps that slithers under your skin and stays there a while. So for me the two films are a natural pairing for a double-feature night (and for this blog, obviously).

I love the opening paragraph of Jackson's 1959 novel, three sculpturally honed sentences that Elizabeth and I have read aloud to each for the minor-key music in their quiet, vivid suggestiveness:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years  and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

"I think," wrote Stephen King in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre, "there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend the sum of the parts."

From the first sentence it's established that Hill House isn't just a setting; it's a character in its own right, an entity, an "organism" with a will and plans of its own, and "not sane." Wise and screenwriter Nelson Giddin apparently knew there was no point in trying to one-up Jackson's opening, so Julie Harris's voice-over version of that passage starts the movie on a perfect note, setting the goosebumpy tone before the first minute is done.

Not coincidentally, The Haunting also bears some strong similarities to King's The Shining. It's easy to see how King drew upon Jackson's novel and Wise's film for his own story of a house that was "born bad." In Danse Macabre, King places The Haunting high on his short list of the basic coursework in gut-level fright films, and among the films that contributed something of value to the genre, with a special asterisk for being one of his personal favorites.

The story brings a group of psychic researchers to the "diseased" and "deranged" old New England mansion, a Gothic monstrosity with a sordid history and architecture that mirrors the warped soul of its builder.

A naive academic, Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), leads a hand-picked collection of amateur investigators: Luke (Russ Tamblyn), heir to the house, is a skeptical hep-cat wise-ass whose only goal is to protect his upcoming investment property. Theodora (Claire Bloom), a sleek and brassy subtexty lesbian, was chosen for her ESP prowess. We also get Lois Maxwell, James Bond's Miss Moneypenny at the time, as Markway's skeptical wife who learns to really, really regret crashing in on her husband's work.

The linchpin of the story is repressed, browbeaten Eleanor (Julie Harris), whose personal history parallels key events in Hill House's sinister past.

The four meet at Hill House to record conclusive evidence of "another world." Hill House is willing to oblige — on its own terms. Seemingly sentient and watchful, the house is particularly interested in Eleanor.

As horrific ghostly eruptions escalate — including a cryptic "help Eleanor Come Home" scrawled on a wall — she is the center of Hill House's attention. Her abusive relationship with her now-dead mother, and an interrupted mixed-signals closeness with Dr. Markway, contribute to a relationship with Hill House that anticipates that of Jack Torrance to The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

Harris's performance is the movie's spine. Eleanor, the sheltered and psychologically broken young spinster, becomes one of the most complex and well-wrought characters in the genre. Through her The Haunting takes on layers of post-Freudian nuance that drives (indeed literally) to its crunching climax.

The Haunting's hypodermic effectiveness derives from the masterful craftsmanship of director Wise. His early apprenticeship was at the feet of legendary producer Val Lewton, whose preference for atmospherics and mood over visceral shocks is visible throughout The Haunting.

In Gidding's tight screenplay, outright "Boo!" moments are few. Instead, Wise (whose creds as an editor include Citizen Kane) builds a powerful sense of dread through off-kilter angles, staccato editing, and Davis Boulton's rich, evocative black-and-white camerawork. Wise's striking compositions put every widescreen square inch to use. He shot the Hill House exteriors on infrared film to give them an unnatural look. Other than that, the movie displays only one visual-effects trick — an oak door bulges inward, like an embolism, because something is pushing against the other side.

It's the use of sound, though, that really elevates The Haunting as a technical tour de force. Two of its most unnerving scenes are all about what we, along with Eleanor, can only hear. When the unseen supernatural presence pounds, boom, Boom BOOM, closer and closer along the hall outside Eleanor and Theo's room, the scare comes from what we can't see hitting the walls and then hammering the door, even as the camera presses us mere inches from the doorknob turning by itself.

Later, in bed, Eleanor hears ghastly chanting and the cries of a child behind the wall flocking (where the decorative pattern suggests a malevolent face) — again neither Eleanor nor we can see anything other than what our imaginations show us, an effect that hits hardest when Eleanor screams, the lights come up, and she realizes that the cold hand she had been holding wasn't Theo's. It's a moment that only a select few screen ghost stories, before or since, have approached.

The current Warner Bros. DVD edition of The Haunting is an essential disc on my shelf despite being a mixed bag. The good news is that the disc presents the film in its original 2.35:1 widescreen. Plus there's a commentary track with Wise, screenwriter Gidding, and all four principal actors; they were recorded separately and the track is only marginally scene-specific, but good information and warm reminiscing are on hand.

Also added are a click-through stills gallery of pages from Wise's original screenplay plus his handwritten notes, a slide-show gallery of promo material, the endearingly overcooked theatrical trailer (in DD 2.0), and a few perfunctory words on cinematic ghost stories.

The less-good news is that the film and audio elements received minimal upgrade attention. Oh, it's a fine print marred only by minor flecks and scratches, but the contrast is boosted a bit too high, resulting in greater sharpness but diminished grayscale detail and a few overblown whites. More disappointing is the audio track, which is clean and clear but quite thin, even for its vintage, in low-fi Dolby 1.0 monaural. Expect to crank up your volume control for a satisfactory level. None of which is a show-stopper, mind you. It's just that The Haunting's complex and scarifying sound cries out for a stereo or 5.1 surround remix option. Given a mindful, expertly managed sound enhancement using its original elements, Chapter 12 — boom, Boom BOOM — all by itself would be a real pants-wetter.

Music: All the John Lennon on my iPod (a lot) on the day that would have been his 70th birthday.
Near at hand: An Advanced Reading Copy of Manu Joseph's Serious Men