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: "House of Usher" & "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1960, '61) — Poe-try in motion

It's another DVD double-discer this time. We're talking not just a veritable pair of Vincent Price performances, but American International Pictures' first two of eight moody, broody films adapted from (actually, more "kind of inspired by, a little, sort of, if you squint") Edgar Allan Poe's atmospheric horror tales.

Sharing the marquee lights with Price is their producer/director, B-maestro Roger Corman, probably Hollywood's most capable director to ever squeeze blood from a long line of low-budget turnips. It's Corman who convinced AIP's cost-conscious chieftains, Sam Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, that for the price of two of the black-and-white drive-in monster flicks that had been Corman's stock in trade in the 1950s — It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Teenage Cave Man, multiple etceteras — they could instead shift gears and increase their butts-in-seats quotient with a full-color Panavision widescreen macabre chiller "based on" a higher-browed commodity.

At first, Arkoff and Nicholson balked, stuck thinking that there's no way these rock-and-roll kids would drop their dollars to see a movie derived from a dead poet their teachers forced them to read in school. However, Corman's shrewd move of bundling his proposal with established star Vincent Price and successful novelist-screenwriter Richard Matheson sweetened the package. Besides, over in the U.K. newly revamped versions of Frankenstein and Dracula had just put Hammer Films and a goosed-up horror-film biz on the map, so why shouldn't AIP be the American outfit to mine the gold in costume gothic frights?

Courtesy Greenbriar Picture Shows

Especially now to our horror-jaded eyes fifty years on, House of Usher (aka Fall of the House of Usher and The Mysterious House of Usher) and its follow-up The Pit and the Pendulum are modest efforts, talky and downtempo, arch and affected. But Corman seemed to congenitally know how to fill a frame and touch our deep-down buttons, and each film is a noteworthy landmark in shoestring-budget filmmaking. Watch them one after the other and you can see the sharp amping-up of Corman's talent and his demonstrable ability to make a dollar look like ten. Or at least seven.

His reward was a level of critical and, more importantly, commercial success that convinced AIP to continue the series with even better movies yet to come over the next five years, meanwhile launching not just careers but an entire "look and feel" of creeps-and-chills suspense cinema.

The script behind Corman's House of Usher owes less to Poe's original story than to screenwriter Matheson, who remains deservedly well known for The Incredible Shrinking Man, the groundbreaking I Am Legend, episodes of The Twilight Zone (such as "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"), Duel (Steven Spielberg's feature film directing debut), 1999's Stir of Echoes, and other genre high points. In fact, he's represented right now on our mall movie screens by Real Steel, based on Matheson's 1956 short story "Steel," which in its time became a 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone.

Poe himself stands to the side, like a maître d', while Matheson and Corman send handsome young swain Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon, from Mario Bava's Black Sabbath) to the titular spooky New England house with hopes to wed beautiful Madeline (Myrna Fahey), the fragile sister of isolated, physically hypersensitive castellan Roderick Usher (Price, of course, splendid in his cool aristo mode):

"Madeline and I are like figures of fine glass. The slightest touch and we may shatter. Both of us suffer from a morbid acuteness of the senses. Mine is the worst for having existed the longer, but both of us are afflicted with it. Any sort of food more exotic then the most pallid mash is unendurable to my taste buds. Any sort of garment other then the softest, is agony to my flesh. My eyes are tormented by all but the faintest illumination. Odors assail me constantly, and as I've said, sounds of any degree whatsoever inspire me with terror."

Philip finds himself marrying — unless desperate Roderick can prevent it to quell the Usher bloodline — into a decadent family cursed to madness. The Usher mansion is itself inherently evil, Roderick says, reminding me of Hill House, the New England monstrosity that was "born bad" in The Haunting. By the time Philip arrives, the place is literally cracking up, brick by brick, along with the psyches around him.

Add a little premature burial — "Did you know that I could hear the scratching of her fingernails on the casket lid?" — plus a ghostly presence, a creepy dream sequence, buckets of dry ice, dark passageways, shadowy baroque chambers, and a climactic firestorm using footage repeated later in the series, and you get one of the prime reasons Corman became a cult favorite subgenre unto himself.



Corman shot House of Usher in 15 days — the longest shooting schedule he'd had to that point — and on a budget of only $200,000, his largest to date. He devoted his team to getting the most out of every moment and nickel. To shoot the opening sequence, for instance, of Mark Damon riding toward the Usher mansion, Corman sent his crew to burned-out acreage blackened by a recent fire in the Hollywood hills, which provided an eerily desolate, skeletal, blasted landscape that was both effective and economical. Each interior scene is carefully composed and shot on sumptuous labyrinthine sets for maximum ambience. For that reason, don't watch any of the Poe series except in their original widescreen versions (MGM's "Midnite Movies" DVDs are an easy source). The old pan-and-scan "adapted to fit your TV" versions are like looking at a Turner painting with the left and right thirds sawed off.

House of Usher marked the beginning of one of Hollywood's great collaborative teams: director Corman, elegant gentleman villain Vincent Price, cinematographer Floyd Crosby, production designer Daniel Haller, and score composer Les Baxter. Corman's colleagues took notice. The Producers Guild of America awarded Usher the Golden Laurel (now the Producers Guild Award) for Sleeper of the Year.

Certainly some elements feel dated now, and as usual Price's fellow actors can't hold a candle to his subdued performance that vibrates gloom, menace, and sympathy altogether like a set of harmonized tuning forks. (That said, character actor Harry Ellerbe as Bristol, the family's loyal and sensible retainer, is also quite fine.)

Usher still holds up admirably as an example of stately suspense that doesn't resort to gore, monsters, or overuse of shock effects. So don't watch it looking for Scream-style frights, but do watch MGM's DVD edition twice — once for the movie, then a second time for Corman's engaging commentary track: an 80-minute Film School crash course in getting things right the first time.

Which brings us to...

Courtesy Greenbriar Picture Shows

This time around we get another eerie castle complete with torture chamber, murder, insanity, adultery, the ghastly look of premature burial, that huge swinging blade, and the refined camp of Price chewing the scenery like a gourmand.

Not at all surprisingly, Poe's tale contributes only to the final act of The Pit and the Pendulum, with once again stalwart genre screenwriter Richard Matheson giving Mr. Poe a creative assist and a plot. Still, several of Edgar Allan's themes and images are on hand here, particularly his fear of the nasty death.

Set in 16th-century Spain just after the Inquisition, this opulent mood piece is practically a remake of Usher in narrative, tone, and style — as you'd expect given that Pit saw the return of Corman's production team, including art director Haller. Again Corman had a restrictive budget and only two weeks to shoot, but this time around he had a little more money and a broader creative canvas to work with.



Even synopsizing the plot risks giving away too much, so let's just say that when a young man (John Kerr) journeys to the cliffside castle of Don Nicholas Medina (Price) to visit the grave of his sister, Nicholas' wife Elizabeth ("scream queen" fan fave Barbara Steele), he discovers more than he bargains for — a devious plot built on a ghastly event from years before, certain proclivities (and a fully equipped dungeon) that convivial Medina inherited from his father the Inquisition torturer, and a lovers' secret that ends in madness and more than one unpleasant demise.

Much of what can be said about House of Usher applies to The Pit and the Pendulum. It's proof that suspense is created by things more elemental than production dollars. It again dispels the notion that Corman was (only) a schlockmeister, instead showcasing a clever, striking visual panache wedded to Daniel Haller's lush production design. It reminds us that flat, colorless character actors — namely wooden boy John Kerr and negligible Luana Anders as Price's sister — come off really flat and colorless when sharing a scene with Price when his swooping, grand operatic melodrama dial is turned to 11. Fortunately, Corman's camera relishes Price's precisely modulated histrionics like an approaching lover. (The down side is that the film's momentum stops cold when Price is off the screen.) And Pit shows us that just when the audience thinks the story's over, that's when you pull out the creepy final surprise.

Stephen King, in his treatise on horror in radio, TV, and film, Danse Macabre, had this to say about a crucial scene in The Pit and the Pendulum: "Following the Hammer films, this becomes, I think, the most important moment in the post-1960 horror film, signaling a return to an all-out effort to terrify the audience ... and a willingness to use any means at hand to do it."

Like its sibling DVD of Usher, MGM's "Midnite Movies" edition of The Pit and the Pendulum comes with an illuminating audio commentary by Roger Corman, whose extraordinary memory supplements any film school's how-to-direct syllabus. Also here is a pointless "rare prologue" that spoils the movie's ending, so watch it last, if at all.

This second entry in Corman's Poe series kept his success on solid tracks that reached a memorable zenith with The Masque of the Red Death, which I'll be getting to here shortly.

Music: KEXP.org
Near at hand: My second favorite coffee mug