Stark Raven Mad: the Edgar Allen Poe Cycle of Roger Corman!

The late poet laureate of neuroticism and despair, Edgar Allen Poe's work is sufficiently well-matched to the mournful strains of doom metal that nautik funeral doom band Ahab cut a whole album based upon his single novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the title of which album spoils the ending of the book, so click only if, like the FUCK you are, you haven't read it.

Look, you made him sad.

But doom wasn't invented in the early 60s, when the bleakest music on the radio was, like, Roy Orbison or something, so instead the late literary depressive is largely commemorated to the illiterate masses by a cycle of Roger Corman movies mostly starring Vincent Price and a series of colour gels and frame distortion effects used to produce endearingly dated psychedelic dream sequences. These flicks range from pretty hardcore for their day to broad comedy, but it's Halloween and I've covered everything else, so let's scrape the bottom of the cask of Amontillado.

The Premature Burial!

Theme: Low Estate - 16 Horsepower

Boy, that's a deep grave.

The sole pre-Price entry in the cycle is actually one of the better ones, instead starring Someone Else as the depressed protagonist obsessed with the terror of being buried alive. Hazel Court plays his concerned bride, and Heather Angel his gravely-countenanced sister. Beset by haunting whistling, flapping windows, and morbid associations of flowers with graves, Else devises an ingenious escapable mausoleum with several backup plans built into it. BUT WILL IT WORK? Not if his psychedelic nightmare is to be believed. Shouldn't have bought from Acme Co.! IS Someone Else's family truly cursed? IS there a mastermind plotting his ruin? IS he going bibbety-bibbety-bibbety mad? HOW much of the budget was devoured by the fog machine? FIND OUT, NERD.

House of Usher!

Theme: Pictures On My Wall - Echo and the Bunnymen

You and me each week when I upload.

Most of these films open with someone showing up at a spooky house inhabited by an obsessive neurotic, typically played by Vincent Price. Over the course of the movie, the visitor learns a little more about the character, his particular obsessions, and his family lore. In House of Usher, Price is hypersensitive to noises, light and touch, and holds his frail sister half a hostage in the titular domicile, against the protagonist's efforts to take her back to Boston and marry her. It's a long slow burn played with deathly sombre seriousness, so watch back-to-back with The Raven (below) for maximum whiplash. In lieu of too much spoilers I will simply choose this point to demonstrate the comically dated but kind of cool psychedelic aesthetic of the ubiquitous dream/fantasy/vision sequences characteristic of these films:

It's always this colour in my heart.

The Pit and the Pendulum!

Theme: I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement - Ramones

CRINGE ALERT: this flick reiterates the most enduring tenet of the Black Legend of Spain: that the Inquisition was LE BAD. In reality, the Inquisition was much more humane than the mainstream judicial/penal system of its day. It introduced significant reforms into the practice of torture (which was ubiquitous until extremely recent times and frankly still is in most of the world) such as requiring a physician present to ensure no lasting harm to the prisoner, and limiting sessions to an hour at a time. Inquisition prisons were so much nicer than secular ones that prisoners convicted of regular crimes would profess heresy just to get transferred.

"Ugh! Pat, can't we get through one dinner without you relitigating the Spanish Inquisition?"

"LMAO no"

Then of course there's the fact the Inquisition wasn't just sadistic maladjusts going around hurting people for thoughtcrimes (that's you guys); it was vital counterintelligence infrastructure against converso partisans still waging covert campaigns on behalf of the evil al-Andalus regime that subjugated the Iberian peninsula for centuries. I'm literally not even being edgy or provocative at all in saying that the Inquisition did nothing wrong, so it's disappointing to see someone as smart as Poe fall for such cheap propaganda nonsense (you I've long ceased to expect anything of).

That massive filibuster aside, Pit was a pretty brief short story so most of the movie adaptation pads by recycling the familiar motifs of premature interment neurosis, only this time everyone's dresƒed like William Shakeƒpeare.

Tales of Terror!

Theme: The Casque of Amontillado - Blitzkid

Since Poe mostly worked in the short story format, it makes sense they'd do a rapid-fire anthology film, so they did, with three instalments loosely adapting at least four of the author's Tales of Terror (1962)!. Morella recycles the spooky-house-arrival motif from the openings of prior entries; this time, Price is a drunken recluse still inconsolable over the death of his wife twenty-six years ago, sought by his ailing daughter looking for some closure.

I gotta dust my creepy staircase too. Way to remind me, Corman.

The Black Cat mixes in elements of The Cask of Amontillado with the tale from which it takes its title. While Poe's Amontillado's Montresor was stone cold, Corman's Tales of Terror (1962)'s The Black Cat's Montresor (Peter Lorre) is more plainly the abusive inebriate of Poe's The Black Cat (1843, colourised), but sloppy-drunkmaxxing and relatively animal-abuserminning, for this instalment is a comedy.

I feel seen.

Finally, The Case of M. Valdemar returns to darker, higher-concept territory, in which manner Tales of Terror (1962) mirrors the V-shaped curve by which this cycle opened srs bsns and descended headlong into self-parody by its rough midpoint (The Black Cat/The Raven) before going dark again by the end. This type of tonal seesaw would happen later with such series as A Nightmare on Elm Street (bottoms out with Freddy's Dead, goes horror again with New Nightmare) or James Bond (gets sillier through Moore, srser with Dalton, sillier with Brosnan, srser with Cr**g), but these were obvious cases of studios reacting to perceptions and correcting (or, in Cr**g's case, incorrecting) accordingly. Corman just seems to have felt like doing horror one year, comedy the next. Black Cat goes so far off the deep end it invents a dream sequence where Price and Lorre's ex-wife play piggy-in-the-middle with Lorre's head, prompting ????s from such viewers as me.

"YOLO" - Corman.

Valdemar concerns the existential question of life after death, with Price's protag placed under hypnosis at the moment of his expiration by the fiendish Basil Rathbone, which concept is sufficiently intriguing to prompt Hamletesque pontifications on matters metaphysical, inducing dread beyond the modest remit of your typical October entertainment. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.

If I look undecided on the way out, I authorise you to mash my head with a sledgehammer until unrecognisable. >inb4 it'd be an improvement.

The Raven!

Theme: The Bird is the Word - Ramones

The most fanciful departure from its source material in the cycle (which is saying something) recasts Poe's repetitious corvid as another sad-sack drunk played by Lorre, transfigured into a bird by Boris Karloff's master magician, who seeks the aid of Price's comparably skilled conjurer to reverse his plight. Twists, turns, malarkey and shenanigans ensue in roughly that order, and Hazel Court returns as the much-mourned Lenore. There's also a role for a young Jack Nicholson before his fame exploded, which just seems incongruous.

"You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? HERE'S JOHNNY BITCH" - the new kid, for some reason.

The Raven goes full comedy but is at least quite entertaining, especially when it comes to the climactic wizards' duel:

The Masque of the Red Death!

Theme: Masque of the Red Death - Crimson Glory

After his more benign turn in The Raven, Price switches it up again in Masque of the Red Death as Prince Epstein, the silver screen's biggest asshole since Alec Baldwin, who orders villages razed, bullies his obnoxious courtiers into debasing themselves for his amusement, literally worships Satan and hangs out with an oafish nonce who drools over a lady midget, then backhands her for spilling some wine. This subplot mixes in another Poe short, Hop-Frog, but the dwarfette's bf is renamed Hop-Toad, like they thought that way noone would notice. Fortunately Hop-Toad burns the pedo alive at the eponymous dance, so at least the subplot has a happy ending.

Wow, dear reader, I can't believe "we represent the Lollipop Guild" just popped into your mind right now. What's wrong with you?

There's an hilariously inexplicable sequence in which, for the crime of branding her awesome rocking tits, (you guessed it) Hazel Court is punished with visions in which she's sacrificed in turn by an Aztec, Karl Marx, an Egyptian and a witch doctor.

Should have left God's finest work alone, thot!

Masque never attempts to make much sense, but is at least a visual spectacle for the ages, not unlike...

The Tomb of Ligeia!

Theme: Ligeia - Annihilator

This would be a gr8 place to take my stacked goth gf on a first date IF I HAD ONE

The cycle concludes as it commenced with a srs tale of neurotic pathology and, once again, mixes in bits of another tale (The Black Cat again) in its freewheeling adaptation of the source. The opening scene seems wildly mismatched with everything that follows, with Price still in hammy villain mode from the Masque days, only to settle into morose morbidity in the rest of the film. Like Lenore, the late Ligeia's gone but not forgotten and not very gone at that, but Price encounters a lookalike (both roles are played by the same actress) on a fox hunt and, despite a courtship filled with more red flags than a male feminist's bio, they're soon wed. But all is not well!!!!, for Price mysteriously disappears at night, leaving Rowena to be haunted and maddened by trippy nightmares.

There's something very fairy-tale about this one, idk

IS Rowena going mad? IS Price? IS you??? OR has Ligeia's malign will survived bodily death to reassert its claim over Price in perpetuity? WELL??

I would compare these movies to nothing so much as Stuart Gordon's HP Lovecraft adaps, inasmuchsofarwith as they play as fast and loose as UR MOM with the material, are no substitute, but are kind of deranged fun in their own vein. Until next time!