‘Tis the Season… Hallowe’en, that is! The coolest guy in Spooksville — Vincent Price — is joined by fellow horror movie stars, including Frank Gorshin, John Astin and John Carradine, in a good-natured reflection on the genre. From 1974. More from the Old Horseman.
SALUTE TO EDGAR ALLAN POE
The Masque of the Red Death, today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, is one of eight films that Roger Corman produced and directed in the 1960s based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. All but one of the films starred 
Vincent Price, the lone exception being Premature Burial from 1963 with Ray Milland. The Masque of the Red Death, followed closely by The Tomb of Ligeia, closed out Corman’s Poe series in 1964. Although the series remained popular at the box office, Corman felt he had run out of ideas on how to present Poe creatively, and decided after these final two features to move onto other themes and genres.
That’s unfortunate because Red Death and Ligeia rank among Corman’s best Poe’s adaptations. They certainly are the most stylish and visually impressive. Corman, for the first time, shot on location in Great Britain, rather than stateside. For Red Death, he collaborated with a dazzling, young cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg, who would later shoot Fahrenheit 451, before directing Mick Jagger in Performance and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
In an artistic conceit that works amazingly well, Corman and Roeg chose to use the most brilliant, psychedelic colors for this story, rather than the drab and dark hues so often associated with films based on Poe’s tales and poems. As Irish blogger James Grancey has written, “The film unfolds within a number of opulently lit sets and thematically coloured rooms and chambers. This 
must surely be one of the most beautiful and lushly filmed horror movies and recalls the eerie beauty of work by the likes of Mario Bava and, eventually, Dario Argento.”
Price, as always, plays a villain, the debauched, power-mad, Satan-worshiping Prince Prospero. He not only mistreats and plunders from the peasants under his command, but also takes great amusement in demeaning the nobles who have gathered around him for protection. Prospero has claimed a ravishing, redheaded Christian girl (Jane Asher) as his latest trophy and fully intends to corrupt her soul, defile her body and then offer her up as a bride to the Master. But while he’s involved in palace intrigues, revelries and masked balls, a plague has spread across the countryside, threatening the lives of thousands, even the wayward fools inside the castle who believe they are immune to its ravages.
The Masque of the Red Death is essentially a morality tale, pitting the pious against the profane, the good versus the evil, the rich against the poor. In the end, none can escape a macabre dance with Death in a work that is as philosophically rich and symbolic as anything by Ingmar Bergman and reminiscent of his The Seventh Seal with multiple Grim Reapers imposing a swift, merciless justice.
Enjoy, and do return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.
A SALUTE TO EDGAR ALLAN POE
Four different dramatic readings of Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven,” one that catapulted him to fame upon its January 1845 publication in a newspaper. But while he achieved success from the poem, it earned Poe only $14 in pay. These readings are by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones and Christopher Walken, respectively.
ARVE error: need id and provider
ARVE error: need id and provider
ARVE error: need id and provider
ARVE error: need id and provider
SALUTE TO EDGAR ALLAN POE
Even though it clocks in at less than six minutes, this 1982 stop-motion animation by Tim Burton remains one of his most endearing and imaginative works. Vincent Price narrates the story of a precocious, young boy with an active fantasy life who avidly reads Edgar Allan Poe and dreams of growing up to become…Vincent Price.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, Last Man on Earth, has been acknowledged by George A. Romero as one of the major works he “ripped off” in creating Night of the Living Dead. It’s an eerie, atmospheric adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the first of four movies based on that same tale, also including The Omega Man with Charlton Heston and I Am Legend with Will Smith. Here, Vincent Price portrays the stoic hero, presumably the last man alive, battling to survive against hordes of zombie-like vampires that awake each night to stalk the Earth.
The premise: A pandemic bacterial plague has wiped out everyone except Price, spared by virtue of having once been bitten by a vampire bat in Panama, inoculating him from the disease. He leads a lonely, monotonous existence, scavenging by day for food and supplies, and seeking out the vampire lairs so he can put them out of their misery by driving wooden stakes through their hearts. At nights, he retreats to a boarded-up sanctuary, blaring jazz records and drinking scotch, while the vampires gather outside, clamoring for his head.
The film’s official tagline sets the tone, “By night they leave their graves crawling, shambling, though empty streets, whimpering, pleading, begging for his blood!”
Britain’s Hammer Films originally acquired the rights to Matheson’s story, but passed along the project to American International Pictures, which produced the 1964 film on a shoestring budget in Rome, Italy. Matheson helped to co-write the screenplay, but withdrew his credit (going under the pseudonym Logan Swanson) after having creative differences with Price. Still, this is probably the one I Am Legend adaptation that best captures the mood of the book, while adhering most literally to its narrative twists.
Some modern viewers find it a little too languid and slow-moving for their tastes, but its groundbreaking importance can’t be denied. Its influence can be seen in practically every zombie movie made over the last half-century, notably Night of the Living Dead, but also Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Enjoy and return next Friday for another Trillion ($) Movie.
