By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
Roger Corman, the living legend who turned 97 in April, is often recognized today for his work as a producer and mentor to several key members of the New Hollywood generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Joe Dante. That said, Corman’s directorial work is also of paramount importance.
After making low-budget black-and-white films during the 1950s, Corman was given the opportunity to make a more expensive color film for American International Pictures (AIP). So he decided to move away from the contemporary world and adapt the work of an author who had interested him since he was a young student: Edgar Allan Poe. The success of The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) led to a cycle of morbid pictures that took as their starting point a short story or poem by Poe.
The so-called Poe Cycle is made up of eight feature films, primarily in the Gothic horror genre and considered by Corman himself as highlights of his directorial career: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).
Throughout the cycle, Corman had to deal with limited budgets and time, but he had a very solid crew – production designer Daniel Haller was constant and cameraman Floyd Crosby shot six installments –. Likewise, he worked with notable screenwriters such as Richard Matheson, Charles Beamount and Robert Towne, and actors like Vincent Price – the great protagonist of all of the films, except for The Premature Burial –, Ray Milland, Hazel Court, Barbara Steele, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson and Lon Chaney Jr.
In the book Corman/Poe, Canadian author, journalist, and filmmaker Chris Alexander focuses on this chapter in the immense career of his hero Roger Corman. For each film, the book offers a detailed synopsis, an interview with Corman himself, and an analysis by Alexander.
The author unpacks Corman’s way of conceiving and filming, at that time influenced by Sigmund Freud, Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock. In addition, he identifies the characteristic elements of the Poe Cycle, as well as the peculiarities of each picture: for example, Tales of Terror is an anthology, The Raven a self-parody, and The Haunted Palace is actually an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft, but AIP forced its inclusion into the cycle. As for The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia, both were shot in England for economical reasons – a young Nicolas Roeg, by the way, served as Masque‘s cinematographer –.
Corman/Poe is also full of tasty Hollywood stories, involving an actor who claimed to have directed The Pit and the Pendulum (Mark Damon), a film that was conceived out of nowhere to make the most of the sets that were built for The Raven (1963’s The Terror), or about the controversy with the Catholic Legion of Decency and the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) over the satanic, sexual and violent elements of Masque.
For the Fantastic Pavilion, I interviewed author Chris Alexander to learn more about Gothic horror and the legacy of Corman, Poe, and Price.
Eric Ortiz (EO): What was the main motivation to write Corman/Poe?
Chris Alexander (CA): I’ve been in this business for quite some time, talking with people about their work, and chronicling their adventures in print media primarily. So I have a vast wealth of content, some of it which I’ve published in Fangoria, Rue Morgue or Delirium, but some of it not.
I’ve known Roger for 20 years, when I first started he was one of my heroes I had to speak to. I’ve been talking to Roger for 20 years, the funny thing is I’d never actually met Roger in the flesh despite considering him and his wife Julie very close friends. We only met this past June at the launch for Corman/Poe in LA.
During the pandemic, when everybody was on lockdown, if you’re a creative person like me you’re looking for things to do. I found an old drive with tons of interviews that I forgot I even did. There was a lot of stuff with Roger on there that I’ve never used, not enough to do anything substantial with, so I just reached out to Roger, who was under super lockdown because, as you can imagine, a man well into his nineties was terrified on the outskirts of this, pre vaccine, that if he got it he would pass.
Also being creative, he was looking for something to do, so I pitched him the idea of making some time for me over the next few months. Roger agreed and we had many conversations during our respective lockdowns about those eight incredible pictures that I love so much. I married that with some of the stuff Roger and I had already talked about, and that was the basic skeleton of what would grow into this little book.
I reached out to Headpress in the UK and they jumped on board immediately as my publisher. The thing came together relatively quickly, from idea to agreement with Roger, who also wrote the foreword to the book. Finishing the book took a little bit of time, although it’s a very simple, elemental book, it’s still painstakingly put together. It took about a year and a half to get it together.
I worship Roger as a friend, as a fan, and I worship those eight films. I wanted to do something of value with these incredible conversations we’ve had. The result is this book.
EO: The films are different from each other, but what would you say is the essence of the Poe Cycle?
CA: The source material, if not the explicit verbiage of Edgar Allan Poe then certainly the soul of Edgar Allan Poe.
These pictures were distilled from various Poe sources, from short story to longer form tale to poem. Case in point, The Raven is actually only a poem, how do you create a film based on a poem? The Pit and the Pendulum is only a few pages long and it’s just about a guy strapped to a slab as a blade comes closer and closer to him, and it’s all his internal monologues, how you turn that into a feature film?
Even then, in the infancy of his career, Roger was already a veteran. By 1960 he’d made dozens of films and had already built the best independent film crew in Hollywood: the Corman Crew, some of the greatest artists who were either out of work, on the way down or on the way up, Roger managed to get the best of the best together. So using those talents, he managed to respectfully take that source material, which Roger had always loved since he was a boy, and expand it in innovative, interesting ways, to create these eight films.
The films are different enough from each other so they all have their own identity, but we can find common links, not just Vincent Price, who’s in seven of them, but the composers for some of them. Les Baxter’s scores for the first two pictures are outstanding but radically different than the music of Ronald Stein in The Premature Burial and The Haunted Palace. We have the internal set-bound worlds that were done in the American ones with Daniel Haller’s incredible production design, moving then into the English countryside with The Tomb of Ligeia and The Masque of the Red Death.
So they all have a little bit of a different flavor depending on who was working on the pictures at the time. Richard Matheson kind of created that blueprint of expanding the elemental source material into something really cinematic, multilevel, emotional, physical and visceral. Then the other writers that’d follow, Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell, they followed suit but each one of those experiences with the different writers also feels a little bit different. They connect together because Roger oversaw it all. The passionate, interesting vision of Roger Corman, along with his cabal of co-conspirators, is what gives these films a cohesiveness.
The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum, both in their setups and styles, almost feel like one entity. But the rest of them absolutely feel a little bit different than each other, especially The Haunted Palace, which isn’t even a Poe film at all, it’s a H.P. Lovecraft movie, so it’s the most radically alien of all of them because technically speaking it’s really not even part of that cycle.
There was a previous Lovecraft adaptation I believe, a short film, but as far as feature films are concerned, The Haunted Palace is the first. It’s based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by Lovecraft and that was what it was filmed as, until AIP bosses, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, said “we got to tie it to our franchise, we are going to slap this title on it based on a Poe poem, and we are going to call it Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace.” The brutal crime against humanity with that movie is that they actually misspelled Poe’s name in the credits, which is like “oh my God!,” so even though Roger is very diplomatic when you talk to him about that, he was probably just furious that his bosses once again fucked with his work because this was supposed to be a radical departure from the previous films, this was a Lovecraft film.
EO: What are the contributions to horror of both Poe and Lovecraft?
CA: Poe’s work is much more internal, melancholic and romantic. It’s more psychological, about the torments of the inner mind. There’s not really any, by and large, supernatural aspect to Poe, any supernatural element is usually distilled from the point of view of the person who’s suffering so exhaustingly. Maybe it’s ambiguous or they’re experiencing supernatural phenomena, or they’re just fucking insane.
Whereas Lovecraft is full-blown supernatural, we’re dealing with legitimate phenomena, elder gods, alternate universes, possession.
So The Haunted Palace is pure Lovecraft in the sense that it’s not psychological, it’s not about the inner torment. It is a simple, elemental story about the perpetual evil that transcends generations and attempts to revive these arcane monsters from the ether. It’s a little bit more purely a horror film than the other pictures.
Even though Poe and Lovecraft are sort of the two classic literary, cinematic minds of the genre, they’re so radically different, you can’t even really quantify their connections because the approach is so different.
EO: In the book it’s pretty clear you appreciate all of the Poe Cycle movies, but you tend to gravitate more towards the ones that are more enigmatic and subtextual.
CA: I love all horror cinema, I appreciate all the subgenres. But since I was a boy I absolutely have been more married to the more ambiguous, I’ve been more fascinated with the idea of somehow transposing the inner mind, the subconscious mind, to cinema. My favorite movies, the ones I keep revisiting, are the ones that sometimes confound me. Sometimes they’re movies that I didn’t really appreciate the first time because I didn’t quite understand them, but there was something in them that was so operatic, something so big, disturbing or affecting that I had to keep going back, and every time I do go back to them I find something new to pull out or new interpretations, depending on where I am. The more ambiguous horror film is always the one that intrigues me the most. I do appreciate a more ambiguous, more existential kind of horror entertainment.
In the case of the Corman films, I’m always more team Matheson, I’m a huge Richard Matheson fan. I’m a huge The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling fan, in that first season of The Twilight Zone it was all Rod Serling writing each and every one of those episodes except for a handful of them, which were by Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson. Serling handpicked these guys thinking they shared a similar sensibility.
If you read Matheson’s work as a novelist, The Shrinking Man, which was turned into Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), is an amazing work of metaphysical human drama, it’s such a great character study of a man going through this transformation almost Kafkaesque. Then there’s Hell House, which was turned into the film The Legend of Hell House (1973), one of the greatest, most harrowing evil house movies ever made, but again one that doesn’t show its hand, it’s much more about what’s going on with the characters experiencing this phenomena. Then 1954’s I Am Legend, which is my favorite book of all time, I read it once a year. It’s a story about vampires taking over the Earth but really it’s about one man faced with trying to survive the impossible and going through this incredible journey that spans years, where he goes from blue-collar schlub to fucking scientist and in between he tries to kill himself, he comes to terms with death. It’s the entire human experience set against the vampire apocalypse. It’s a fucking masterpiece.
Matheson is such akin to Poe and such a perfect fit for those first few films. He also has a great sense of humor so I even appreciate some of the goofier films like The Raven and The Black Cat in the Tales of Terror anthology. I still find enough of Matheson’s sensibilities, his marriage of pop culture and fine arts and fine literature, to be alive and pulsing in those movies as well.
EO: When you read about Corman you can learn a lot. What are the biggest lessons you can take from him both for shooting a film and dealing with the industry?
CA: Roger Corman is cinema. He’s been there if not since the dawn of cinema then certainly since the time when cinema started to become vibrant, alive, and tapped into youth culture, the counterculture. Roger birthed the counterculture, he was one of the architects of it. We would need hours and hours to get into the importance of Roger Corman, to study Roger Corman’s work.
Those Poe movies are Roger at his most intellectually fertile, when he was studying Sigmund Freud. He was much more open to everything and he had something to prove. Later on as a producer, maybe he had less to prove artistically, more as a businessman. But either way you can learn something from Roger every step of his existence, right up until today: 97 years old, still sharp as a tack and still prepping movies. He has a tireless mind. He doesn’t dwell on his failures, if any. He consistently looks towards what’s next, that’s the key to his success, and that should be the key to any filmmaker.
I find today there’s a lot of younger creators and it’s tantamount to our zeitgeist: there’s a lot of self-pity and self-victimization, there’s a lot of dwelling on the minutiae of negativity to the point where, who wants to hang around with these crybabies? Roger, while privately of course has dealt with his share of tragedies and disappointments, publicly has always been a self-made guy, gets up, brushes himself off, gets back on that horse, “if this one didn’t work then goddammit maybe the next one will.” His professional and personal philosophies are inspiring.
I teach horror film history now but when I used to teach broad film history, about 15 years ago, my students would get into class and I said: “Look, I’m going to tell something that’s probably not a wise thing to do in the context of this school, but I recommend you to go into the dean’s office and you drop out. Then you go to your local video store and you buy MGM’s DVD releases of Roger Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum, you take them home, you watch them, and then you listen to them with Roger’s commentary. You won’t need film school anymore, he will identify every step that he took to stretch a dim into a dollar, how he navigated the business creatively and professionally, with that soothing voice that only Roger has. You’ll learn everything you need to know from Roger Corman.”
As a filmmaker myself, who also gravitates towards the ambiguous and even a more hyper non-narrative, non-conformist way, I’m always thinking “what would Roger do? How did Roger do this?” One of my sons, who’s 16, I’ve turned him on Roger Corman years ago, he’s read Roger’s autobiography, that’s his all-time hero. I think that if we are wise, every film school, long after Roger passes, needs to consistently address Roger Corman, have complete units based on Roger’s work, because he is the full spectrum of cinema.
EO: When Corman is mentioned today, it’s usually more as a producer or as a mentor of Scorsese, Coppola, and so forth. Do you think he is still underrated as a director?
CA: Absolutely he is underrated as a director, on one hand. What happens is that people forget about the directorial stuff over time. When he first came roaring out of the gate, the Europeans loved him. He mentions in the book that even before the Poe films, he was being celebrated in France with stuff like Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), with Charlie Bronson, and rightfully so. If you look at Roger’s directorial stuff pre Poe pictures, all that shit is amazing, not just the fact that he cheated all these limitations but he always brought something else. On the surface, sure, Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) is literally about some kind of weird crab monsters inhabiting an island and fucking people up, but underneath it, it’s got this really bizarre, strange, almost Bergmanesque feeling to it. It’s ambiguous, abstract, eerie and cerebral, even when it’s stupid.
Roger says this in the book too: the key to creating a good genre film is to deliver something that has solid text on the surface, enough that it can hook the average viewer into watching an entertainment that connects point A to point B to point C, gives you all the exploitation elements that you want in that kind of entertainment. But there should always be a subtext bubbling underneath it, that you intentionally or unintentionally have running under the surface. The subtext should never override the text, but it should always be there so that the viewer can find something else underneath if they choose to look for it. I think that’s the key to Roger Corman, the artist, the director, is that in all of his films, no matter how low or high, he was always acutely aware of placing sometimes an elemental, sometimes a quite profound subtext underneath the main text.
Do I think he’s underrated? Absolutely, completely underrated, but by the same token, it pleases me to no end that as of this recording, The Criterion Channel, whether or not the impetus was all the bubbling going on around about my book, they’ve now launched an entire category called Grindhouse Gothic, which is the eight Poe Cycle films, right up there with all the other auteur directors that are celebrated on that channel. And that’s the way it should be.
EO: How would you introduce Vincent Price to younger audiences?
CA: Horror movies, by and large, find actors that are on the way down and then find actors that are on the way up, and they kind of meet together in the horror film. So the fact that Price was in these pictures and became a “horror star,” he was already a veteran actor by the time that evolved organically and he just managed to luckily, happily latched on to a couple of creators that were actually making decent horror films, enough to give him this sort of second life in his career. He’d worked with Otto Preminger, he was a known, respected dramatic character actor, and became a superstar in the context of the genre.
A few years ago I sat with Nicolas Cage and Cage had just had a meeting with Roger Corman. Cage was on the way down, it was around the Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011) era. He’d gone from an Oscar-winning actor to a guy that was treading water and trying desperately to stay relevant and alive. But he was also bored and being a man who’s obsessed with Vincent Price, and whose uncle (Francis Ford Coppola) obviously wouldn’t be part of the cinematic conversation without Roger Corman, he went to Roger and he said “look, I want to make a bunch of movies with you, I want you to direct them. I want to be the new Vincent Price.” And that didn’t quite work out, they couldn’t get the money together, Cage wasn’t necessarily bankable, it was a weird time for Nic.
But I would say now Nic Cage has become the new Vincent Price, because he kind of said “OK, in order to survive I have to latch on to genre films, I have to make the deal where no matter how high or low the movie, I have to be above the credits, I have to be the star of the film. I have to get my little chunk of money and that’s how I dig myself out of my hole.” Now Cage has become a genre unto himself, we watch Nic Cage movies not necessarily because they’re all great, it’s almost become an addiction where you watch them because you’re looking for that de facto Nic Cage moment.
When you watch Vincent Price movies, whether they be more restrained like The Tomb of Ligeia or Witchfinder General (1968) or more flamboyant like The Pit and the Pendulum or Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), you’re always looking for just this wild, scenery-chewing, operatic performance that’s larger than the movie that it’s in. On Mount Rushmore of cinema eccentrics, Price’s face is already there.
The Poe films play just as well today as they did then, they’re timeless, they’re not tied to any kind of technology or political zeitgeist, at least not on the text. They take place in an old world that isn’t accurate to the old world, so they kind of take place in a completely alternate dimension that doesn’t exist in any time or space, it’s uncanny, it’s familiar and yet it’s alien. Those movies will last, thus Vincent Price’s performances will endure as well. Out of all the big horror heavy hitters, history will remember Mr. Price more fondly than the other guys.
EO: On one hand, the book starts with the story of Coppola’s grandkids watching attentively The Raven in 2022. On the other hand, at the end of the interview about The Tomb of Ligeia, you both talk about younger audiences losing interest in period horror films. Also, I noticed that you liked The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) but it’s already being labeled as a flop, so do you think audiences today are losing interest in that type of period, Gothic horror?
CA: Everything moves in waves, the zeitgeist changes, generations end, things go out of favor, pop culture trends alter. But somehow it’s always cyclical, we kind of end up where we were, and then the past becomes a point of fascination for the present. So Coppola’s grandkids watching The Raven today like it’s this fantastic thing, I mean, what other movie fucking looks like The Raven? Nothing else looks like it, plays like it, it’s funny, its humor is universal enough that, again, transcends time. There’s no mention of political figures or anything that kids wouldn’t understand. They get the physical comedy of it, plus it looks amazing, it’s bizarre, macabre, and otherworldly. It’s almost like a live-action Grand Guignol Gothic cartoon, so of course kids would dig it.
When Roger was saying towards The Tomb of Ligeia people were losing interest in the Gothic horror, that’s because again the world was turning, the kids that were learning Poe in school were now starting to veer into the hippie generation where they weren’t as interested in watching stuff that their mom and dad dug, they weren’t interested in watching guys in puffy shirts with candelabras walking down dark corridors mourning their miseries. They wanted something that was more immediate, urgent, sexual. Roger was instrumental in birthing that American New Wave anyways (Corman directed films like The Wild Angels and The Trip after he stopped making Poe chillers).
Today is a hard thing to say what trends work, we’re in such a glut of media now, there’s no one muse to follow anymore. There’s so much happening that is hard to say who likes what. Gothic horror does very well on the small screen, witness Mike Flanagan’s contemporary revivals of some of the great Gothic horror properties, in fact he’s just done The Fall of the House of Usher, which is contemporary but still in the spirit of Corman and Poe.
As far as period piece horror goes, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, like the Corman movies, is set at a certain time and place and yet it’s no place, it literally takes place in a bizarre world, a strange boat that could be floating through some other dimension. Like you said, the critics are saying “it flopped,” I mean it flopped for a few reasons: I think the title is kiss of death, the kids don’t know what the fuck a Demeter is. Overseas the movie was released as Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter, that’s how they should have done it but even then maybe kids don’t even know what the hell Dracula is. I love the title but I don’t think it played well commercially to the average horror audience. I think it’ll have a great second life when it hits the small screen. This movie plays like a fucking Hammer horror movie!
Horror movies that do well theatrically aren’t necessarily horror movies that are any good or that will stand the test of time, they’re date night movies hitting a certain kind of demographic. I can’t predict the future, the trends change moment to moment. If you’re not poured into spandex and set against a green screen, making some dipshit tent-pole Marvel movie… even those will eventually burn out their coils. I don’t know what’s going to be popular anymore, but I don’t care!