The Curse of the Living Corpse is usually dismissed as a cheap Z film, along with most of Del Tenney’s output. Indeed Roy Scheider (billed as Roy R. Scheider), later the star of hits like Jaws (1975), Marathon Man (1976), Blue Thunder (1983) and 2010 (1984) and here in his first ever screen role, was reported to refuse to acknowledge The Curse of the Living Corpse on his resume. In truth, this is mostly a case of Del Tenney’s bad movie director reputation preceding him. The Curse of the Living Corpse is not a bad film at all. It is by no means a great film either, strictly average, but not too different from any of the other genre films being made around the time.

It is fairly clear that The Curse of the Living Corpse has been made in an attempt to copy Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations that were all the vogue at the time, beginning with The House of Usher (1960). Tenney borrows the same gloomy 19th Century settings that Corman so favoured, showing various members of a well-to-do family in a state of aristocratic decay. The initial reading of the will makes reference to premature burial (even though this is an element that has little to do with the film) that features in much of Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction and the Corman films – Corman even made one entitled Premature Burial (1962). Moreover, Roy Scheider really gives a Vincent Price performance – close your eyes and you would really swear that it is Price going through all the tortured self-loathing dialogue in one of his roles for Corman.

But where Roger Corman’s films concentrated on a brooding mood, Tenney has created The Curse of the Living Corpse around a series of sensationalistic deaths. Indeed, rather than a Corman Poe film, what Living Corpse resembles is something like Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), which was based around serving up a series of lurid novelty despatches. These often prove quite entertaining. Tenney gets a big fun jolt with the first of these when Robert Milli opens a silver tray that supposedly contains his breakfast and finds Linda Donovan’s severed head there. There are other quite effective scenes like where the killer drowns Margot Hartman (Tenney’s real-life wife) in the bath, where Tenney makes maximum effort to get Hartman as near-naked as censorship of the time allowed him to; Helen Warren set afire in her bed; Robert Milli being dragged along behind his horse; and a graphic shot where J. Frank Lucas is stabbed in the face with the sword cane. Certainly, you have to commend Del Tenney in these scenes for going for broke and not holding much back.

The plot itself is a rather routine one. It bears much in common with a 1960s psycho-thriller or indeed an Old Dark House thriller like The Cat and the Canary (1927) about relatives being bumped off in an elaborately contrived scam by what at first seems like something supernatural. There are quite a few similarities between The Curse of the Living Corpse and the obscure Old Dark House film The Ghoul (1933) about Boris Karloff seemingly revived from the dead and hunting his greedy relatives through a big gloomy mansion. The end mundane revelation is all rather contrived.

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