| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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THE HAUNTED PALACE
Rating: 
USA. 1963.
Director/Producer – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Charles Beaumont, Based on the Novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft, Title Based on the Poem by Edgar Allan Poe, Photography – Floyd Crosby, Music – Ronald Stein, Makeup – Ted Coodley, Production Design – Daniel Haller. Production Company – AIP/Alta Vista.
Cast:
Vincent Price (Charles Dexter Ward/Joseph Curwen), Debra Paget (Ann Ward), Frank Maxwell (Dr Willett), Lon Chaney Jr (Simon Orme), Leo Gordon (Ezra Weeden/Edgar Weeden), Elisha Cook Jr (Michas Smith/Gideon Smith)
Plot: In the small New England town of Arkham, the townspeople discover Joseph Curwen has taken a local girl and is preparing to use her in blasphemous rituals to interbreed humans with the Elder Gods, something that will allow the Gods to have dominion over the Earth again. Curwen is dragged out and burnt at the stake. He dies cursing the locals, saying he will return to haunt their children’s children. 110 years later and Curwen’s descendant Charles Dexter Ward and his wife Ann arrive in Arkham to inherit the Curwen mansion but are afforded a frosty welcome by the locals. In the mansion, the weak Ward’s mind is taken over by the spirit of Curwen, emanating from a portrait over the mantle. Using Ward, Curwen again sets about on his blasphemous mission again, while taking revenge on the descendants of those that burned him.
The Haunted Palace is often taken as one of the series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations that Roger Corman made during the 1960s. (See below for Corman’s other Poe films). And while the film was billed as ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace‘ and has most of the production personnel behind all of Corman’s other Poe films involved, it is in fact based upon a novella by H.P. Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft is a cult horror writer. Writing between 1922 and his death in 1937, Lovecraft created an extraordinary body of work, all centered around cosmic nightmares – of ancient gods waiting beyond the abyss of time to return and wreak havoc, of blasphemous rites, abominable experiments in miscegenation and people driven insane by contact with the elder forces. Corman and his team originally started out making a straight adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (published posthumously in 1941) but then had the Poe title forced on them by AIP who were seeking to exploit a connection with Corman’s Poe films. The Poe connection is tenuous to say the least – there is no palace in the film, nor really any haunting or anything to do Poe’s 1839 mood poem, although Vincent Price gets to quote a couple of lines from it to justify the connection. What the film does trade on is the redolent, oppressive atmosphere of Roger Corman’s Poe films. And as it transpires, Lovecraft and (at least the filmic) Poe make strangely congruous bedfellows.
The Corman production team are on good form – a fine brooding Ronald Stein score, and with cinematographer Floyd Crosby and production designer Haller making particularly good usage of drowned-out colour contrasts – the house all in muted browns, the town in greys, being strikingly lit up by the occasional flash of a red gown. And the sets that Haller builds – so that Crosby can with quite raw effect crank the camera right up to the ceiling over the sacrificial altar, or breathtakingly pan through the cavernous hallway of the house – are excellent. There is much of a classical elegance to Corman’s direction – like the strangely ritualistic scene in the streets where the mutants surround Price and Paget and move off at the tolling of a bell; and a quite sadistically nasty scene where Price douses Elisha Cook in fuel and then coldly tosses a match at him. Price overdoes his familiar craven, cringing thing as Ward, but that sinister smile as Curwen takes over has a potency. What the film principally lacks though is something to do once it has gotten its warlock back to life, really only thereafter circling around cliche warlock’s revenge and sacrificial virgin plots.
Roger Corman’s other Poe films are: The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was later remade by Dan O’Bannon as the also worthwhile The Resurrected (1992). This film’s production designer Daniel Haller would also go onto direct two other H.P. Lovecraft adaptations in the same style as Corman’s Poe films with Die, Monster, Die/Monster of Terror (1965) and The Dunwich Horror (1969).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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