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THE TOMB OF LIGEIA
Rating: 
UK. 1964.
Director – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Robert Towne, Based on the Short Story Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe, Producer – Pat Green, Photography – Arthur Grant, Music – Kenneth V. Jones, Special Effects – Ted Samuels, Makeup – George Blackler, Art Direction – Colin Southcott. Production Company – AIP.
Cast:
Vincent Price (Verden Fell), Elizabeth Shepherd (Rowena Trevanian/Ligeia Fell), John Westbrook (Christopher Gough), Oliver Johnston (Henrick), Derek Francis (Lord Trevanian), Richard Vernon (Dr Vivian)
Plot: Verden Fell buries his late wife Ligeia who committed suicide, but is certain that she is not really dead. Some time after Rowena Trevanian, the daughter of a neighbouring lord, is thrown on top of Ligeia’s grave by her horse during a foxhunt. Fell appears and insists she come to the abbey where he lives so that he can tend her. She becomes fascinated by the strange, morbidly preoccupied Fell and agrees to marry him. But after the marriage he becomes obsessed, seeing her as being possessed by the spirit of Ligeia.
This was the eighth and last of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptions. (See below for the other titles). It is claimed in some quarters as the best of the series. Bearing this in mind, one however finds it the most overrated of the films. The plot shuffles around the basic elements of the rest of the films – love from beyond the tomb, possession, the doom and gloom obsessed hubbie, the pretty innocent bride driven around the bend by such obsessions, the gloomy Gothic mansion, sinister black cats, a neurotic and cowering Vincent Price suffering from hyper-acuteness of the senses, and everything going up in flames at the end. But the lack of much connecting logic to it all makes it a fairly uninspired rehash.
The English location shooting makes a welcome relief from the usual fog-laden sets – taking it somewhat closer to the Hammer horror films which inspired Corman’s Poe series in the first place. But Corman and cast hardly seem to be doing much more than playing a game of hide-and-seek in a set of Gothic ruins. Price’s usual clipped, overwroughtly enunciated delivery is okay. A scene where Elizabeth Shepherd is hypnotized and possessed by Ligeia contains a good jolt. But it’s still no good – the dialogue is flowery, the pace slow, nothing ever really happens and when it does is never properly explained.
Robert Towne later went onto become one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters with scripts for films like Chinatown (1974), Shampoo (1974), Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) and the Mission: Impossible films, among others.
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 Poe-titled but H.P. Lovecraft adapted The Haunted Palace (1963) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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