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TALES OF TERROR
Rating: 
USA. 1962.
Director/Producer – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Richard Matheson, Based on the Short Stories Morella, The Black Cat, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and [uncreditedly] The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe, Photography – Floyd Crosby, Music – Les Baxter, Music Co-ordinator – Al Simms, Photographic Effects – Butler-Glouner Inc, Special Effects Supervisor – Pat Dinga, Art Direction – Daniel Haller. Production Company – AIP.
Cast:
Morella: Vincent Price (Locke), Maggie Pierce (Lenora), Leona Gage (Morella); The Black Cat: Peter Lorre (Montresor Herringbone), Vincent Price (Fortunato Lucrezi), Joyce Jameson (Annabel Heringbone); The Case of M. Valdemar: Basil Rathbone (Carmichael), Vincent Price (Ernest Valdemar), Debra Paget (Helene Valdemar), David Frankham (Dr Elliott James)
Plot: Morella: Lenora returns home to see her father for the first time in 26 years. He blames Lenora for the death of his beloved wife Morella, who died as a result of giving birth to her. But then Morella’s ghost comes to possess Lenora. The Black Cat: Montresor Herringbone is a drunkard who has spent all his wife’s money, leaving them near penniless. He befriends Fortunato Lucrezi at a wine-drinking competition but then finds that Fortunato has started an affair with his wife. He plots revenge and poisons the two of them and then bricks their bodies up behind a wall in his cellar. But he has reckoned without his wife’s black cat, which he has accidentally also bricked up. The Case of M. Valdemar: The mesmerist Carmichael is able to relieve the dying Ernest Valdemar’s pain through hypnotism. But then Carmichael has one last request – to conduct an experiment and hypnotize Valdemar just before he dies. He is successful and is able to keep Valdemar’s spirit imprisoned in his dead body. However Valdemar, suspended between life and death, is in agony but Carmichael refuses all entreaties of others to release him.
In the 1960s, Roger Corman had considerable success and found mainstream critical acclaim with a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations beginning with The House of Usher (1960). (See list of titles at the bottom of the page for others in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe series). Tales of Terror was the fourth of these films. Here Roger Corman reteams with star Vincent Price, who appeared in all but one of the Edgar Allan Poe films, and screenwriter Richard Matheson, who wrote four of the films. With Tales of Terror, Corman altered his approach slightly in that he had Richard Matheson adapt not one but three Edgar Allan Poe tales. (In actuality there are four tales – The Black Cat segment combines two Poe stories with Richard Matheson uncreditedly also using Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado [1846]). This pormmanteau approach is something that works quite well for Poe. In the case of all Roger Corman’s other Edgar Allan Poe films, the various scriptwriters have to pad a single Poe story out to feature length. Most Poe stories are a single effect without much even in the way of motivation – in all cases Richard Matheson and the other writers had to create an entire backstory to build up to the story’s single effect. An anthology film like this is something that allows Poe to operate in a form that requires far less story padding.
The first segment, Morella, is the slightest of the stories. The story marshals all the cliches of the Corman Poe films – an old decaying house, an overwrought and obsessed Vincent Price haunted by the past, possession (the piece is like a dry run for The Tomb of Ligeia [1964]) and the house burning down at the end. There’s one eerie image of a black ghost creeping up the stairs to the sleeping daughter’s bedside, but the piece is otherwise forgettable.
The best of the segments is The Black Cat, which seems like a dry run for the more overtly comic treatment of Poe that Corman, Matheson and this episode’s two stars, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, would conduct with the following year’s The Raven (1963). Peter Lorre gives an hilarious performance – the wine-tasting contest between he and Vincent Price is a comic gem. Not to mention the quite surreal vision of a dream sequence of Price and wife playing catch with Peter Lorre’s head.
The Case of M. Valdemar quite effectively uses Poe’s single scene ending while padding it out with a full flight of “There Were Some Things Man Was Not Meant To Know” paranoia. Here Basil Rathbone gives a wonderfully arrogant performance and Roger Corman builds fine atmosphere with the eerily gurgling voice, climaxing in a memorable deliquescing effect.
Roger Corman’s other Edgar Allan Poe films are The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963), the Poe-titled but H.P. Lovecraft adapted The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). The Black Cat and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar were also adapted in the Edgar Allan Poe anthology Two Evil Eyes (1990).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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