Tall and erudite, with a booming, instantly recognizable voice, Vincent Price is too often regarded as a camp figure. Yes, there are unhinged Price performances, in films that range from the incompetent to the goofy to the sublime to the disturbing. But there are many that attest to the freedom he enjoyed in playing with his image, pushing potentially ludicrous concepts into realms of poetic feeling and psychological complexity. Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death and Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General are two such films, as are Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia and Douglas Hickox’s Theater of Blood.
The Tomb of Ligeia, from 1964, is the final film in Corman’s cycle of loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, always with Price in the center ring. The plot involves a variety of familiar Poe elements: a lonely, wealthy man, a dead woman, perverse burials, and hidden passageways and crypts within an eccentric mansion that appears to embody everyone’s collective madness. In The Tomb of Ligeia’s prologue, Verden Fell (Price) buries his dead wife, Ligeia (Elizabeth Shepherd), on his property, a former abbey littered with ruins that suggest a backyard Stonehenge. This action enrages the church, as the woman is deemed to have been unholy.
Undaunted, Fell doubles down on his blasphemous actions, proclaiming that Ligeia isn’t beholden to God’s laws of mortality. A black cat jumps on the casket, which has a panel of glass illuminating Ligeia’s face, especially her eyes as they jolt open to behold the soul-stealing creature. Fell’s blithe reaction to this event is worth the price of admission alone. He accepts as a given that his wife has never truly left, which complicates his relationship with the Lady Rowena Trevanion (also played by Shepherd), to put it lightly.
Like Price, Corman has been too often been written off as a peddler of B-movie camp, who in his case started the careers of better artists, including Fracis Ford Coppola and Jonathan Demme, and there’s dozens and dozens of titles under his belt to justify that assessment. But Corman is a true artist capable of fashioning beautiful and unsettling films, of which his Poe Cycle, along with The Intruder and X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes, serve as the pinnacle. No artists have ever come as close as Corman and Price did to wresting Poe’s hysteria on screen, to capturing the author’s sense of the past eating untrustworthy protagonists alive.
The Tomb of Ligeia, said to be Price’s favorite entry in the Poe Cycle, is less claustrophobic than the other films, involving kinetic romps in the British countryside around Fell’s abbey. But its true heart resides in the design of Fell’s mansion, an expansive cavalcade of Egyptian imagery and haunted-house bric-a-brac, in hallucinatory colors in the key of Mario Bava, and in Price’s committed, rhythmic, and delectable handling of Robert Towne’s florid and, um, priceless dialogue, which suggests Poe by way of a lunatic Shakespeare student. As ever, Price doesn’t shy away from excess, giving a funny and operatic performance that is also tightly controlled and poignant. These potential contradictions essentially embody the Poe tone.
Operatic seems to be the starting point of Price’s performance in dark horror comedy Theater of Blood, from 1973. Price plays the unforgettably named Edward Lionheart, a Shakespearean actor who plots revenge on a committee of critics who routinely dismiss his work, murdering each of them according to a violent scene in one of the Bard’s plays. The gimmick is irresistible, and could make for a fun romp, but Price, Hickox, and screenwriter Anthony Greville-Bell invest Theater of Blood with a variety of strange and unsettling ironies that cut close to the class tensions of Britain and even to Price’s personal frustrations.
Price, a classically educated actor who got his start on Broadway only to make his name in a decades-long string of low-budget horror movies, could almost certainly empathize with Lionheart’s anger and feelings of having been slighted by culture. This autocritical element is baked into Theater of Blood’s very premise, and could’ve led to self-pity. However, Price embraces the extremity of the situation by madly overplaying the role of Lionheart, purposefully daring his critics to equate him to his character. What such critics might miss in the process is Price’s astonishing sense of meter, which becomes especially fascinating in the scenes where we see Lionheart performing Shakespeare before dispatching his victims.
Lionheart is meant to be a bad actor, and Price goes high on the hog with the verse, pounding it into the ceiling of the proscenium. Yet Price’s deliveries are authentically beautiful underneath the garishness; you hear his understanding of the verse even in his deliberate distortion of it. (Think of how good, say, a pool player must be to lose convincingly for the sake of the hustle.) The garishness itself is more volcanic, riskier, more simply alive than many more respectable recitations of Shakespeare. You may come away from these scenes with a kind of double resentment: of the on-screen critics and of fate for not giving Price a “straight” shot at this material. And such resentment is physicalized by the giddy yet surprisingly brutal murder scenes, which in their way remind us of the sheer visceral luridness of Shakespeare.
It’s more than implied that the critics in the film—played by a murderer’s row of British character actors—partially write off Lionheart precisely because he opens Shakespeare’s work up to people outside of their rarefied sphere. It’s very telling that the first murder occurs in a delipidated housing project, with a group of homeless derelicts, Lionheart’s army, killing a critic (Michael Hordern) in a reenactment of the central murder in Julius Caesar. The critics know Shakespeare by heart, but they’ve lost sight of the way his work used to connect with the populace; they’re also pompous, vain, and see anyone other than the elite as aliens.
Hickox’s subtle handling of this material shames recent social-minded horror movies, such as Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, where the characters are prone to self-righteously spelling out the filmmakers’ themes for the audience. Hickox allows us to sort his film’s resonances out for ourselves, especially in his use of found locations, contrasting how various people of different walks of live life. This blend of realism with pulp outrageousness was a specialty of British filmmakers of the 1960s and ’70s, and with Theater of Blood Price was allowed to become an unexpected ringmaster of a kind of kitchen-sink Grand Guignol. Like Lionheart at the glorious end of the film, Price found an unexpectedly ideal context for his multifaceted art.
The Tomb of Ligeia and Theater of Blood are now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.
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