Roger Corman co-produced and directed TALES OF TERROR during his early period of successful Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson were only more than happy to release further Corman Poe adaptations under their American International Productions (A.I.P.) banner. The presence of Vincent Price and Peter Lorre insured that TALES OF TERROR would make an impact with the drive-in crowd. The film was eventually syndicated on late night TV, in a terrible pan’n scan version, which compromised the colorful and atmospheric widescreen visuals. Home Video was never kind to TALES OF TERROR, until a widescreen laserdisc was released in the mid-1990’s. MGM, which had since retained rights to most of A.I.P.’s catalog, reached deep into their vaults to release this cult favorite.

Besides the opening narration, Vincent Price is a triple threat; as he stars as three characters (one in each segment): Fortunado, Valdemar, and Locke. The great Peter Lorre is the murderously hilarious Montressor Herringbone. The penultimate Sherlock Holmes actor, Basil Rathbone, plays the lecherous hypnotist, Carmichael. Maggie (THE FASTEST GUITAR ALIVE) Pierce portrays Lenora Locke. Leona (SCREAM OF THE BUTTERFLY) Gage plays her dead mother, Morella. The lovely Joyce (DEATH RACE 2000) Jameson plays the cheating wife, Annebel Herringbone. David (RETURN OF THE FLY) Frankham is Dr. Elliot James. Debra (THE HAUNTED PALACE) Paget plays the pretty young wife whose husband is dying, Helene Valdemar.

TALES OF TERROR is essentially a trilogy of Poe adaptations. The first segment is adapted from Poe’s Morella. Lenora Locke (Maggie Pierce) is a 26 year old woman suffering from a terminal disease. She returns home to her estranged father, Locke (Price), whom she has not seen since she was an infant. Her father is still mourning the death of his beloved wife, Morella (Leona Gage), who died shortly after their daughter Lenora’s birth. Locke reminisces about Morella’s final moments, when she placed the blame for her impending death on their own infant daughter. Lenora is startled when she discovers her father has kept his wife’s corpse inside the house all these years. Still, she and her father reconcile their differences, but the spirit of the evil Morella still dwells within the family mansion.

The second segment is based on Poe’s The Black Cat. This story features hallucinating cat-hater, Montressor Hemmingbone (Peter Lorre), who tries to bilk money from his wife (Joyce Jamison) to purchase liquor to feed his addiction. When he discovers a wine salesman’s convention in town, he sneaks into the event and challenges the resident wine-taster Fortunado (Price again) to a name-that-wine contest. After a heated drunken competition, they quickly develop respect for one another, and Fortunado helps waddle his new friend home to his wife. Once there, Montressor passes out, giving Fortunado an opportunity to put moves on Montressor’s wife. When Montressor is out at the pubs every night getting drunk, Fortunado is at Montressor’s home having an affair with his wife. It does not take long, however, for Montressor to discover their secret relationship, and he takes steps to put a stop to their romance.

The final segment is based on Poe’s The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar. This time, Vincent Price is the terminally-ill Valdemar. To the dismay of his young wife, Helene (Debra Paget), and his physician, Dr. James (David Frankham), he undergoes hypno-therapy to relieve the pain of his illness. The hypnotist is Dr. Carmichael (Basil Rathbone), an ambitious man who covets Valdemar’s wife and fortune. At Valdemar’s urging, Carmichael places him in a hypnotic trance at the moment of his death. Valdemar’s spirit remains trapped within his home, as Carmichael attempts to usurp his wife and position. Valdemar’s ghost seeks revenge on Carmichael for his hypnotic manipulations.

Richard Matheson is a very talented writer who has the Midas touch with everything he writes. But, at Corman’s urging, Matheson took a lot of liberties with the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Matheson gives characters motivations and histories that contradict Poe’s original intentions. I’m not so sure Poe would approve of these changes to his work, were he still around when the TALES OF TERROR was produced. But even if it’s bad Poe, it’s terrific Corman, and sometimes his additions bring out some interesting variations of their own.

The Morella segment ignores most of the plot of the short Poe tale, and deals with the events after the climax. Corman counters Poe’s misogyny by shifting the viewpoint away from the male narrator to a female heroine who barely exists in the original story. It is Lenora who enters the house, experiences its horrors, and eventually restores her father’s sanity. Locke is initially hostile, and clearly insane with grief; his house is exactly as it was on the day his wife died, complete with a banquet table wreathed in cobwebs and tarantulas. Gradually, though Locke’s sanity returns through the love of his daughter, herself dying after a lifetime of failed relationships. The plot becomes dominated by the women--the heroine is killed, Morella takes her place - masculinity is impotent and goes irretrievably insane; and the house literally goes up in flames. The segment’s melodramatics are uninteresting, and Vincent Price’s heart doesn’t seem in it, but there is remarkable narrative commentary from the wonderful music, and a brisk fluidity to Corman's filming that demands admiration.

The centerpiece is a wonderful black comedy that borrows elements from both The Black Cat and The Cask of Amontilado. Poe’s story is one of the most horrific things I've ever read, featuring a once-sensitive man who declines into alcoholism, beats his wife, gouges the eye out of, than hangs, a cat, and finally splits his wife’s head open with an axe, before walling her corpse in a cellar. It’s existential, metaphysical and supernatural depths are despairing to consider, its violence as repellent as literature can get. Corman’s segment however, is as much bouncy fun as you can have. The unnamed narrator becomes Montressor Herringbone (!), embodied by a very short and fat Peter Lorre. There are moments of unpleasantness as he harasses his wife for money, but there is little sense of crisis in his paralysis. Price is an absolute hoot as a ludicrous wine expert, Fortunato - the tasting competition is comic genius - which begins an affair with Montressor’s wife. Montressor finds out, and determines to revenge himself. The dispatch of Fortunato, his imprisonment, the visit of the police, Montressor’s hallucinations and dreams, and the final revelation should all be deeply horrific, but are instead delightful fun. The playful music, the jokey fade outs, the continuous intimation than repudiating of darkness, the gleeful pantomime performances, all adds to the segment’s effect.

The third segment is closest to the original story in terms of its plot, but furthest from its spirit. Poe’s story about a hypnotist who managed, through mesmerism, to keep a man alive after death was written with such detachment that it was printed in a prestigious scientific journal as a true case study. That sense of experiment and report is crucial to the story’s success as it reveals the paganistic powers of science, the unfathomable capabilities of the mind, and the terror of a dead man who cannot die. The mesmerist-narrator is always a detached scientist, and while his very detachment in such a case might betoken insanity, it is a far cry from the eye-rolling villainy of Basil Rathbone here, who simply wants to marry Valdemar’s wife. Poe intended to show how mad calm, rational science is. Rathbone is simply demonized, with a personal stake in playing with a man’s soul. This makes Valdemar’s plight less shocking, but Carmichael, within Rathbone’s barnstorming limits, is an interesting character, unable to cope with the monster he has created, and finally destroyed by it. The casting of Rathbone is a welcome stroke of genius; still the embodiment of rationalist supreme, Sherlock Holmes, our expectations are compellingly checked here.

Vincent Price puts on a virtual tour-de-force with his three roles. Price seems a little uncomfortable with the first segment, but he really gets to use comic timing in the second segment, and his dramatic range in the third. Its a riot seeing him as the wine taster Fortunado, sampling the wines using a variety of humorous expressions to give the impression of the wines’ tart flavor. As amusing as Price is here, he is upstaged by Peter Lorre, who is a master at this type of comedy (This unlikely duo would chart similar territory again in Corman’s light-hearted THE RAVEN). Basil Rathbone makes for a steely villain in Carmichael. The ladies (Debra Paget, Joyce Jameson, Leona Gage, and Maggie Peirce) work extra hard to keep up with their veteran co-stars, and all turn in memorable performances.

-  Victor Bryant 

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