Roger Corman's Poe Cycle

The death of Roger Corman at the age of 98 on 9 May brought to an end one of the most prolific and influential careers in American cinema history. We'd be here for months if we tried to do justice to the 55 features that Corman directed and the 385-odd pictures he oversaw in various credited producing capacities (there are dozens more uncredited). So, we'll focus on the eight classics that comprise the Poe Cycle.

Trained as an engineer, Roger Corman returned from a year in Oxford and Paris determined to be a film-maker. He made his directorial debut with Five Guns West (1955), which was the second feature released by the independent outfit, American International Pictures. Promising owners James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff that he could churn out two monochrome movies in 10 days, Corman enabled AIP to become a major player in the drive-in and midnite movie markets.

Cinema Paradiso has a goodly number of Corman's early outings available to rent, namely Day the World Ended (1955), Gunslinger (1956), Rock All Night, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Sorority Girl (all 1957), Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Machine Gun Kelly (both 1958), A Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman (both 1959), and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). But Corman quickly tired of churning out exploitation and convinced Arkoff and Nicholson that he could produce something more sophisticated for the usual $300,000 budget, providing he had 15 days to shoot in.

The Fall of the House of Usher

Corman latched on to the works of Edgar Allan Poe because they were out of copyright and wouldn't cost AIP a cent to redraft. Secondly, most American schoolchildren had studied Poe in the classroom and teenagers were the principal target for indie productions, because their parents preferred to stay home and watch television. Kids were telly addicts, too, of course. Indeed, they often crept downstairs for late-night screenings of the classic black-and-white chillers in the Universal horror tradition. Some may also have been aware of the lurid colour remakes produced by Hammer, although (unlikely as it sounds for someone who always had his finger on the pulse of the movie audience) Corman always maintained that he had never heard of the Bray-based studio until he came to work in Britain in the mid-1960s.

As a champion of the Gothic tale, Poe wrote in a genre that was still regarded as subversive and this made it additionally attractive to adolescent audiences sneaking their way into outdoor venues and college town fleapits hosting exploitation all-nighters. It just so happened that Corman was an avid reader and a fan of the author who had died at the age of 40 in 1849. 'Poe was an artist,' Corman enthused. 'He was a great writer.' However, he had also specialised in short stories, which gave Corman and his acolytes the chance to be creative in filling out the action to feature length.

In the case of 'The House of Usher', Corman was able to draw on his growing interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud and found a willing ally in screenwriter Richard Matheson. He had cut his teeth with Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), but had honed his craft on such classic TV series as The Twilight Zone (1959-64). He would go on to contribute to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65), Star Trek (1966-68), and Night Gallery (1969-72) before hitting his feature stride with Terence Fisher's The Devil Rides Out (1968) and Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971).

Matheson decided to make hero Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) the fiancé of the mysterious Madeline (Myrna Fahey) rather than merely the best friend of his hyper-sensitive host, Roderick Usher (Vincent Price). But this wasn't simply to add a romantic element to the mix. Corman and Matheson wished to suggest an incestuous bond between the siblings, which increased the dangerous intrigue. Raised on shock horror, however, the AIP bosses wanted bang for their buck.

Arkoff demanded to know the whereabouts of the monster who would jolt punters out of their seats. But Corman explained, 'The house is the monster! Can't you see it? It's the house!' In order to drive home the point, he had Matheson give Roderick the chilling lines, 'The house lives! The house breathes!' Moreover, he consulted with production designer Daniel Haller to ensure that the house was not only 'honeycombed with secret passages', but was also a yonic space that reinforced the Freudian undertones. In addition, the interiors also had to manifest signs of decay and collapse that would underline the severity of the family curse, as well as the fragility of Roderick's dwindling mental state.

The opening shot of Winthrop riding towards the Usher residence set the mood of desolation and dislocation, as his horse canters through a charred landscape that is shrouded in low-lying mist. This wasn't planned, however, as Corman read in the Los Angeles Times about a forest fire in the Hollywood Hills and rushed a skeleton crew to shoot in the scorched surroundings. Similarly, on discovering that a barn in Orange County was going to be demolished, Corman asked if he could film it being razed to the ground and he used the footage for his finale (and would frequently return to it later in the cycle).

Somewhat reluctantly, Corman agreed to shoot in CinemaScope for the first time, as well as in Eastmancolor. Aware that budgetary constraints meant that the sets were rather small, Corman was concerned that the widescreen format might not only expose the make-do nature of his setting, but also vitiate the sense of claustrophobia that was crucial to the picture's atmosphere. However, he was able to call on the services of Floyd Crosby, who had won the first Academy Award for cinematography with F.W. Murnau's Tabu (1931). His son would become better known as the decade wore on, as David Crosby was a key member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Cinema Paradiso users can find out more in A.J. Eton's excellent documentary, David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019).

In addition to exploiting the extra screen space in establishing shots, Crosby also made deft use of lighting to block off areas within the corridors, portals, and imposing staircases to highlight the figures and faces being shown in close-up. Red candles were also effectively deployed around rooms that were filled with disconcerting ancestral paintings. These were the work of artist Burt Schoenberg and several cast members, including Price (who was a knowledgeable collector), took pictures home after the 15-day shoot was over.

Although a busy performer since debuting 22 years earlier, Price hadn't done much horror before the Poe Cycle made him synonymous with the genre. At Universal, he had teamed with Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone (more of each anon) in Rowland V. Lee's Tower of London (1939) and had taken the lead in Joe May's The Invisible Man Returns (1940). But he hadn't returned to the macabre before essaying Professor Henry Jarrod in Andre de Toth's 3-D horror, House of Wax (1953), which led to him being enticed into the B-Hive to terrifying effect as François Delambre in Kurt Neumann's The Fly (1958) and its sequel, The Return of the Fly. This came between two of gimmick master William Castle's better outings, House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler (all 1959), in which he took the roles of Frederick Loren and Dr Warren Chapin. But it was the white-haired Roderick Usher who would shape Price's screen destiny.

By all accounts, $50,000 of the $270,000 budget went to Price. But it proved money well spent, as the picture grossed $1.4 million in North America and became a cult hit in France. It helped, following its premiere in Palm Springs on 18 June 1960, that it found itself in the lower half of a double bill with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Reviews were positive, with the experimental techniques used in the hallucinatory sequence being particularly commended. Nicholson and Arkoff were delighted and keen to cash in on their success. Thus, even though Corman had not planned to do a second Poe picture, he readily agreed on the proviso that he could recast Price and retain the 'Corman crew' behind the camera.

Pit and the Pendulum

Little but the title remained in the 1961 adaptation of 'The Pit and the Pendulum'. In his 1842 story, Poe had focussed on an unnamed prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, who is rescued from repeated torture by Napoleonic troops. Corman and Matheson relocated the action to 1546 and invented a completely new scenario. 'With a number of the pictures,' Corman explained, 'the stories were only a few pages long. I was fortunate enough to be working with a very good screenwriter, Dick Matheson, so Pit and the Pendulum was an example of what we did with a number of films, where we used the short story as the third act. And then we created a first and second act within what we thought was the spirit of Poe.'

The narrative similarity to Usher was deliberate, as Francis Barnard (John Kerr) arrives at a remote castle to demand from Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) a full explanation of the sudden death of his beloved sister, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele). Despite the assurances of Nicholas's sibling,

Catherine (Luana Anders), and best friend, Dr Leon (Antony Carbone), Francis remains sceptical until ghostly nocturnal occurrences prompt the increasingly deranged Nicholas to divulge the truth about his father Sebastian's torture chamber.

By using flashbacks featuring Price in a dual role, Corman offered a variation on the hallucinations of the first film, although he retained the psychedelic connection with the coloured oils that oscillated across the screen during the opening credits. For all the liberties taken with the plot, the essence of Poe is sustained by the psychological elements and the references to debilitating grief and a dread of premature burial.

Matheson admitted borrowing the idea of conniving lovers from House on Haunted Hill, and told one interviewer that he didn't agonise over his Poe scripts. 'They didn't take me that long,' he said. 'Maybe a month, month and a half. I mean, they shot 'em so fast they were practically standing outside my door waiting for new material so they could take it and run to the cameraman! They always shot them word for word. And I stand by those scripts; what makes me wince is some of the performances!'

He had nothing to worry about on that score here. John Kerr had won a Golden Globe for Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy (1956) and had fluttered hearts as Lieutenant Cable in Joshua Logan's South Pacific (1958). But he would leave acting to practice law and only make occasional returns to the screen. Antony Carbone was a Corman regular, while Luana Anders went on to feature in several counterculture classics after co-starring with Dennis Hopper in Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961). Corman had her return to film a prologue in 1968, when the film turned out to be too short for its television slot, although this was never appended to any home entertainment releases.

Although Corman had her dialogue dubbed because of her English accent, Birkenhead's Barbara Steele proved a striking presence and she would return to Italy to build on the reputation she had forged with her dual role in Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960). She would go on to marry American screenwriter James Poe, although he doesn't appear to have been related to Edgar Allan. Dubbed by critic Raymond Durgnat as 'the only girl in films whose eyelids can snarl', Steele is now 86 and recently confided to Sight and Sound: 'I was made for horror. I don't want to wear crinoline, I'm just a big blade.'

The 18ft pendulum designed by Daniel Haller had a rubber cutting edge, although a metal blade was made for close-ups. Kerr wasn't convinced about the safety of the mechanism that lowered the swinging boom and Corman volunteered to be strapped to the table for a demonstration. The actor was suitably reassured, but the director later confessed that it had been a discomfiting experience.

Haller used matte shots to make the torture chamber more daunting, as he was required to refit the Usher set at the Raleigh Studios, where Douglas Fairbanks had filmed such silent swashbucklers as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Three Musketeers (1921). Price came up with the idea of festooning the secret passage with cobwebs, as Corman sought ways to fill the wide screen by placing objects like red candles in the foreground. Floyd Crosby also made innovative use of wide-angle lenses and canted angles, which were made to seem all the more sinister by Les Baxter's moody score.

Following a day's rehearsal, shooting lasted for 15 days in January 1961. Corman later revealed, 'I enjoyed Pit and the Pendulum because I got the chance to experiment a bit with the movement of the camera during the final sequence. There was a lot of moving camera work and interesting cutting in the climax of the film.' The critics noted the ingenuity, although a few complained of déjà vu. Punters didn't seem to mind, however, as the picture grossed $2 million on its $300,000 budget. But, while AIP were eager to rush out a follow-up, Corman was insistent on doing things on his own terms.

Premature Burial

Following a dispute with Nicholson and Arkoff over profit percentages, Corman decided to make his next Poe project as an independent. Having reached an agreement with Lawrence, Bernard, and David Woolmer of Woolner Brothers Pictures to abandon their own plans to tackle a Poe story, he secured funding from Pathé Laboratories, which was keen to move into production. With Price under contract to AIP, Corman signed Ray Milland, the Welsh actor who had won the Oscar for Best Picture for Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) and who had demonstrated a darker side in Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder (1955).

Seeking to add further distance from the previous pair, Corman also hired new writers, Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell, although they were friends of Matheson and wrote in much the same style. Floyd Crosby and Daniel Haller remained on the strength, although Ronald Stein took over the composing duties, while former child actor Ronald Sinclair moved into the editing suite. But Corman's bid for autonomy didn't last for long, as Nicholson and Arkoff visited the set on the first day of shooting to announce they had bought Pathé and that Premature Burial (1962) was to be an AIP release after all.

The storyline centres on Victorian aristocrat, Guy Carrell (Milland), whose childhood experience of hearing his father wailing in his tomb has given him a paralysing dread of being buried alive. Fiancée Emily Gault (Hazel Court) vows to make him happy and their marriage gets off to a good start. However, he becomes unnerved after hearing a gravedigger (Dick Miller) whistling 'Molly Malone' and, he becomes so fearful of death that he builds a vault that is fitted with various means of escape if he should ever regain consciousness in his casket.

Delusions and deceptions fill the action, which allows Milland to go on a rampage after a brush with mortality. Being a more guarded actor that Price, Milland brings a degree of gravity that is reinforced by Heather Angel as Guy's sister, Richard Ney as his best friend, and Alan Napier as the doctor father of the excellent Court, who arrived at Raleigh Studios in October 1961 off the back of another entombing excursion in Sidney J. Furie's Dr Blood's Coffin.

Corman acknowledged the influence of the surrealist aesthetic of Luis Buñuel on Premature Burial, but it didn't make as deep an impression as its predecessor, which left its mark on 1960s Italian giallo. Premiering in Chicago on 8 March 1962, the film was promoted before its Hollywood debut with a horse-drawn hearse bearing the warning: 'Drive Safely - Live To See The Premature Burial.' Actually (as with Pit and the Pendulum), the initial definite article is missing from the on-screen title.

Despite lukewarm reviews that resulted in it being placed on a double bill with Nathan Juran's Flight of the Lost Balloon (1961), the picture performed creditably at the box office, taking around $1.25 million. Although rarely frightening, it remains an effectively unsettling piece of horror that plays on our fears about the afterlife. Milland would reunite with Corman and his writers for X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963), while Court would return for two further Poes. But Corman had learnt his lesson and he would not make another film in the cycle without Vincent Price.

Tales of Terror

Curiously, Ray Milland would be associated with the next entry, as he directed himself in the thriller, Panic in Year Zero, which was released in a double bill with Tales of Terror (both 1962). In some cities, however, it was twinned with Sidney Hayers's Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn), which starred Peter Wyngarde and Janet Blair.

Anthology or portmanteau pictures had been popular in Europe since the early 1950s, but they had become particularly voguish in nouvelle vague France. Somewhat surprisingly, Ealing had led the way in horror circles with Dead of Night (1945). But, thanks to Corman, the format would become synonymous with the genre, especially after Amicus used it for seven classic collections, starting with Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965).

Richard Matheson returned to write the triptych, which consciously placed a greater emphasis than its predecessors on the supernatural. There is also a more pronounced element of humour, as Corman sought to avoid repeating himself and aimed gentle jibes at the gambits on which Poe relied in his tales. As so many of these were exceedingly short, Corman and Matheson had to do some deft fusing to add 'The Cask of Amontillado' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart' to 'The Black Cat', while also fleshing out 'Morella' and 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'.

Price appears in each vignette. In 'Morella', he plays Locke, whose world collapses when he is visited by Lenora (Maggie Pierce), the daughter he blames for the childbirth death of his adored wife, Morella (Leona Gage). Peter Lorre proves no better husband in 'The Black Cat', as Montresor Herringbone takes vicious exception to his wife, Annabel (Joyce Jameson), when she becomes friendly with Fortunato Luchresi (Price), the bon viveur he had met at a wine tasting. Finally, in 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar', Price essays Ernest Valdemar, who hires a hypnotist named Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) to help him cope with the pain of a debilitating ailment.

Having become slightly jaded, Corman was grateful to Matheson for injecting some humour into the central segment. 'Cat' was the most interesting,' he explained 'It also matched Vincent with Peter Lorre. Vincent and Lorre proved to be two truly classy and versatile actors, especially in their delightfully humorous wine-tasting contest.'

Price also relished this duel of wits with such a master scene-stealer as Lorre. 'Before we did it,' he recalled in Victoria Price's Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography,'they brought in this very famous wine taster to show us how it was done. We enjoyed that enormously; we got very drunk in the afternoons. Roger really allowed us to comedy it up on that scene. I did it exactly the way the wine taster showed us, but added a little bit more, and Peter was doing it the way they didn't do it, which made for a very funny scene.' Aided by some image-flattening distorting lenses, Lorre also excelled in the delirium sequence after Montresor has shown off his brick-laying skills.

As Cinema Paradiso users will discover by typing the names of Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone into the Searchline, Price's co-stars had distinguished pedigrees. 'Peter loved to make jokes and ad-lib during the filming,' Price explained. 'He didn't always know all the lines, but he had a basic idea what they were. He loved to invent; improvisation was part of his training in Germany.' Price also admired Rathbone, with whom he had co-starred in Tower of London and with whom he and Lorre would reunite in Jacques Tourneur's The Comedy of Terrors (1963).

The British Censor took exception to the last shot of the picture and ordered AIP to close on an abrupt fade to black rather than showing Valdemar's putrefying corpse. However, Price was very pleased with the effect used to suggest the decaying of his body while his mind remained active. 'We settled for an old-fashioned mud pack,' James Robert Parish and Steven Whitney reported in Vincent Price Unmasked, 'it dries and draws the skin up and then cracks open. It worked beautifully. But the hardest job was the part where the dead man actually comes back to life. They decided on a mixture of glue, glycerin, cornstarch, and make-up paint, which was boiled and poured all over my head. Hot, mind you. I could stand it for only one shot, then I'd have to run. It came out beautifully. It gave the impression of the old man's face melting away.'

Matheson thought the dissolving make-up trick was 'lousy' and was no more complimentary about Maggie Pierce. But he enjoyed the other performances, as did Corman, who revelled in experimenting in the closing section with a post-production bleaching process that left black, white, and green as the predominant shades. He slipped a little more visual trippiness into the prologue narrated by Price, while he recycled the conflagration footage from Usher for the 'Mortella' blaze. Buoyed by box-office takings in excess of $1.5 million that atoned for the odd shellacking in the press, Corman agreed with Matheson to retain the lighthearted approach in their next adaptation.

The Raven

Having laced A Bucket of Blood with ideas from 'The Tell-Tale Heart', Corman decided to make his next presentation an all-out comedy. Ending his association with the cycle, Matheson had been very pleased with 'The Black Cat' and wanted to freshen up what was turning into a franchise with a whiff of wit. Besides, as he reasoned, the only way to go in turning a poem into a feature film was to flip it the bird.

Starting out in 1506 as another bereavement story, as Dr Erasmus Craven (Vincent Price) mourns the death of his wife, Lenore (Hazel Court), the focus shifts to cuckoldry after the magician discovers that his spouse had faked her demise in order to move in with Dr Scarabus (Boris Karloff). Craven has been lured to his rival's castle by Dr Adolphus Bedlo (Peter Lorre), who had been transformed into a raven as part of a fiendish plot. But, with Craven's daughter, Estelle (Olive Sturgess), and Bedlo's son, Rexford (Jack Nicholson), in tow, Craven and Scarabus decide to settle their dispute with a duel.

Some three decades earlier, Karloff had headlined Lew Landers's The Raven (1935) with Bela Lugosi, with whom he had also starred in Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934). Suffering from emphysema, he struggled to get around the set and Corman had to find ways to limit his exertions. Thus, during the climactic showdown, he sat Karloff and Price on opposite ends of a crane and placed the camera in the middle in order to give the impression that they were flying when the crane was whirled around the set.

As a classically trained actor, Karloff liked to prepare meticulously for a role. However, Peter Lorre, who loved to improvise, often threw Karloff for a loop by refusing to stick to the script. Despite being trained in the Method, Jack Nicholson also found Lorre difficult at times, although they developed an amusing bit of business in which Bedlo (who was embarrassed by his son) kept slapping away Rexford's hand when he grabbed at his clothing. Nicholson's main complaint, however, was with the raven, which kept pooping on his shoulder.

Once again, Daniel Haller worked wonders with the interiors, as he generated shabby grandeur on a meagre budget. Regulars Floyd Crosby, Les Baxter, and Ronald Sinclair also made their customarily precise craft contributions to a picture that had an end of term feel, as Corman was ready to move on from Poe after five titles. But, as Eunice Sadak toiled away on her second consecutive novelisation of a Matheson screenplay, the sound of box-office tills was music to the ears of Arkoff and Nicholson.

Moreover, although some critics felt that Corman was pushing his luck, Variety called The Raven 'a corn-pop of considerable comedic dimensions'. So, AIP persuaded Matheson to produce another horror spoof for Jacques Tourneur, who had directed Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombi, and The Leopard Man (both 1943) for that master of the genre, Val Lewton. Despite bringing Basil Rathbone on board alongside Price, Karloff, and Lorre, The Comedy of Terrors turned out to be more of a cult gem than a genuine classic.

The same is true of The Terror (1963). As Corman was so taken by Haller's sets for The Raven (which were spared fire again by the re-usage of Usher's burning barn) that he asked screenwriter Leo Gordon to dash off 30 pages of script that he could film on the two days he would have spare at the end of the shoot. Convincing Karloff and Nicholson to hang around, Corman captured the scenes around which he would cobble the remainder of a scenario centred on Nicholson's character. However, union rules made this more difficult than he had anticipated and Corman had to delegate the directorial chores to Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, and Nicholson himself in order to complete the picture. Cinema Paradiso users require only a single click to discover how things turned out. Go on! You know you want to...

The Haunted Palace

Eight lines from an 1839 poem justify AIP's claim that the sixth film in its cycle was 'Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace '. Yet, the writer's middle name is misspelt as 'Allen' in the on-screen credits. Read by Vincent Price, the verses can be heard within the framing device. The first extract, 'And travellers now within that valley though the red-litten windows see vast forms that move fantastically to a discordant melody,' form a transition between the 1765 prologue and the main action, which is set in 1875. The second are heard at the picture's end: 'While, like a ghastly rapid river, through the pale door, a hideous throng rush out forever and laugh - But smile no more.'

Corman had planned to adapt The Case of Charles Dexter Ward after completing Premature Burial, with Ray Milland, Hazel Court, and Boris Karloff. However, AIP coaxed him into sticking with Poe and a year elapsed before he returned to the H.P. Lovecraft novella, which had been written in 1927, but posthumously published in abridged form in Weird Tales magazine in 1941. However, Corman and screenwriter Charles Beaumont borrowed from several other Lovecraft sources in fashioning their own variation on the story of a wicked necromancer who seeks to exploit the return to Arkham, Massachusetts of a malleable ancestor. Assistant director Francis Ford Coppola also got in on the act when Beaumont left to work on The Twilight Zone, as he indulged in a bit of uncredited dialogue polishing.

This is essentially a revenge saga, as a villain takes control of his great-great grandson's body in order to dispatch the descendants of the cursed villagers who had burned him at the stake. Naturally, Vincent Price stepped into the dual role of Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward, while Lon Chaney, Jr. was cast as warlock Simon Orne after Karloff fell ill making Mario Bava's Black Sabbath (1963) in Italy. Having replaced Patricia Medina in the last segment of Tales of Terror, Debra Paget made her final screen appearance as Anne Ward, while newcomer Cathie Merchant found herself being resurrected as Curwen's malevolent mistress, Hester Tillinghast. Fans of postwar B movies will also take pleasure in the presence among the villagers of such Hollywood stalwarts as Milton Parsons, Elisha Cook, Jr., John Dierkes, and Leo Gordon.

For the final time, Daniel Haller worked wonders on a pittance to create authentic sets on a soundstage at the Raleigh Studios, where the shoot commenced on 10 April 1963. The main interior from Pit and the Pendulum, as well as flats from The Raven, were given makeovers, as Haller made use of sombre hues to reflect the drabness of life in the cursed community. Desaturating the colours, Floyd Crosby draped the scenes in shadows that were almost noirish in their bleakness and seemed to distract the Production Code regulators from the fact that Curwen was kidnapping local women in order to mate them with a demonic or possibly extra-terrestrial entity in his lair. In order to convey this sense of strangeness, Corman made use of forced perspectives and zoom lenses, although Ronald Stein's score also reinforces the sinister nature of the locale, while Ted Coodley's make-up effects stress the cruelty of the physical effects of the Curwen curse.

The front of the palace and the dungeon would be dusted down for The Terror, while snippets from The Haunted Palace can be seen alongside four other entries in the Poe cycle in the showreel that establishes Paul Toombes (Price) as a great screen actor in Jim Clark's Madhouse (1974). This is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso, but we can't currently bring you William Asher's Beach Party (1963), the AIP romp starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello that features Price popping up at the end to urge viewers to pay a visit to The Haunted Palace.

Premiering in Los Angeles on 18 December 1963, the film failed to find favour with contemporary critics. Indeed, the New York Times went so far as to claim, 'Nothing about it calls for comment.' This is nonsense, of course, as there is much to commend about the cast and the production values, as well as in the way that Beaumont dispenses with the Gothic melancholy that Matheson retained from Poe's texts in order to tell his tale with a stark sense of inevitability that replaces suspense with dread. Also significant is the influence of the Mario Bava giallo horrors that AIP had started to distribute Stateside.

Having done tolerable business, the picture has since come to be appreciated as one of the better screen adaptations of Lovecraft's distinctive work. Interestingly, another notable effort, The Dunwich Horror (1970), was directed by Daniel Haller. Nevertheless, The Haunted Palace is sometimes excluded from discussions of the Poe Cycle, even though Corman had no regrets about Nicholson and Arkoff's marketing strategy, which they would try again when distributing another Price vehicle, Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968). Once again, the actor was asked to read some Poe verse to justify the title change to Matthew Hopkins: Conqueror Worm.

Yet this would be the last Poe picture that Corman would shoot in the United States, as the final twosome were made in Britain.

The Masque of the Red Death

Corman had wanted to adapt The Masque of the Red Death after completing The Fall of the House of Usher. However, he was conscious of plot similarities with another study of the impact of plague upon medieval society, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), in which Death is also depicted as a cowled figure. Thus, rather than risk accusations of copycatting, Corman waited four years to tell the tale of Prospero (Vincent Price), the 12th-century Italian prince whose disdain for the villagers living in the shadow of his castle is surpassed only by his obsession with Francesca (Jane Asher), an innocent beauty who is added to his household along with her father, Ludovico (Nigel Green), and her sweetheart, Gino (David Weston). Meanwhile, as the region's nobility seek sanctuary from pestilence in the citadel, Prospero's jealous mistress, Juliana (Hazel Court), dabbles in diabolism in order to impress her lover, who is a committed Satanist.

John Carter, Robert Towne, and Barboura Morris had all submitted draft screenplays, but Corman had been dissatisfied with them all. Even when the ailing Charles Beaumont took on the task and incorporated elements of Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Torture By Hope, Corman felt something was missing. Having just worked with R. Wright Campbell on the war film, The Secret Invasion (1964), Corman asked him to take a look at the text. He suggested adding Poe's short story, 'Hop-Frog, or the Eight Chained Orang-Outangs', to the mix and Corman had a suitable narrative with which to explore his themes of religious belief, the abuse of power, and the gap between the rulers and the ruled.

Having distributed the Poe Cycle in Britain, Anglo-Amalgamated suggested to American International Pictures that it should shoot the next entry at Elstree Studios with a British cast and crew, as the project would qualify for a subsidy under the terms of the Eady Levy. Realising that they could virtually make the picture at the British government's expense, Nicholson and Arkoff readily approved the transatlantic crossing. Indeed, they even assigned Corman 35 days, instead of his usual 15 and arranged for Daniel Haller to re-dress sets that had originally been created for Peter Glanville's Becket (1964) and Fred Zinnemann's A Man For All Seasons (1966).

Corman would later complain that the British crew didn't work as quickly as their American counterparts. But he could have no complaints about cinematographer Nicolas Roeg's exemplary use of colour and lighting shifts that often made the imagery resemble the illustrations in a lustrous Book of Hours. The acting ensemble was also impeccable, with Corman relishing working with Patrick Magee, who had just made such a strong impression in Joseph Losey's The Criminal (1960) and The Servant (1963). Count Alfredo makes the mistake of getting the wrong side of Hop-Toad (Skip Martin), the dwarf jester in a troubling sequence that bothered the British Board of Film Censors much less than the sight of Hazel Court in a diaphanous robe during garish betrothal sequence and its attendant nightmare. The excised footage was returned in a 2008 restoration by Martin Scorsese's foundation. However, the dialogue tweaks that Corman negotiated with the Catholic Legion of Decency remained intact.

Along with Price, Court, and Magee, Corman was impressed with Jane Asher, a former child star who introduced Corman to her boyfriend at the commissary. In an interview with Chris Alexander, the director recalls being polite to the young Liverpudlian, who had mentioned the fact his pop group was making its London debut that night. On perusing the papers next day, Corman learned a good deal more about Paul McCartney and The Beatles.

Revelling in the chance to play a man of charm and cruelty, Price insisted that Prospero 'is not a villain, not a monster; he is someone who is put upon by fate'. He would play a similar nobleman in Gordon Hessler's Poe adaptation, Cry of the Banshee (1970). But he had one last Corman assignment to complete.

Tomb of Ligeia

With Eady money available for a second British sojourn, Corman turned to Robert Towne to script Tomb of Ligeia. Having worked with the director on Last Woman on Earth (1960), Towne was aware how the Poe pictures evolved from the source material. As 'Ligeia' was such a short story, Towne read the entire canon and fastened on to the recurring themes of mesmerism and necrophilia. The latter was very much a taboo topic and it says much for the suggestive delicacy with which Towne approached it that the screenplay passed the censors in both Britain and the United States without issue.

Towne was less successful in lobbying against Vincent Price being cast in the lead, however. He felt the actor was too old for Verden Fell, the widower who becomes convinced that the spirit of his late wife, Ligea (Elizabeth Shepherd), has passed into the black cat who continues to prowl his home after he has married Rowena (also Shepherd), a neighbour who had been close to his friend, Christopher Gough (John Westbrook). In Towne's view, audiences expected Vincent Price to be corruptible (and, therefore, capable of unspeakable acts), and he felt the part should have gone to someone younger like Richard Chamberlain, who had become a clean-cut icon in the TV series, Dr Kildare (1961-66).

However, Price was cast and veteran make-up artist George Blackler was tasked with making the 52 year-old look like a man in his early thirties. He had started out on Powell and Pressburger pictures in the 1940s before becoming a fixture at Pinewood. But Corman told Towne he had worked with Marlene Dietrich. Price's face was partially covered by the dark glasses that Fell wears because of the sensitivity to light that he shares with Roderick Usher. But Price reined in his tendency to melodramatise in conveying a crippling melancholy that was reinforced by the ruined setting of Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk.

Corman had found the 11th-century structure while on a motoring tour of mainland Britain to scout locations. As the Poe scenarios had utilised stylised exteriors fashioned on soundstages, he was ready to experiment with an outdoor shoot. However, Price was keen to take some credit for the setting. 'I had said I had always wanted to do a picture in a ruin,' he told an interviewer, 'but actually using the ruin as an actual place, with real furniture in it and the ruin around it, which I thought would be very effective. This is sort of what he adapted to The Tomb of Ligeia, which I think was the best one we ever did.'

As Nicolas Roeg was unavailable, Corman hired Hammer stalwart Arthur Grant to capture the mournful beauty of the surroundings, which would contrast with the oppressive sets that Daniel Haller and Colin Southcott would erect at Shepperton Studios. However, Corman would be disappointed by the quality of the day for night shooting, which suggests he really hadn't seen any Hammer horrors before he came to the UK, as the technique of using filters to darken sunlight is consistently the weakest aspect of the company's catalogue.

Comparisons have been made with Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960), as the spirit of a dead woman pervades proceedings. But this is unmistakably a Corman Poe adaptation, even though Ligeia and Rowena are considerably more complex than other female characters in the cycle. Had things been different, Elizabeth Shepherd would now be known for having played Emma Peel in The Avengers (1961-69). But, halfway through filming her second episode, she was replaced by Diana Rigg. Now based in Canada, Shepherd is still active in her late eighties, recording an audiobook of Poe stories, including 'Ligeia' in 2019.

Price gives an underrated performance, as a man being controlled from beyond the grave. But critics grumbled that Corman resorted to a third reel conflagration to tie up the loose ends, with Price's view on the matter being recorded in his daughter's biography: 'I have been singed many times. While making Tomb of Ligeia, in which the whole set was sprayed with liquid rubber, someone lit a cigarette and the whole thing went up. But then Roger's a fire fiend. He's a firebug.'

The picture didn't quite catch light at the box office after premiering in November 1964, with Variety dismissing the film with the glib line, 'More Poe but no go,' before going on to grizzle about 'a script that resists analysis and lacks credibility' and performances that were all 'blah monotones'. By contrast, the Los Angeles Times enthused that 'the fluid camerawork, first-rate color, sumptuous period sets, and an impassioned performance from Vincent Price blend perfectly to bring a great Gothic tale of terror to life on the screen'. But it was the reviewer for The Times who was most impressed: 'Here at last Mr Corman has done what it always seemed he might be able some time to do: make a film which could without absurdity be spoken of in the same breath as Cocteau's Orphee. '

The notices must have been gratifying and Corman was momentarily tempted by AIP's suggestion that he tried his hand at Poe's 'The Gold Bug'. But the 60s were starting to swing and Corman's attention had been snagged by the counterculture. Consequently, his next three outings were The Wild Angels (1966), The St Valentine's Day Massacre, and The Trip (both 1967). Price would return to AIP for Poe's The Oblong Box (1969), but Gordon Hessler would be at the helm. Moreover, Corman was becoming more interested in running his own company than wielding a megaphone. Thus, having completed Target: Harry (1969), Bloody Mama, Gas-s-s-s (both 1970), The Red Baron (1971), and Deathsport (1978), he called time on his directorial career - although he would be lured back for Frankenstein Unbound in 1990.

Corman ended Tomb of Ligeia with a quotation from Poe: 'The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and the other begins?' It was an apt way to bring down the curtain on a series that had exceeded expectations and would long continue to exert an influence over horror writing and film-making in the United States and beyond.

Stephen King cites the Poe Cycle as an important inspiration, as do such directors as Joe Dante and John Landis. The elegant and erudite manner in which Corman slipped psychological, spiritual, political, and socio-sexual subtexts into each film makes it impossible to see how Hollywood horror could have moved out of the orbit of the Universal monsters without his Gothic octet. Exploiting the universality of Poe's often provocative themes, Corman showed how period settings, ornate costumes, and occasionally florid language could be used to comment on the contemporary scene.

All eight films fixated on the past and explored how evil that had once cursed an individual or a family sends ripples through time to the present. In so doing, they can be read as parables of the Civil Rights era, as the United States sought to complete the Civil War battle to make America a place of genuinely equal opportunity. The Poe Cycle is also suffused with a wit that comes directly from the AIP sensibility. But Corman invests it with an air of melancholy, which is particularly evident in the final outings, which were made in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that many equated with the ending of the closed aristocratic order that had ruled over an increasingly antiquated and iniquitous system of white male privilege.

In his Criterion essay on the AIP Cycle, Geoffrey O'Brien wrote: 'Poe's name established a perfect rubric for the series, even though the films might best be described as free inventions on themes suggested by phrases, images, and situations in Poe: chains, coffins, catalepsy, cracked masonry, metempsychosis, dual personalities, fused personalities, resurrected corpses, bloody revenges.' Corman drew on everything from Freud to Buñuel, and Hitchcock to EC Comics to spice up the series and make these classic Poe tropes meaningful to a new generation. Six decades later, they remain essential viewing.