Roger Corman had a good run of Poe adaptations with Vincent Price. He would eventually run out of works that were more easily translatable to feature-length films, eventually basing one work around “The Raven”, which is a rather short poem. It is odd he made 1963’s The Haunted Palace in the middle of that run, essentially adapting H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, while using for this only the name of a Poe work. In an odd, additional slight against the author, the opening credits say this is based on poem by Edgar Allen Poe. I’m surprised they didn’t also have a credit for H.P. Hovercraft.
Gothic trappings give is a solid vibe of Poe, even with all the talk of the Old Ones. It opens with Price and his wife getting ready to sacrifice a young woman who just can’t wait to be an offering to those dark gods, practically skipping to the dark castle like she’s in an old bra commercial: “I dreamed I ran through the woods to a human sacrifice in my Maindenform bra.”
Angry villagers manage to stop the sacrifice in time. Then they incinerate Price while he’s tied to a tree. What I never stop to find astonishing in films such as this is how they give the person accused of witchcraft time to talk before they are executed, thus giving Price time to curse their their children and their children’s children. I never thought that one Moody Blues album title meant a curse to be applied to that generation, but now I have a entirely new perspective on it.
110 years later, the great-great-grandson played by Price goes to Arkham with his wife (Debra Paget) to claim the family homestead. The villagers are not happy, with one even suggesting he destroy the deed. True to the template of such pictures as this, he instead decides he and Paget spend “just one night” in the creepy ass old mansion, though they will inevitably stay much longer than that.
I like how the old caretaker of the place (Lon Chaney, Jr.) starts out being quite hospitable, when the cliché would normally have him be intimidating or hostile. Admittedly, the guy isn’t very healthy looking, with his skin a weird green-gray color. Other characters with evil intentions will eventually surface, and they will be easy to identify because of their similar pallor.
The angry villagers, on the other hand, are healthier looking, even if some of them are revealed to have some odd deformities. Some of these are rather extreme, such as smooth skin where eyes should be. Others are more subtle, such as the webbed fingers of Elisha Cook, Jr.—a touch which somehow felt right for this actor who played so many put-upon characters. Frank Maxwell, as the town’s doctor and exposition-monger, explains the people believe these are attributable to the curse placed on the town over a century ago. Those small towns, they sure know how to hold a grudge.
Something I like about the approach of this film is how it makes the then-present-day Price very affable and unpretentious, while his G-to-the-two-father was extremely arrogant. The ability to play these two very different characters not only once again demonstrates the actor’s solid acting chops, but also makes it easy to tell when the spirit of the evil one takes over the nice guy in the present day.
Soon, he’s fully under the command of his ancestor and back to summoning those ancient, evil gods. What I found interesting in this very early adaptation of Lovecraft is how it is more in the spirit of gothic horror than later interpretations which get too bogged down in the “mythos” of the author’s world. Instead, The Haunted Palace feels more akin to Poe, and the average viewer may be slow to detect something more unusual is happening here. Though not as enjoyable as the best films of Corman’s Poe cycle, this odd hybrid succeeds and is intriguing in its own right.
Dir: Roger Corman
Starring Vincent Price, Debra Paget, Lon Chaney, Jr.
Watched as part of Shout Factory’s blu-ray box set The Vincent Price Collection