The Price Of Darkness: A Tribute To The Singular Spooky Charms Of Vincent Price (2024)

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An adaptation of Richard Matheson’s landmark novel I Am Legend, this finds Price as the lone survivor of a mysterious pandemic that has turned all of the rest of mankind into curiously zombie-like vampires. A compromised piece in many ways – Matheson worked on the script but took his name off the final product – the film remains vital because of Price’s portrayal of melancholy and loneliness. He’s lost his wife and daughter to the contagion and lives by himself in isolation. He has some sort of immunity he thinks, but his time oublietted away from the world has left him strange and changed in a way that leaves him an alien in the midst of a rise of a new world order. The echoes to our current state are indisputable, and while it lacks the revolutionary impact of the source material, what it retains is that image of Price, doing his best to befriend a mongrel dog. The influence of Night of the Living Dead is there in not just the look of the piece, but the sociology.

Where to stream The Last Man On Earth (1964)

The first and best of the brief 3-D fad of the ’50s, Andre DeToth’s masterpiece features Price as Professor Henry Jarrod, a veritable Madame Tussaud who is betrayed by an unscrupulous business partner, burned alive, and left for dead. Driven mad by it and by the death of his fiance, Professor Jarrod re-emerges on the wax museum scene with a few startlingly-detailed new pieces that raise the suspicions of his fiance’s best friend Sue (Phyllis Kirk) and the New York constabulary. The direct antecedent to the Dr. Phibes films, House of Wax is as good as it is because it, like Hitchcock’s 3-D Dial M for Murder, eschews the showier jump-effects that would plague this technological moment in favor of a cohesive narrative and of course Price’s delicious, slithery performance.

Where to stream House Of Wax (1953)

Charles Dexter Ward (Price) inherits a castle in Arkham once owned by his great-great-grandfather. Seems great-great-granddad has been burned alive for luring comely young village lasses to be eaten by a thing that shall-not-be-named and Charles, once comfortably ensconced in his family’s estate, falls under the same compulsions. The film blames possession, but I’m not so sure. As played by Price in another of his revenge-obsessed turns, the climax finds Charles betraying his loyal wife Anne (Debra Paget) in a moment resonant only because Price’s gift was not the grand gestures, but the little asides now and again that betray vulnerability: that humanize him, make him recognizable for all of his flourishes.

Where to stream The Haunted Palace

Price’s last role is home to his most poignant on-screen death as the hands he’s sculpted for his bladed-creation are destroyed along with Edward’s last hopes for a “normal” existence. Tim Burton is a huge fan of Price’s, his breakthrough short film Vincent is an homage to the man, and here he finds for Price a literal creator to serve as the metaphorical father to not just the film’s goth Frankenstein, but to the filmmaker for whom he is the avatar. The creation can touch nothing without destroying it, you see, and it’s only through the agency of the lost father that some sort of connection is possible. Price’s influence is broad and almost incalculable on a generation of filmmakers. Burton here, in the only film on this list that does not feature Price as the main attraction, gives him the poetic epigraph he deserves.

Where to stream Edward Scissorhands

Some prefer this sequel to the original and there’s something to be said for a supporting cast that includes Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro (in the flesh this time), but I guess for all of its energy and macabre bonhomie, I do miss the clockwork mechanism that drove the first. All that being said, what’s not to love about a film about the search for a River of Life in which Dr. Phibes hopes to dip his sweet, lost, immortal beloved? Also, scorpion death and Egyptian booby traps. It’s like Indiana Jones, except the grave robbing is grand guignol opera.

Where to stream Dr. Phibes Rises Again

Price is hammy actor Edward Lionheart who, after getting roasted by a circle of theater critics, plots a series of murders patterned after famous murders from Shakespeare’s plays. That’s right, it’s an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the Dr. Phibes movies. Derivative in that sense, the film is a delight for the meticulousness of Lionheart’s machinations. Hard not to see Sideshow Bob’s headwaters here. The great Diana Rigg stars as Edward’s daughter, Edwinia naturally, who in the course of helping daddy, finds herself inadvertently cast as one of Shakespeare’s anti-heroines. Great? At least great. Watch it in a double with unofficial remake Vernon Zimmerman’s exceptional Fade to Black.

Where to stream Theatre of Blood

I’m paraphrasing myself here, but this adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story is so wrathful in its scorn for the excesses of the bourgeoisie that it actually makes Satanists of the ruling class. Here, we meet mad prince Prospero (Price) who, in the fifth month of a plague, locks his palace to his people and throws a series of wild bacchanals for his rich buddies in defiance of the Red Death ravaging his kingdom. If possible, the current plague sweeping through the White House is even stupider, driven as it is not by hubris (as many are saying) but by deep, belligerent stupidity.

Where to stream The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

If there was something Vincent Price was good at, it was playing men broken bad by a grief so inconsolable it turns them to a path of the blackest, coldest vengeance. Take his good Dr. Phibes, introduced playing a giant organ accompanied by what appear to be life-size automatons (or ARE they?), plotting the elaborate murders of the doctors he blames for a botched surgery claiming his wife (Caroline Munro in a series of photographs). There are ten surgeons (because apparently it was really a complicated surgery) one as it happens for each of the Biblical plagues with which the Old Testament God afflicts Egypt. Stylish, inventive, mordantly-hilarious, Price plays it all with a blank expression because the horribly deformed Dr. Phibes is, of course, only wearing a Vincent Price mask. Of course.

Watch The Abominable Dr. Phibes on DailyMotion

One of Roger Corman’s eight Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (actually seven with The Haunted Palace just taking the name of a Poe poem), this is, to my eye, the best of them. Helmed by Roger Corman and written by Richard Matheson, the production is a murderer’s row of legends anchored by a never-better Price as moody Roderick, carrier along with his sister Madeline (Myrna Fahey), of the curse of the House of Usher. A heavy influence on, among other things, Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak, the film allows Price long monologues in which he describes a nameless evil sure to encompass any who would seek to separate the siblings. Loaded with intimations of forbidden love, obsession, and insularity, it’s peculiarly apt for quarantine viewing.

Where to stream House Of Usher

Michael Reeves’ genuinely great historical horror, loosely based on the abominations visited on women in the 17th century by one Matthew Hopkins, revolves around a self-declared witch-finder who uses the assumed vocation as an excuse to torture a lot of people. A notoriously troubled shoot with director Reeves, then 24, dying not a year after the film’s release from a barbituate overdose, the film nonetheless houses the personal favorite of Price’s performances. Free largely of his familiar affectations, Price’s Hopkins is a haunted sort of psychopath, guided by a twisted religiosity and perverse moral imperative. As we prepare to inaugurate our own version of The Handmaid’s Tale in the United States, Witchfinder General emerges as prime among a series of texts we should have heeded when we had the chance.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Witchfinder Generalon YouTube