TALES OF TERROR

By: Stuart Galbraith IV
Date: Tuesday, November 21, 2000

For years Roger Corman's screen adaptations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe were available only in grainy, faded, pan-and-scan versions on television and home video. Their release on laserdisc a couple of years ago changed all that, and now the DVD format moves the viewing experience up yet another notch. Tales of Terror (1962), the first of the Corman-Poe-Vincent Price films to be released on DVD, looks especially good on big, wide screen television sets (the disc is anamorphically enhanced). Indeed, short of seeing a theatrical print, this new DVD is the best thing.

The Film

Tales of Terror ranks somewhere in the middle of the Corman-Poe canon. It's livelier than The Premature Burial (also 1962) but several notches below The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia (both 1964), arguably the best of the series. The film was inexpensive by Hollywood standards, but producer-director Corman compensates for the low budget by making the most of the wide screen format. Working closely with cinematographer Floyd Crosby's, Corman's compositions and his blocking of actors are always interesting, and this mise-en-scene suffers when their work is arbitrarily cropped. The same holds true for Daniel Haller's sets, which are occasionally excellent.

Tales of Terror is less character-driven and more anecdotal than the Corman-Poe films that preceded it, House of Usher (1960) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), with three talesand three genre starsfor the price of one. The Usher/Ligeia-esque 'Morella' opens the film, in which the bittersweet reunion of a dying woman (Maggie Pierce) and her long-estranged father (Vincent Price) is threatened by the spirit of her mother, who blames the young woman for her premature death. In 'The Black Cat,' jealous husband Montresor (Peter Lorre) encases his wife (Joyce Jameson) and her lover (Price again) behind a brick wall in his cellar. Price turns up yet again in 'The Case of M. Valdemar,' playing the dying title character. Valdemar makes a deal with an obsessed mesmerist (Basil Rathbone), who offers to relieve the pain of his last days if he'll allow himself to be hypnotized at the moment of death.

'Morella' is impressively moody, thanks largely to Haller's sets of Price's estate, which are dominated by bright, ivory-colored, but cobweb-encrusted walls. (Also, as in nearly all the Poe films, there are impressively unreal matte shots of the seaside estate, pounded by crashing waves. These are wonderfully evocative in wide screen.) 'Morella's' climax is appropriately unsettling, but it's equally undermined by a complete absence of logic, especially when Morella's ghost attacks Price for no clear reason. 'The Black Cat' suffers when compared with The Raven, one of the great horror-comedy-fantasies. Like that film, 'The Black Cat' is broadly played, but here Lorre comes off more unpleasant than amusing, and unlike The Raven he seems to be walking through the role. The segment is also marred by Les Baxter's emphatically cute score, though his work on the other two segments is excellent. 'The Case of M. Valdemar' comes off best; its premise and the nature of its horror are unlike anything Corman had attempted before. Rathbone holds Price's soul prisoner in a netherland where he's dead yet alive; the horror is emotional rather than psychological, and the sequence is admirably intense.


Price is in fine form playing three very different characters. His brooding father in 'Morella' isn't far removed from the roles he played in other Poe films, but it was nevertheless the kind of role in which he excelled. In 'The Black Cat,' Price's character, a wine-expert dandy, is especially hammybut with Price, that was always part of the fun. 'The Case of M. Valdemar' gives him less to do, but his disembodied voice, aided by unearthly sound effects, makes a lasting impression. Rathbone is given probably his last decent screen role as Valdemar's hypnotist. Though obviously frail, the actor gives it his all, creating a wonderfully sinister character.

As with nearly all of AIP's films of the period, Tales of Terror's titles come at the end, and their superb design is especially notable. Richard Matheson is credited with the script, which seems somewhat below his usual standards.

The Disc

Special features are limited to an original theatrical trailer (likewise enhanced for widescreen TVs), one typically lurid by distributor AIP's standards of the day. No booklet is included, and the sound is presented in its original mono format, with optional French and Spanish subtitles. The film-to-digital video transfer is generally very goodthe deep reds come off finethough there is one curious technical hiccup: During a nightmare sequence in 'The Black Cat,' an optically-added color tint which appeared on Image's laserdisc release is inexplicably missing on the DVD. M-G-M realized this and made a concerted effort to find these missing tints, to no avail. For those misguided souls who still prefer full-frame view, M-G-M Home Entertainment has offered it that way on the disc's reverse side.

This, however, is a trivial complaint. M-G-M's first Corman-Poe release is an otherwise commendable effort, and now audiences who have long-endured poor-quality home video and television versions of this minor classic can enjoy it just a sliver below the manner in which it was meant to be seen. More Corman-Poe films are slated for 2001, and if M-G-M can maintain the standards set by Tales of Terror, the complete series will be required viewing for any serious fright fan.