Corman/Poe Month: 6. The Haunted Palace (1963) (Patreon)

Okay, first things first: I legitimately think The Haunted Palace is neck and neck with The Pit and The Pendulum as Roger Corman’s best Poe film. It strikes the creepy haunted house vibe better than any of the other films, the plot is relatively straightforward and easy to follow, and it provides Vincent Price with one of the broader canvases on which to splatter the various extremes of his acting. If you’re looking to just cherry pick one or two films to watch, this is the top of my recommendation list. AND YET, there are several big giant asterisks alongside that recommendation, both from an objective critical standpoint and also from my own personal proclivities.

For one thing, let’s go ahead and address the Yog-Sothoth in the room. The Haunted Palace is unique among the movies in Corman’s Poe cycle in that it actually isn’t a Poe adaptation. Like, even according to the strained and generous standards that allow The Raven or The Pit and The Pendulum to qualify, The Haunted Palace literally isn’t based on Edgar Allan Poe at all. Apparently, Corman was getting bored with the whole Poe formula (which makes The Raven much more understandable in retrospect) and decided to branch out to some other horror authors. Writer Charles Beaumont (apparently usual script guy Richard Matheson was getting bored doing these things too) was thus commissioned to write an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by Mr. Cthulhu himself, H.P. Lovecraft. Unfortunately for anybody who like things to make sense, American International Pictures head honchos James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff refused to let Corman make a Lovecraft adaptation. Actually, scratch that, Corman could MAKE whatever he wanted, but he couldn’t RELEASE it as a Lovecraft adaptation. As far that the drooling masses were concerned, if Roger Corman directed a Gothic Horror movie staring Vincent Price, that movie had to be billed as an Edgar Allan Poe story. Whether it actually WAS Poe didn’t matter, since it’s not as if most of the “real” Poe flicks weren’t stretching the attribution anyway. In short, somebody checked out a Big Book of Poe from the library, went looking for anything that even remotely resembled something from Charles Dexter Ward, found the poem “The Haunted Palace,” and apparently decided the existence of a caste in the movie was justification enough. Price was brought in to dub a few lines of the poem over a couple scenes of the film like it was the narration, and voila! Instant Poe adaptation!

Now, in all fairness to the meddlers at AIP, Lovecraft was significantly less well-known in the 60s than he is now. Cthulhu wouldn’t become a meme until decades later, so I can see why Nicholson and Arkoff wouldn’t want to ditch the winning Poe formula in favor of a relatively obscure weirdo whose name sounded like an extremely romantic boat. What’s more, the following year’s Comedy of Terrors, while not directed by Roger Corman, was another Price-staring Gothic that the producers apparently wanted to re-christen as a Poe movie. They didn’t get their way on that one… and the film underperformed.  And if you read all of the previous blog, you know I really like Comedy of Terrors, and will vouch for the problem not being a matter of quality. So apparently the marketing sleazebags knew what they were talking about. Still, it does create a situation where anybody talking about “Poe adaptations” will feel obligated to mention The Haunted Palace in air quotes.

But enough backstory, let’s… get into an entirely different kind of backstory. As I said before, I think The Haunted Palace is one of the best Corman Poe movies, and won’t hesitate to recommend it to anybody looking for a good example of this school of spooky flick. And yet… I find I often struggle to enjoy it as much as I want to. This is another one of those cases where my own compulsive habit of watching all the Poe Cycle in chronological order works against me. The Haunted Palace SHOULD feel like a welcome return to form, a serious attempt at horror after the zany comedy of The Raven. And if I just jumped in and watched it on its own, it’d probably work for me really well. More than any other Corman Poe flick, The Haunted Palace has the creepy atmosphere down to an absolute science. This movie just looks like that the words “haunted house” sound like, and anybody looking to get their Halloween on would do well to throw this on in the background. Price is also in top form here, essentially playing the dual role of the titular Charles Dexter Ward and his warlock ancestor Joseph Curwen, who spends the movie seeking to poses him. Price does a great job of playing the genial Ward and the malicious Curwen differently, to the point that Curwen can pretend to be Ward and the audience can still tell what’s going on. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Vincent Price stands above an ocean of hammy blowhards who chew the scenery because they HAD to by being one of a rare breed who could do it when they CHOSE to. Only somebody who genuinely knows what he’s doing could ever control his theatricality with this level of fine precision.

But the fact remains, we’re six movies in at this point, and this is around the time where I can’t help but feel some fatigue. It doesn’t register as much with The Raven, since I’m usually too distracted by the unwelcome genre shift, but The Haunted Palace is where the sense of sameness really starts to wear on me. There’s only so many ways Corman can arrange those bargain basement castle walls before I get distracted by how much I recognize everything. The issue is compounded by a significantly more muted color palette this time around. It works tonally, but if I’ve already got movie fatigue setting in, then the lack of vibrant colors to perk me up kinda hurts my experience. Likewise, take the big portrait of Curwin that a decent chunk of the plot revolves around. The painting is… fine, I guess, but after having seen the surreal masterpieces Burt Shonberg concocted for House of Usher and The Premature Burial, the generic painting here just feels a bit bland. Again, it’s a complaint that only a person who’s watched all the movies in order and in close proximity to each other would have, but that’s exactly what I do, so here we are. I also find myself distracted by the familiarity of the cast, and I don’t just mean that Price is teamed up with Debra Paget again. In the past, most of Corman’s Poe movies had fairly small casts (House of Usher has, what, four speaking parts?) but The Haunted Palace demands a whole spooky town to be filled up with a crop of spooky townsfolk, and it feels like the entire Hollywood B-Movie Bit Players Troupe was summoned for the task. Now, if you don’t watch as many trashy late 50s/early 60s movies as I do, then seeing Bruno VeSota or Barboura Morris or Elisha Cook won’t mean anything to you. But since that IS what I do, I wind up spending the whole movie going “Hey, it’s the fat guy from The Killer Leeches! And the secretary from The Wasp Woman! And the weird guy from The House On Haunted Hill!” I’m genuinely surprised Dick Miller isn’t somewhere in this film, since he’s about the only That Guy missing from this ensemble. (It’s especially odd since Miller actually was on set at least one day to shoot some additional footage for the unending production hell that was The Terror) It hardly breaks the movie, and I’m once again sure that most viewers wouldn’t even notice, but if I’m already in a state of mind to be hyper-conscious of the film's sense of sameness, all these added distractions don’t help.

I also have an issue with a different familiar face: Lon Chaney Jr. as Curwin’s seemly immortal stooge Simon. Despite his character boasting obviously the best name any film character could ever hope to be blessed with, Chaney is… not the best part of the film. I hate to call him “bad” because he really isn’t, but he does feel like he’s wandered in from some other movie. Part of it is a matter of Chaney simply not looking the part. Curwin’s OTHER lackey, Jabez, is played by the downright skeletal Milton Parsons, who looks EXACTLY like what a centuries-old preserved lich ought to look like. But then there’s Chaney: this big, barrel-chested bear of a man who gives of an entirely different vibe, and totally clashes with Parsons. It made all the sense in the world when I learned that the part of Simon was originally written for Boris Karloff, but he had to turn it down due to health reasons.  Karloff absolutely would have fit in between Price and Parsons more naturally than ol' Lon does. And even setting physical appearances aside, Chaney’s performance… Again, I hesitate to say he’s bad, ‘cos he honestly isn’t, but he does seem to be operating on an entirely different wavelength than anybody else. The rest of the cast is giving this deliberately exaggerated, stagey performance that fits with the surreal mood of the material, and in lumbers Chaney with this folksy, naturalistic, “aww-shucks” act as if he’s playing the town drunk in some Western. And again, it’d be a perfect fine town drunk performance (after all, by this point, he was living the part every day), which is why I can’t in good conscience say his acting is “bad.” But still, it really is the wrong acting for The Haunted Palace. In contrast to his chameleon of a Dad, Lon Jr. only had a fairly narrow range he could operate in, and he badly needed the movies to meet him halfway for that range to work. It’s hard for me not to assume that Chaney was only hired because Corman thought his name would look as good on the poster as Karloff’s, regardless of whether or not he was right for the part.

As negative as I feel I’m coming across here, I need to stress that I really do like The Haunted Palace. Corman gets some of the best atmospherics of any of the Poe movies here, the whole thing is wonderfully dark and creepy. Yes, I know I mentioned the lack of color earlier, but that’s really only an issue to somebody like me who’s already had his expectations tuned to expect a lusher pallet. Most normal people who expect their spooky movies to be black and even darker black with probably find this to be the BEST looking film in the cycle. Even when it comes across as dreary and depressing, it’s clearly in a way that was MEANT to be dreary and depressing. I also need to applaud The Haunted Palace for managing to do right by me on one of my least favorite horror movie tropes: that early scene where the protagonist enters the creepy village full of downtrodden locals who won’t give directions or answer questions or do anything remotely useful. I know it’s a genre staple, but these scenes always feel like a frustrating waste of time to me. Not a waste of time to the characters, but to me personally watching the movie, since I inevitably already know the Dark Secret everybody’s being coy about. And any time the characters in the movie are playing catch-up to something I already know, that’s when my mind starts wandering and I start to think how ALL THIS COULD BE AVOIDED IF THAT ONE LOCAL WOULD ACTUALLY GIVE A STRAIGHT ANSWER ABOUT WHAT’S GOING ON! Thus, it came with tremendous relief when Ward wandered into the town tavern and Leo Gordon’s character Edgar Weeden bluntly announced that he COULD tell them exactly where the Curwin place is... but he won’t. Functionally, it plays the same role in the story as the equivalent scene in any other post-Dracula flick, but the openly hostile mood from Weeden gives it an entirely different vibe. I appreciate a movie that gives its characters some semblance of agency, and even more so a movie that doesn’t waste my time. Compare this scene to the opening of another AIP Lovecraft movie, Die, Monster, Die! That movie plays the suspicious but tight-lipped locals trope entirely straight, and it’s always an excruciating chore for me to sit through. With The Haunted Palace, though, the only thing threatening to make it a tough sit is the personal baggage I dragged along with me, and I can't in good conscience blame the film for that.

And if you’re sick of hearing about my weird personal anecdotes about watching these movies, well, you’re REALLY not gonna like the next one, because everything I just said is about to get turned on its head…

OH! And I totally forgot to find a place to mention this anywhere in the main text, but Ronald Stein’s soundtrack for this movie always makes me think of a drunken, woozy waltz version of Toto’s Dune soundtrack. I don’t even have any punchline for this observation, but I’d have felt like a dope if I didn’t include it, because it hits me EVERY SINGLE TIME I watch this thing.