After five proper Poe adaptations and one semi-improvised riff (The Terror, 1963), Roger Corman’s epochal series of colour AIP horror films turned a corner with The Haunted Palace: it’s actually a loose adaptation from H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, thus making it the first film version of Lovecraft’s work. Yet AIP, worried about losing brand appeal, titled it after the Poe poem, from which quotes are sprinkled throughout. Something that’s always tantalising and hard to define about Corman’s Poe series is the way each episode, in spite of repeated motifs and visual gimmicks (and those inimitable recurring stock shots), is distinguished by carefully varied tone and style: the patient chill of House of Usher, the slow-burn hysteria of Pit and the Pendulum, the psychodrama of Premature Burial, the farcical yet epic satire of The Raven, the tripartite variations of Tales of Terror, and later the ecstatically apocalyptic Masque of the Red Death and inventively realistic Tomb of Ligeia. The Haunted Palace, as a Lovecraft adaptation, has a narrative that works in a different fashion to any of the above, lacking the delayed eruption of chaos that underpins them, but proceeding instead with a driving, eventful plot. The script was provided not by Richard Matheson, who had written most of the early entries, but by Matheson’s fellow Twilight Zone scribe Charles Beaumont, with additional dialogue reportedly by Francis Coppola.
The budgets of the series were climbing steadily higher, whilst still never approaching “lavish”, and The Haunted Palace was the last to be shot in America. The
The townsfolk, their fury finally getting the better of their fear, ascend to the castle, drag Curwen out, and burn him alive. 110 years later, Curwen’s descendent Charles Dexter Ward (Price again) and his young wife Ann (Debra Paget) arrive in Arkham to find that the climate hasn’t improved, still constant ground mists and thundery overcast, and neither has the humour of the locals, who are still afraid, for good reason, of Curwen’s legacy, and they’re astounded to see the similarity of Ward to his deep-fried ancestor. That Arkham still lies under the pall of Curwen is hard to doubt. The population is filled with the distorted, misshapen descendents of the women who Curwen somehow impregnated with an alien seed, and several of these local freaks, with variously eyeless and mouthless faces and twisted limbs, are corralled to frighten off the Wards in the film’s queasiest scene. Other inhabitants include the descendents of the men who burnt Curwen, including perpetually smouldering Edgar Weeden (Leo Gordon, who had collaborated with Corman on several films as a screenwriter as well as actor), friendly Benjamin West (John Dierkes), timid Peter Smith (Elisha Cook Jr), and helpful Dr Willet (Frank Maxwell).
Gordon’s Weeden is the edgiest and angriest of these men: where his great-grandfather had a special hate of Curwen for enticing away his betrothed Hester Tillinghast (Cathie Merchant) to become his mistress and helpmate, Edgar has to keep his grotesque, bestial half-brother locked in the attic. The Wards try to settle in at the Curwen house, a Spanish castle that was disassembled and brought stone by stone from the old world, which has been kept for them by genial yet unnerving caretaker Simon Orne (Lon Chaney Jr). On their first night Charles finds himself falling under the influence of Curwen’s lingering, determined spirit. Soon Curwen’s personality is totally ascendant, allowing him to set about two pressing matters with the aid of his undying fellow warlocks Simon and Jabez Hutchinson (Milton Parsons): to revive and restore Hester, long since dead, and to avenge himself more directly on Arkham’s citizens, before returning to his great project of restoring the rule of the Elder Gods by producing a race of human-demon hybrids to populate the Earth.
The film’s relatively elaborate production helps Corman render the stylised sets and delirious genre images more certifiably dramatic than in some of his earlier films, especially the dream-like exteriors, which really do seem at risk of dissolving altogether in the mist and dark, distant battlements, gravestones and sailing ships’ rigging lurking ill-defined in the shimmering pall and perpetual twilights. Floyd Crosby’s camerawork is at its sensuous best, full of long, roaming tracking shots and drinking in the drenched colour effects of Daniel Haller’s art direction. After The Raven had seen Corman paying tribute and gaining credibility by synthesising a tangible link to the heyday of Universal horror by utilising Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, here Chaney’s presence extends the tribute, and this was Chaney’s only work opposite Price, but Chaney, looking rather tired and ponderous, doesn’t add much. Price on the other hand is at his finest, sporting some marvellous moments of eyebrow-hovering, nostril-flaring archness, but his portrayal of the alternating personalities is cunning and convincing. His ability to play an essential geniality in quick juxtaposition with a haughty and vicious evil was rarely as well-exploited. Paget, so long stuck playing dancing girls and period maidens, does well by a grown-up part in what proved to be her last feature film.
The swooning approach, ironically, doesn’t sit all that appropriately with Lovecraft, however, as much as it did with Poe’s fundamentally psychological horror: whilst Poe of course had a powerful influence on Lovecraft, Lovecraft’s concepts were far more grounded in an immediate sense of the physical world and what then might lurk behind that masking reality. Whilst Poe’s works are hysterical and hallucinatory, Lovecraft’s are violently paranoid, and such a stylised environment then doesn’t offset Lovecraft’s ideas to maximum effect. That said, it’s impossible not to relish Corman’s grasp on the imagery he invokes, a mental and physical landscape of siege and buried sin, candle-lit windows and homes full of unspeakably sullied progeny kept under lock and key, and the great warren of mysterious space that is the Curwen palace. The Haunted Palace works, in fact, as an excellent metaphor for the fallout of nuclear and chemical malfeasance, a nightmare-scape rendition of the basic story of films like A Civil Action (1998) and Michael Clayton (2007): read Curwen as “evil capitalist polluter” and you’re set. And yet it’s the aspects that anticipate David Lynch’s more overtly surreal Eraserhead (1978) and David Cronenberg’s works that catch my attention more: out of the traditional gothic imagery on show a more disturbing and acute kind of horror is emerging, fear of the body being warped, and an explicit paranoia about legacies of evil communicated both socially and physically.
If Lovecraft’s universe is distorted by the treatment, the sexual and familial menace at the heart of much of his writing is rendered all the more powerful by the fetid atmosphere, with perverted births proliferating, young women made pregnant by the god-knows-what Curwen kept in his basement, and nice-guy Ward supplanted by psychopathic, sexually rapacious Curwen. He tries to indulge himself with Ann, who comprehends the fierce dread inherent in so much gothic writing in which the pleasant husband turns into his savage opposite. But Curwen’s more interested, finally, in the mouldering sex object he’s dug up, and his early efforts to revive Hester see a shrivelled corpse sit up, but finally she arises perfectly restored, to receive Curwen’s longing, greedy kiss: it’s definitely the most pure moment of ecstatic necrophilia in this series.
A motif that had been only suggestive in Corman’s earlier horror films – the boding remnant of malevolent personality in portraits – is here literalised in the perfectly coherent yet appropriately ethereal moments in which Ward falls under Curwen’s spell, unable to keep his eyes from returning the glare his portrait offers. Curwen’s revenge involves releasing Weeden’s mutant sibling, the two struggling and both falling to roast on the coals of the household hearth, and dousing Smith in petrol before setting him alight with a casually flicked match – a moment of efficient cruelty that still packs a punch. Corman’s grip loosens now and then, indulging the regulation scene where the heroine loses her way in a dark secret passage to no particularly good effect, and a few of those always-amusing animal-phobia scares, here involving a python only four thousand miles out of its comfort zone, and a lurking tarantula, another out-of-towner.
More problematic is the film’s hurried last act: given all the tantalising elements that have been set up with such care, The Haunted Palace crashes to a stop just as it’s really starting to really hum. The narrative’s ambition and potential strains the boundaries of the settled length and rhythm of the AIP-Poe format, and the still quite low budget can’t stretch to any manifestations of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods: the briefly glimpsed alien beast that lurks in the pit lurks a bit like something that might have filled out a range of Mattel action figures circa 1984. With some over-abrupt editing, the rush of action sees Curwen’s coven fellows disappear without explanation – this doesn’t seem to be a deliberate ambiguity – and the admirably constructed tension let down by the rush to get it all over with, not usually a fault with Corman. The very conclusion’s mocking hint that Ward is again, forever in the grip of an even more vengeful Curwen is however a relishable subversion of the usual ritual cleansing by fire. The film as a whole has the most promise of Corman’s horror films and some of his best work, but it finally doesn’t match the evocations of the cycle’s immediate follow-up. Still, out of all the entries in the series, this is the one that looks forward to the modern genre most intriguingly.
