Tales of Terror (1962) – Nostalgia Central

Tales of Terror brought together three half-hour stories from Edgar Allen Poe, produced and directed by Roger Corman for American International Pictures (AIP) and starring Vincent Price in a triple role. He also provides the overall narration.

Price appeared in ‘Morella’ as Locke, a once handsome and virile man who has lived as a hermit for 26 years, mourning the death of his beautiful young wife, Morella (Leona Gage), several months after the birth of their only child, whom he blames for his wife’s untimely death.

The child, Lenora (Maggie Pierce), was boarded out from infancy, and Locke has not seen her until she returns to her now gloomy and decay-ridden birthplace to see her recluse father for the first time in 26 years.

A sick, embittered and unhappy young woman, Lenora confronts her father in the hope of finding an answer to her rejection by her parents.

He has become an alcoholic and rejects her attempts at reconciliation, though he is dismayed at her reappearance.

Forced to stay overnight at the familiar deserted mansion by the sea, Lenora explores the rooms and finds a state of decay everywhere, everything apparently untouched for the last 26 years.

When she goes to visit her father before retiring, she finds his room dark and deserted and goes through an open door to discover her mother’s bedroom with Morella’s body still on the bed, completely mummified, as she had died 26 years previously.

She notices, to her horror, the facial expression of the corpse, one of rage and terror as in a violent struggle against death. Locke enters and orders her from the bedroom. He then reveals that he thought Lenora was responsible for her mother’s death, and that he had almost killed the child in a rage in her nursery after Morella’s death.

This revelation breaks the barrier between father and daughter, and they exchange details of their mutually miserable past years.

That night, Morella’s tortured spirit rises from her mummified corpse and possesses Lenora. Lenora’s screams bring Locke to her bedside, where he finds her apparently dead of pain and shock.

As Locke mourns the death of his daughter, the covered body suddenly starts to show signs of life with awful sounds and mysterious twitches. When he draws back the sheet shroud, the colour of Lenora’s hair has changed, and the face is that of Morella, back from death.

He rushes to Morella’s bedroom in disbelief to look again at the mummified corpse and sees, to his horror, that it is the body of Lenora – as if she had been dead 26 years.

When Morella follows him and announces that she has returned to avenge herself, the terrified Locke drops the candle he is holding, igniting the dry bedclothes and furnishings. As the Morella apparition strangles Locke, the flames consume the bodies, living and dead.

In ‘The Black Cat’ – adapted from two of Poe’s stories (The Black Cat and The Cask of Amontillado) – Peter Lorre starred as Montresor, a drink-sodden husband out to take his terrible revenge against his pretty, young but faithless wife Annabel (Joyce Jameson) and her lover, wine connoisseur Fortunato Luchresi (Price).

He uses Fortunato’s love for Amontillado wine to drug him and entombs him and Annabel alive to die together behind the cellar wall of the house.

Smug in the belief that he has gained his revenge and committed a perfect crime, Montresor lets the police inspect the cellar, only to be discovered when Annabel’s black cat, Pluto, starts crying and wailing.

The cat that he despised had slipped into the wall tomb with his two victims, unknown to the murderer, to lead to his betrayal.

‘The Case of M. Valdemar’ is one of the most terrifying and unusual of all Poe’s famed works, dealing with the almost occult science of Mesmerism (the forerunner of modern hypnotism) and a fiendish plot to keep a man suspended in great pain in articulo mortis – the moment between life and death.

Vincent Price is present again as the dying Monsieur Ernest Valdemar, an old man nearing the end of his days and torn by the pain of a fatal ailment.

He has befriended M. Carmichael (Basil Rathbone), a crafty, unscrupulous practitioner of mesmerism who uses his hypnotic skills to ease the sick man’s pain, despite the opposition of Dr Elliott James (David Frankham).

Through this challenging period, M. Valdemar’s young and pretty wife, Helene (Debra Paget), remains faithful to her husband, though she has fallen in love with the young doctor.

We soon learn that Carmichael has designs upon the soon-to-be-widowed Helene, and when the doctor announces that Valdemar’s final day of life is near, the mesmerist extracts a strange bargain from the dying man.

It is agreed that Carmichael will put Valdemar under his spell in the final hour of life in an ostensibly “scientific” experiment to see if mesmerism can forestall death itself.

Over the protests of Dr James, Carmichael casts his spell and apparently does hold off the fact of death, holding Valdemar in a mysterious, tortured neither-life, nor-death trance.

When this torture-like trance continues for months after the time when Valdemar should have had a final death, and the old man starts to speak in agony from the nether world, Carmichael’s evil plot becomes apparent.

Despite Helene’s pleadings, he forestalls death and keeps the old man in a state of torture and exhorts Valdemar to command Helene to give up Dr James and marry Carmichael.

To end her husband’s torture and give Valdemar the peace of death, she agrees to the forced marriage. At this point, Valdemar stirs, literally from the grave, to rise from the deathbed and envelop the evil Carmichael, who dies from fright.

When the hypnotic spell is finally lifted by Carmichael’s death, all that remains of Valdemar is an oozing, liquid putrescence enveloping the mesmerist’s body.

Morella

Locke
Vincent Price
Lenora
Maggie Pierce
Morella
Leona Gage
Driver
Edmund Cobb

The Black Cat

Fortunato Luchresi
Vincent Price
Montresor
Peter Lorre
Annabel
Joyce Jameson
Policemen
Lennie Weinrib
John Hackett
Barman Wilkins
Wally Campo
Chairman of the Wine Society
Alan DeWitt

The Case of M. Valdemar

M. Ernest Valdemar
Vincent Price
M. Carmichael
Basil Rathbone
Helene Valdemar
Debra Paget
Dr Elliott James
David Frankham
Servant
Scott Brown

Director
Roger Corman

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