Beyond the Cycle: 4. Diary of a Madman (1963)

I occasionally see it said that Roger Corman’s Poe movies were responsible for Vincent Price being reborn as a horror star, though this is fairly misleading.  He’d played bad guys in everything from costume adventures like The Three Musketeers, Son of Sinbad, and The Ten Commandments to film noirs like Shock to even the pseudo-Gothic Horror House of Wax.  Heck, the guy literally played The Devil in The Story of Mankind.  Even when he played more sympathetic roles, by the late ‘50s it was in movies like The Fly or William Castle joints like House on Haunted Hill or The Tingler.  Heck, he played The Invisible Man once, meaning he’s included in that illustrious Universal Horror Canon.  The point being, Roger Corman wasn’t doing anything daring or unprecedented when he started building Edgar Allan Poe adaptations around Price.  And yet, the Poe Cycle does indeed represent a marked shift in Price’s career, the point at which he stopped being a guy who, among other things, had appeared in some horror movies and became That Horror Guy.  Those examples above ceased to be just one facet of a varied acting career and became THE movies everyone remembered, surrounded by a bunch of stuff everyone didn’t.  To make a weird musical comparison: “Fell In Love With A Girl” broke The White Stripes through to the mainstream, but it wasn’t until “Seven Nation Army” that they truly become Rock Stars, and House of Usher was Price’s “Seven Nation Army” moment.  By the mid-60s, Vincent Price had become utterly dominated by horror and villainy, ether played straight or -perhaps even more tellingly- when a parody movie needed an actor whose very presence was shorthand for “this is the bad guy,” or at the very least “this is the spooky part.”

Most relevant to our purposes are the string of off-brand Gothic Horror that blatantly attempted to cash in on the success of Corman’s Poe films.  We’ve already touched on The Oblong Box, which had an extra dose of authenticity thanks being (sort of) based on an actual Poe property.  We’ve also briefly mentioned Tower of London, which also recruited Corman himself in an ultimately-unsuccessful attempt to re-cast Shakespear into a Gothic Horror, but there’s plenty more blatant cash-ins to go around.  The Captain Nemo rip-off War-Gods of the Deep was also released under the title City Under the Sea because there’s a Poe poem with that title.  Then there’s Twice-Told Tales, an anthology film that attempts to recreate Corman’s formula by replacing Poe with Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Actually, I very nearly included Twice-Told Tales in this series of blogs, since TMC would often use it to plug in the gaps between Poe movies.  However, there’s one movie that I got used to seeing in that spot far more often, so it only felt right to give this spot over to it: Diary of a Madman.

Diary of a Madman has absolutely no direct connection to the Poe Cycle beyond its star, but it is incredibly obvious that the whole thing represents United Artists’ attempt to rustle in on AIP’s success.  Even more than the previously discussed Die, Monster, Die!, everything about Diary of a Madman looks like somebody hung a big chart on the wall with all the Poe moves and tried to scientifically distill the essential essence of them in order to reverse engineer their own version.  We’ve got the period setting with ye olde fashionede costumese, we’ve got some splashes of porto-psychedelic lighting effects, we’ve got Price in full tragic doomed protagonist mode, and we’ve even got a literary source: French author Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Horla.”  Full disclosure, I know pretty much nothing about Maupassant or the original story, other than the fact that a number of other writers like Lovecraft seemed to like it.  Maybe if producer/screenwriter Robert E. Kent had gotten his obvious wish and launched a full cycle of his own Gothic Horrors, I’d be better educated on the subject (Kent was also a primary force behind Twice-Told Tales, so he definitely had a strong case of Corman Envy in the ‘60s).  As it stands, this presents a bit a problem for me, because I’m not sure whether Kent or director Reginald le Borg or the source material itself should receive the blame for the movies faults.  Because there are a few.  

Diary of a Madman certainly does have all the right pieces.  The film’s narrated flashback structure allows for much more internal monologue than any of Corman’s Poe movies, and that was always one of the bigger obstacles to adapting this sort of Gothic Horror material.  What’s more, the basic story of “The Horla,” in which a well-meaning man is haunted by an evil inter-dimensional being opens itself up to exactly the kind of tortured, haunted performance that Price always excelled at.  While Joseph Ruskin plays the once-titular “Horla” via voice-over, it is Price’s trademark outsized emoting that actually sells the creature as a villain.  And make no mistake, Price definitely brings his A game… more than anybody else in the cast.  Quite frankly, the rest of this crew are exceedingly stiff, making the movie feel a good twenty years older than it really is.  Seriously, when Price isn’t on screen, I’d swear this movie were a product of the 1940s.  I’ve bent over backwards to defend the man’s theatricality elsewhere, but THIS might actually be the best case in favor of it, simply because he’s the one entertaining performer in a sea of smothering staginess.  Richard LaSalle’s old-fashioned, overly-florid score probably doesn’t help much in that department either, often being overpowering to the point of suffocation.  And that brings us to the biggest problem of Diary of a Madman: it’s pretty dull, to the point of stuffy at times.  For as much as the movie may borrow from Corman’s production design, what with the historical costumes and flashes of unnatural lighting (and, inexplicably, a set piece ripped straight from A Bucket of Blood), it completely lacks his sense of energy and pacing.  Die, Monster, Die! may have problems, but at least that movie is farily fun; a movie that knows it’s a cheesy bit of exploitation and rolls with that.  Diary of a Madman suffers from the delusion of being a serious drama, and not the trashy “Jekyll & Hyde and also Jack the Ripper only with a demon ghost thing ” murder movie it clearly ought to be.  Not that the Corman Poe movies are bloody slashers themselves, but at least those films understand what they are.  Diary of a Madman feels like it would rather be a costume melodrama about love triangles, and actively resents getting rudely interrupted by an invisible monster.

Even having said all that, I’d still recommend Diary of a Madman… to a VERY specific subset of people.  If you're the sort of ravenous Poe Cycle fan that I recommended Die, Monster, Die! to, and you still want more, then Diary of a Madman is probably worth your time.  At that point, you’re probably into these things as much for the stylistic tropes on their own as for any objectively good filmmaking.  Much like a good kaiju rampage or a cool spaceship fight, Vincent Price chewing some historical-looking scenery is the kind of thing I can enjoy independently of the quality of whatever movie surrounds it.  And for sure, the man’s been in WORSE Gothic Horrors than Diary of a Madman.  I mean, I’ll endorse this movie over The Oblong Box any day of the week, despite that one having far more of a connection to the Poe Cycle.  But he's also been in far better films, too, and I'm not going to recommend Diary of a Madman OVER any of those movies.

Oh, but speaking of movies with very little connection to Poe, remember what I said about the Corman movies not really being all that violent?  Well, see, there’s another movie that definitely doesn’t have that problem…