Corman/Poe Month part 8. The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

And with this, we reach the end. Corman’s last Poe film, and the end of the cycle. Yes, more adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe would hit theaters after this, many coming from American International and some even featuring Vincent Price, but this is where the Roger Corman set ends. And I’m sorry to say the series does NOT go out with a bang. While I stand firm in my assertion that The Premature Burial is the worst of Corman’s Poe flicks, I at least find myself engaged with the badness, enough to wonder how it could have been done better. With The Tomb of Ligeia… I’m just bored. I’m sure a part of that problem is just the fatigue of being on the EIGHTH movie in a series by this point, but this time I feel confident that even if I watched Ligeia first, I’d still be underwhelmed.

For one thing, just on a surface level, I find The Tomb of Ligeia to be the most underwhelming installment in the Poe Cycle to look at. While Roger Corman apparently had mixed feeling about his experience shooting Masque of the Red Death in England, it didn’t stop him from making Ligeia there as well, and this time shooting abroad enabled a major stylistic change. While all the previous Poe films had been confined to soundstages furnished on the cheap (or in Red Death’s case, borrowed from bigger productions), Ligeia took the exotic step of going out into the wild and shooting real, live, on-location exterior shots in the actual outdoors! The UK, in case you haven’t heard, is teaming with old castles and monasteries and various historical buildings in various states of disrepair, so Corman got it in his head to center the production around Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk. On paper, it sounds like a great idea. Vincent Price skulking around an actual ruined English Castle in your Gothic Horror movie, what could be better? Well, some legitimate creepy atmosphere, for one. The thing about shooting on soundstages is that it gave Corman absolute control over the atmosphere of the scenes (well, within his meager resources, at least). If he wanted a dark, foggy night, he could just hang up some black curtains and shovel out the dry ice and there ya go. Heck, even those rare times Corman actually DID use footage shot in the great outdoors, he’d made sure it fit with the studio material so well that I honestly tend to forget about it. Case in point, the opening shots of House of Usher were infamously shot in the immediate aftermath of a forest fire, giving the terrain a barren, almost alien quality that perfectly fit the mood of the film and generally enhanced the atmosphere.

With Ligeia, however, the natural quaintness of the British countryside absolutely overrides whatever meager attempts at a spooky vibe Corman might attempt to set up. Even the most crumbling corners of the castle look picturesque and lovely, while the rolling grassy hills and leafy surrounding look more like one of those quaint BBC shows my Mom watches than a Gothic Horror. And in the middle of all this lovely greenery comes Vincent Price in all black with a top hat and shades, looking completely out of place. Did you ever see a gaggle of goth kids going to hang out at Hot Topic, but they had to walk through the rest of the brightly-lit mall to get there? All those piercings and boots and eyeliner awkwardly walking between the store that sold the scented soaps and that kiosk with all the cat posters? That’s what Price looks like here.

And as sad as I am to say it, Vincent Price himself is a bit of an issue this time around. It’s not his fault, he does fine with what he’s given, but it’s quite obvious that he’s been given a script that was written with a much younger man in mind. Apparently both Corman and writer Robert Towne had wanted to break from tradition and cast somebody a few decades younger, but the higher ups at AIP demanded that Price continue to be THE star of Corman’s Poe films (and in fairness, just look at what happened when he WASN'T). Again, Price is not bad by any means, but no amount of heavy lifting by the makeup crew can keep the age difference between Price and leading lady Elizabeth Shepherd from being a bit distracting, nor does the script really do much to meaningfully address it.

And that brings us to the biggest issue, at least to people who AREN’T me and DON’T get more worked up about the movie’s aesthetics being off. As I mentioned earlier, Corman didn't bring in either of his usual Poe scribes, Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont, but instead relied on Robert Towne to stretch Ligeia from a few pages of short story to a full feature film narrative.  The results do not impress me. Admittedly, I’m not quite sure how much of the results I should blame on Towne himself, and how much on him being caught in what seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding between Corman and Poe. I’ve seen some debate amongst scholars whether or not Poe wrote the original “Ligeia” as a parody of Gothic tropes, and there are certainly numerous points in which the finished film feels like somebody telling a joke without realizing it’s supposed to be funny. Somebody who’s read the entirety of these blogs will recall me saying that the “Morella” portion of Tales of Terror felt like a straight-faced parody of Poe’s common tropes, and seeing as how “Ligeia” is roughly the same story (only without the added weirdness of the Mother/Daughter thing), I suppose it’s only fitting that I should get the same impression here. The ending especially is a serious offender, and in THIS case I can firmly place the blame on Townes for dreaming it up. I won’t go into detail, partially to avoid spoilers but mostly because I just don’t really want to TRY and summaries the absurd pile of twists and double twists the final few minutes throw at the viewer. Just know that, if I were trying to deliberately write an absurd parody of supernatural twist endings, I would employ the exactly the same number of “BUT WAIT!” moments that Townes presents here without even the slightest hint of irony.

And the nitpicky issues continue to pile up from there. For as much as I dumped on the location shooting earlier, even the soundstage scenes feel too bright and sterile to fit the mood I want from a movie like this. And as much as I picked on Price’s casting, he legitimately does a better job than the rest of the crew. I mean, I don’t recall anybody being egregiously BAD or anything, but that's because i don't really recall them period. It’s all imminently forgettable outside of the leading man. And then there’s the sizable stretches of time where there’s just not a lot going on. I mean, maybe YOU enjoy scenes of the main character wrangling with inheritance laws in your Gothic Horror, but I find myself just wishing the movie would get back to our hero being haunted by his mostly-dead wife in a LITERAL sense rather than via the complexities of property ownership. Oh, and even after shifting production across the Atlantic Ocean, Corman can’t resists the temptation to use that same barn burning stock footage for the climax, so that can't help but go out on a very samey note. And that brings me back to the very issue I had at the start: fatigue. Even when I tune out the unique personal bias that comes from watching all eight of these movies in rapid succession, I can still see how audiences experiencing these across four years would start getting bored at this point. Much of The Tomb of Ligeia is forgettable, and even the parts that aren’t still bring to mind much better entries in the Poe Cycle. There’s just nothing here to keep me from spending this final step of my traditional Corman/Poe marathon being just a little relieved it’s over. Roger Corman obviously felt the same way, as he not only broke away from Gothic Horror entirely, but by the time the decade was out he’d all but given up directing entirely. To be perfectly honest with everybody, I had to go a back an rewrite most of this blog due to technical issues, and I’m legitimately not sure how much stuff from the original draft has actually made it into this version. The Tomb of Leigia is so forgettable that I can’t even remember my own impressions of it. In fact, in the rare instances where I talk about this movie, I find I struggle to avoid calling it “Legend of Legaia” by accident. Yes, a forgettable PS1 RPG from the late 90s still apparently made a bigger impact on my psyche than The Tomb of Legeia.

But despite this limp, unsatisfying ending, I do still really love my traditional binge of Corma’s Poe cycle every October. While I know there’s a lot of demonstrably better Gothic Horror movies out there, it should be well established by this point that I’m honestly not that huge a fan of the genre. And yet, something about the unique balance of campy cheese and trashy pulp with genuine talent and craftsmanship in Corman's flicks just seems to appeal to my personal sensibilities better than a lot of really GOOD movies in this genre. After all, I’m looking for movies to accompany the season in which we give out teeth-rotting candy, of COURSE I’m going to gravitate towards comfort food over actual quality. And hey, hopefully you’ll all have enjoyed this little romp through one of my few legitimate spooky season traditions, or at least liked looking at the doodles. If you haven’t already, be sure to become a full, paying patron so you can see the rest of the stuff I do around here! And at the end of the day, if you’ve learned nothing else here, at least take this home with you: Roger Corman kinda looks like DeForest Kelly. 

Happy Halloween!