The Corman/Poe Cycle

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that, for pretty much my entire formative years, Halloween was never a big deal for me. Part of that is from growing up in a good conservative Southern Baptist family that did do devil holidays like that (we had a Fall Festival at church, thank you very much!), but the main reason for me was that Halloween just looked LAME. I grew up in a neighborhood with very few other kids, so the rare times I ever saw anybody Trick or Treating at all, it was a lonely, pathetic sight that I wanted no part of. The closest I ever came to having any sort of excitement over anything Halloween-related as a kid was The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” specials. In fact, it was a marathon of those specials that got our household hooked on watching The Simpsons in the first place, but that’s a whole other story. The thing is, even there, my dalliances in “Horror” were blatantly tongue in cheek. Being a diehard SciFi nerd from a young age, most incarnations of the Horror genre still didn’t hold much appeal to me, so that was just one more reason why most Halloween entertainment just blew right past me.

It probably wasn’t until around the end of college that I actually started getting “in the spirit” of Halloween entertainment, thanks entirely to the greatness that is Vincent Price. One October, Turner Classic Movies did one of those “actor spotlight” whatevers to Price movies leading up to Halloween, and it was the first time I’d seriously made a deep dive into his filmography. I’m sorry to say that, like a lot of people, I knew him more as an imitation voice actors did in cartoons than as an actor in his own right. There was a point in my life where the Vincent Price roles I was most familiar with were the scientist in Edward Scissorhands and Egghead in the old Batman series. Needless to say, this TCM marathon was a revelation, and did a pretty good job of covering a full range of Price films, from the post-apocalyptic SciFi of The Last Man On Earth to the pulp schlock of The Tinger, but the thing that made the biggest impression on me was, in case you haven't guessed, the string of Edger Allan Poe adaptations he starred in for Roger Corman.

Now, being already established as a SciFi dork, I already had a soft spot for Corman’s ruthlessly low-budget monster flicks, but seeing these comparatively high budget period pieces was an even bigger revelation that seeing Vincent Price actually act. Seriously, I know these movies might not look that fancy to the average, uninformed casual viewer, but try to put things into the proper context here. To somebody used to Corman’s standard “four or five guys in army surplus clothes chase a dude in a monster suit around Bronson Canyon for an hour” brand of filmmaking, seeing historical costumes and period sets and ACTUAL COLOR made these Poe movies look like Cecil B. DeMille levels of opulence. I absolutely fell in love with the whole Poe cycle, and just about the only real “Halloween tradition” I have is watching the set through from beginning to end during the month of October. And guess what? This time I’m including all of YOU in the tradition!

As part of my yearly desperate scramble to get some more eyes onto this Patreon, I’m going to post free, public blog posts featuring reviews of all eight of Corman’s Poe films for American International Pictures, plus some fun bonus doodles to remind everybody that I really AM still a cartoonist. And to be clear, I’m sticking to the eight “official” Corman/Poe movies. So none of the other Gothic Horror flicks AIP and/or Corman did to milk the success of the style (which means no Die Monster Die or The Terror), none of the other Gothic Horrors Vincent Price did for other studios during this time (so no Diary of a Madman or Twice-Told Tales), and none of AIP’s attempts to graft independently-produced films into the end of the cycle after Corman had moved on (so no The Oblong Box or Witchfinder General, a.k.a. “The Conqueror Worm”). Trust me, doing eight blog posts over the course of one month is already a foolish amount of work I’m inviting upon myself. Trying to squeeze in any more would probably kill me. But hey, if this goes over well enough, or if I just really enjoy doing it, there’s always next year!

So strap on your old-timey costumes, dust off your castle sets, and get ready for just SO many cases of people getting buried alive; it’s Edgar Allan Poe Month!