TALES OF TERROR (1962)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


TALES OF TERROR follows the same pattern seen in the previous three films in Roger Corman's "Poe cycle," where a scripter takes Poe's delirious but sketchy stories and attempts to fill in the gaps with greater psychological verisimilitude. Of the previous three, Richard Matheson scripted the first two-- FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER and PIT AND THE PENDULUM-- for Corman, while the one that immediately preceded TALES was THE PREMATURE BURIAL, scripted by two other writers and not nearly as affecting in the psychology department.

As I've discussed in my short surveys of Poe's fiction on another blog, OUROBOROS DREAMS, Poe's psychological concerns were closely linked to his philosophical ones. Both Matheson and Corman sell their Poe-adaptations not with philosophical insights but with an appeal to the sort of wild-and-woolly melodrama that Poe eschewed during his career. Yet Matheson was a good enough writer that his first two feature-length rewrites of Poe manage to sustain themselves as "myths derivative of Poe's world." TALES OF TERROR, being an anthology film, stands as more of a mixed bag, in which Matheson sometimes seems to be chafing at his task of dramatizing Poe's curious meditations on death, love and eternity. Indeed, the anthology starts out with one really good segment, one merely adequate segment, and one that looks like Matheson just going through the motions.

Going from worst to best-- and thus in reverse order of the segments' appearance in the film-- Matheson shows little passion for the Poe story "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." As I observed in this post, Poe's original tale exists to do little more than raise the question of what it might be like, to use mesmerism to pierce the veil between life and death. As in previous entries, Matheson merely injects sex into the mix. Wealthy Valdemar (Vincent Price), who now has a lovely young wife named Helene, suffers from a pain-inducing disease. The ministrations of the hypnotist Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) relieve Valdemar of his pain, but nothing can forestall the victim's death. However, Carmichael does not allow Valdemar to die, but places Valdemar's into a hypnotic state that keeps his mind alert even though his body dies and begins to putrefy. Carmichael attempts to blackmail Helene into marrying him, which she's willing to do if the hypnotist will release Valdemar from his thrall. But for some obscure reason this isn't good enough for Carmichael, as he fears betrayal after he lets his victim free. In contrast to the original tale, Valdemar then stirs forth and takes supernatural vengeance. The only saving grace of this routine segment is a barnstorming performance by Rathbone.

"The Black Cat," the second story in the film, is a free-form take both on Poe's original story and the later "Cask of Amontillado." Possibly Matheson or Corman associated the two tales because they both deal with protagonists who (1) commit bizarre crimes for capricious reasons, and (2) wall up their victims behind freshly-laid brick walls, though in the case of "Cat" the victim is already dead, while in "Cask," the killer Montresor entombs his rival Fortunato while the latter is yet living. Matheson plays his "Cat" for goofy humor. Though the main character is named after "Cask's" Montresor, as played by Peter Lorre he's a jokey version of the nameless "Black Cat" protagonist, whose addiction to liquor causes him to kill first a pet cat and then his wife, following which he receives his comeuppance from a mysterious feline doppelganger. Montresor is a drunk who berates and abuses his wife, and then makes the acquaintance of an upper-crust wine-expert Fortunato (Vincent Price). Though Montresor wins a wine-tasting contest against Fortunato, the latter gets even by seducing Montresor's wife. Montresor gets his revenge in a denouement borrowing from both of Poe's story. But aside from the segment's sociological theme of "lower class vs. higher class," Matheson's "Cat" is just a silly mashup, whose humor probably played well in theaters but doesn't hold up in subsequent viewings.

Matheson's "Morella" is also a mashup, though it doesn't wear its influences quite as overtly as the "Black Cat" segment. Of the 1835 story, I wrote:

Whereas "Berenice" concerns a desired woman who seems to perish of a literal illness, "Morella" is about a woman who passes away because the unnamed narrator, her husband, mysteriously ceases to feel affection for her. Also in contrast to "Berenice," both the narrator and Morella seem to be ardent bookworms, schooled in abstruse philosophies like Fichte and Schelling. There may an element of envy in the narrator's indifference; perhaps he feels inferior to Morella's oft-described learning? In any case, though once again Poe's narrator disavows erotic feeling toward his beloved, this time he's somehow managed to father a child on Morella. A girl child is born just as Morella perishes, roughly repeating the trope in "Berenice" wherein narrator Egaeus is born when his mother dies.
The daughter grows to womanhood, and the narrator somehow manages to avoid giving her a name until she shows an almost identical resemblance to Morella. A christening-ritual requires the husband to name his daughter. He gives her the name "Morella" and she, like her mother. drops dead.
The story is preceded by a Platonic quote on the uniqueness of identity. Poe may be burlesquing this high-flown philosophy by showing the horror resulting when two entities share the same basic identity.

Matheson entirely ignores these Platonic concerns by jettisoning the climax of Poe's story-- that of the narrator giving his daughter his mother's name and thereby killing her-- and instead substituting a mashup of motifs from both his version of "Fall of the House of Usher" and from Poe's "Ligeia." The latter story is intimately concerned, unlike "Morella," with spiritual transmigration, suggesting that the late Ligeia has usurped the body of the narrator's current wife Rowena. Matheson builds his "Morella" along the lines of "Ligeia," but the usurpation is that of the dead Morella usurping the body of her grown daughter Lenora (patently named after the vanished "Lenore" of Poe's "The Raven").

In this opening segment, Matheson dovetails all of his influences in what might be the horror-genre's version of Sartre's NO EXIT. At the start of the story, wealthy hermit Locke (Price again) wanders around in his mansion, doing little or nothing until grown daughter Lenora (Maggie Pierce) shows up on his doorstep. Lenora has had no contact with her father since childhood, having been raised at boarding-schools, because Locke resented her for having killed Morella in childbirth. Lenora, filled of resentment toward her absentee parent, nevertheless shows up on Locke's doorstep. He tells her that he loved Morella so much that he wanted to kill infant Lenora, but he softens slightly when Lenora reveals the reason for her belated visit: that she's going to perish of a fatal illness. That illness seems to snatch the young woman away, just as a reconciliation seems possible-- but then the long-dead spirit of Morella takes over the body of Lenora, even transforming into the image of Morella, and slays Locke in a fiery climax. But does Morella come back because she despises Locke for making her pregnant? Or does Lenora summon Morella as a means of wreaking revenge upon her negligent father? I'm omitting some of the juicier details of this rich segment, but it's good enough on its own to make up for the shortcomings of the other two.