TOMB OF LIGEIA (1964)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

TOMB OF LIGEIA was the last of Roger Corman’s Poe-films. Often serials, whether built around a character or a general concept, tend to peter out toward the end. Happily, Corman’s last outing with the haunted genius was a fitting summation of everything that Corman and his collaborators had managed to extrapolate from the original works of Poe.

As I remarked in a review of the short story, LIGEIA is the closest Poe ever came to writing a “classic ghost story.” The author doesn’t neglect the possibility that the unnamed narrator may have imagined all of the apparitions, but my verdict was that most readers probably tended to affirm that some sort of obscure transmigration did take place from the late Ligeia, the narrator's first wife, to the person of his second wife Rowena. The same basic approach holds true for the direction of Corman and the script by Robert Towne. In contrast to some of the other adaptations, this one is set within Poe’s own era, that of the 1820s, and TOMB embodies, perhaps better than any other Corman film, Poe’s association of dangerous physical enclosures with the peril of the enclosing family unit. The action takes almost entirely on the estate of the unfortunate husband, given the pleasingly Gothic name of Verden Fell (Vincent Price), and not only is Fell’s manor as thoroughly baroque as any of Poe’s domicile-descriptions, Fell’s property includes a ruined abbey where the main action of the delirious story concludes. Indeed, Fell tells another character that his wife was so knowledgeable in things occult that”in a sense, Ligeia became the abbey.”

The abbey is the site of the film’s opening, as Fell chooses to bury his recently deceased wife in the shadow of the ruined buildings. A local priest objects, asserting that Ligeia (Elizabeth Shepherd) cannot rest in such a grave because of her past history of blaspheming against the power of God, claiming that human will alone can allow one to survive death. Fell doesn’t care about traditional pieties; he only wants to ensure that his beloved wife will always be close to him, whether she can return from the dead or not. Ligeia’s coffin even comes with a window spotlighting her face, and when a mysterious black cat pounces on the coffin, the eyes of the corpse flutter open. Verden examines her, and shuts her eyes once more before having Ligeia committed to the earth. During this scene Fell shows no signs of optical impairment, but for the rest of the film the gloomy aristocrat’s eyes prove extremely sensitive to sunlight. Towne was certainly referencing, in part, the over-sensitivity of the Poe-character Roderick Usher, but the lack of sight has other connotations. Since Fell’s under the thumb of his late wife throughout the film, one might speculate that even while dead, she’s exerted her will to make sure that he sees nothing she doesn’t want him to see, such as other women. Further, it will be disclosed that Fell’s lack of sight also signifies his inability to see his own nature, though he ends up being the only one who pays for it.

Poe’s short story suggests that the narrator’s second marriage may have been arranged as a merger of fortunes. Here, Towne contrives a meeting between Fell and his future second wife that recalls the encounter of Jane Eyre and Rochester. While Rowena (also played by Shepherd) is out hunting foxes with her family, she crosses onto the property of Fell, her neighbor. When she meets the strong but damaged lord of the manor, she becomes fascinated with him, and with the idea of “rescuing” him from his morbid attachment to his dead wife. Fell isn’t eager to cultivate new relationships—indeed, during his second encounter with Rowena, he imagines her to be Ligiea and tries to strangle her. Yet even this doesn’t discourage the ardent female, of whom Fell notes that she’s as “willful” as Rowena.

The story’s climax revolves around Ligeia’s spirit usurping the body of Rowena, and the film chooses to follow this model as well. To do so, Towne’s script has to delay the climax with assorted “haunting scenes.” The best takes place when Rowena follows the omnipresent black cat into a bell-tower—possibly on loan from one of Poe’s other stories—and nearly gets “bonged” to death. Fell rescues Rowena, and the scene glides to the site of Rowena’s wedding to Fell, complete with church-bells. More than once, the black cat seems at times to represent the will of the late Ligeia. If so, then Ligiea may have abetted Fell’s second marriage for her own reasons.

As in most of the other Corman Poes, there’s a young man who more or less plays the role of detective. In this case a man named Gough, who seems to cherish a covert ardor for Rowena, investigates when Rowena claims that the spirit of Ligeia is still haunting the manor. Eventually Gough discovers that much of Fell’s eccentric behavior stems from what a later era called post-hypnotic suggestion, and Towne’s script skillfully foreshadows this revelation with a scene in which Fell demonstrates hypnotism on Rowena. At the same time, Towne isn’t attempting to dispel all the ghosts via Radcliffean rationales. Ligeia’s seeming possessions of Rowena aren’t explained by hypnotism, and though Ligeia never comes back in the same way she does in the story, the black cat still seems to incarnate her recrudescent will for the big climax. Fell is literally blinded by the cat’s claws—castration complex, anyone?-- and another convenient Corman-fire destroys both the ornate manor and the proto-family that inhabited it. As in the Poe story, the chain of events proves too extraordinary to be contained by even marginal rationality, and the Corman Poe-cycle fittingly meets its end by equating Ligeia’s “tomb” with her destructive “womb.”