Or at least, everyone's favorite public domain horror film. If you'd like a laugh sometime go to the main reference page and click the "combined details" link and get a load at how many different companies have "released" home video versions of this. There are probably even more that simply haven't been described yet: I've seen this movie for sale at newspaper kiosks, drug stores, "All for a Dollar" shops, supermarkets, train station lunch counters ... Though as one fellow here already pointed out, don't judge this movie based on the torn, tattered relics that exist in the public domain. TCM aired a restored print last spring (thoughtlessly cropped to 16x9: how I hate the widescreen TV revolution) and the clarity of the image resolution & lushness of the color was eye-popping, to those who know the film. And any TRUE fan of period Gothic horror really should know this film inside & out, because watching it may be the ultimate guide as to how you would go about making one.
I can still remember watching this sick as a dog one afternoon on PAX back when they were just a funny UHF station, and since I find myself a bit short of Corman Poe's aside from PIT AND THE PENDULUM (though I have seen most of them at least on VHS & late night TV at various times) I decided to dig through my shelves and see if I could find a copy. It's now become my favorite "just put something on to relax" movie, certainly far less arty & intense than PENDULUM, but more dreamlike and ambiguously iconographic. I like the pacing of the film, which (up until the big flood) is slow and meditative, not so much dwelling on shock sequences as atmosphere + ambiance, with a plot that doesn't so much describe specific things as to suggest many others. The background story behind the production is also fascinatingly compelling and one of the fun things about watching it is seeing if you can spot the seams where the different bits were cobbled together.
One thing about the film that I will lobby to anyone is that in spite of the fact that there are no direct attributions to Poe, this film is very much in keeping with his mystique, right down to the somewhat discombobulated storyline; Like 1934's THE BLACK CAT and good old WEB OF THE SPIDER it seems to be a movie that Poe would have enjoyed watching as much as it draws on his literary traditions and imagery. Cobwebs, crypts, creepy castles overlooking a wasteland coastline, Napoleonic soldiers being lured from their way by a ghostly siren who starts melting once she is saved, foggy graveyards, ominously clanking iron gates, a love or obsession that lasts beyond the tomb, characters brandishing antiquated looking pistols that are little of no use, and a hero who's own sense of goodness is the root of why he gets wrapped up in the nightmare to begin with. The cackling old witch is a bit much, but her presence too ties the movie's themes in with the kind of horror movie iconography that the film seems to be mimicking in shorthand. Her presence is almost like a quotation from "Macbeth", copy/pasted in to give the story some additional gravitas.
I love stuff like the repeated stock shot of Boris Karloff cranking open that gated door: The repetition of the action is actually very dream or nightmare-like in nature, where we often find ourselves visiting the same scenes repeatedly within the context of a single dream. The legendarily cheap way in which the film was made is itself quite endearing, my favorite story being how Corman instructed his principal actors to each descend the staircase in order, figuring that he could use the footage later even though there was no script indicating the actions. LIke our brains constructing our dreams & nightmares they essentially made it up as they went along, with a number of different people filling the role of director to expose footage as quickly & efficiently as possible which would then be assembled around a core idea that eventually resulted in a quite satisfactory creepy little ghost story. The palpable atmosphere makes up for whatever weakness there may be to the "plot", an attribute that is usually used as a point of criticism but here fits the process marvelously.
The fact that the sets, costumes, cast and crew had just finished another movie & Corman figured he could get some more mileage out of it all was a very keen observation on his part. He may have only been thinking about the financial aspects of stretching out those production dollars as far as he could, but the resultant movie is actually BETTER than many of the same era which were deliberately constructed around a discreet script. Part of this has to do with the inscrutable nature of the "story" but part of it also has to do with the zeitgeist that Corman was tapping into with his Poe series as a whole: It's a marvelous homage not only to Poe but to the B movie horror industry in general, and may in fact qualify as the ultimate low-budget movie, made for literally nothing and still delivering it's goods forty-five years later. I've now watched this about two dozen times since feeling the urge to dig it out and have yet to be bored -- Not just because of an urgency to try and discern the "story" the movie tells, but also because re-playing it is sort of like listening to some gloomy Gothic radio production over and over again. You get to know the cadences and bursts of dialog very much like one gets to be familiar with a record album. It's a supernatural soap opera, and has as much doom & gloom in it as any of the "actual" Poe derived films that Corman made during the early 1960s.
8/10
