#and to think i only started watching price and corman's films in july

[clara-is-brave]

*pretends to be shocked*

[aion-rsa]

The Masque of the Red Death: Roger Corman Talks Pandemics and Restoration

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During the 2020 lockdowns and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, people at home sought isolated comfort. News reports continued to count the number of dead while people in charge downplayed its seriousness or offered dubious advice on dealing with the disease. It certainly didn’t interrupt many golf games. As workers were furloughed from jobs, they binged. One of the movies at the top of the playlist was The Masque of the Red Death, Roger Corman’s 1964 low budget masterpiece.

It told the tale of a wealthy medieval prince in a country decimated by an epidemic. The satanic overlord, played by the legendary actor and horror icon Vincent Price, locks his gates to his god-fearing dominions while he and his friends party like it’s 1999.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is about 2,300 words. Corman’s adaptation, which has been fully restored and can now be seen in its lush, psychedelic splendor, padded it with more Poe to reach 90 minutes. The screenplay by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright merged the tale with Poe’s “Hop Frog,” along with elements of the short story “Torture by Hope” by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

The devilish revelries came deep into a filmmaking cycle that began with American International Pictures executives Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson asking their in-house director Roger Corman to make two black-and-white horror films at $100,000 each. At the time, Corman had been producing tightly budgeted horror, science fiction, and juvenile delinquency quickies. With this opportunity, he pitched one film based upon Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” saying it would move AIP to up in the motion picture world, as the studio was regarded as the maker of exploitation pictures.

It was the first of a cycle of eight films. Poe is read in every high school and is part of America’s literary canon; Corman’s Poe cycle made the writer an international gothic horror fan favorite.

The Masque of The Red Death was the seventh in Corman’s series. The adaptation also stars Jane Asher (Alfie, Death At A Funeral), Hazel Court (The Premature Burial, The Raven), David Weston (Becket, The Red Baron), and Nigel Green (Jason And The Argonauts, Zulu).

The 4K restoration of the extended cut of The Masque Of The Red Death was done by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Additional funding came from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. The Masque of the Red Death opened the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear nightmare Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The fallout from an atomic war would result in a Red Death among survivors. Corman’s take on Poe was seen as a comment on the collateral damage of the Cold War, but it is a film which bridges generations of apocalyptic omens.

We spoke with Corman about the timeliness of his classic adaptation, as well as about stars Price and Asher, cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, and why Corman continues to find different delivery systems for message pictures.

Den of Geek: The last time we spoke, it was right before the inauguration. You had put Malcolm McDowell in funny hair and made him the president of the United Corporations of America. At the time, you said you hadn’t expected Trump to win. Today is the day after his (second) impeachment. Now that 2020 turned out to be a death race, did you expect him to be President Prospero?

Roger Corman: No. I assumed that [Joe] Biden was going to win. The polls all indicated that he was ahead. The polls have not always been correct, but in this case, they were so much in his favor, I assumed he was going to win.

Was there a conscious effort to put out The Masque of Red Death during the COVID-19 crisis with him as president?

Yes. Masque of the Red Death, in the United States, was on one of the platform streaming services, and the ratings on it went way up during COVID, because it was so appropriate. It’s actually more pertinent today than when it was made, because we do have the equivalent of the Red Death pandemic that is killing people all over the world.

In Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero brings together his friends, aristocrats and so forth, and they hold themselves up in the castle, to prevent the Red Death from killing them. And we have a somewhat similar situation today.

For instance, Trump is very careful. He claimed that the coronavirus was overrated. As a matter of fact, he said there was no such thing as coronavirus; it was “a hoax” perpetrated by the Democrats to make him look bad. But at the same time he was saying that, he was holed up in the lighthouse, going up primarily only to play golf or to hold big rallies. People were not protected within the rallies, but he himself made a real point of staying away from the crowd, to be on the stage and let the crowd get together and kill themselves, which they did.

The Mar-a-Lago of Red Death.

The Masque of the Mar-a-Lago.

Is it hard to keep a social distance when you’re squirming around on a floor like a worm?

It’s a little difficult, I would believe.

Vincent Price’s voice is beautiful in this movie. This is one of his most seductive parts. How quickly did he capture the character, from rehearsal to shooting?

He had the character pretty much set in mind when he came into it. Vincent always did a great deal of preparation. So what we would do [is] we would discuss the characters, just Vincent and me, before the rehearsals. He and I were in agreement on the character, and then he would bring that character to the rehearsals. We did not do a great deal of rehearsing because of the Screen Actors Guild rules. They charge you as if you are shooting when you rehearse.

Do you remember any notes you had to give him?

This is so long ago. It’s a little bit difficult to remember. But as I remember, I said, “The real key to Prospero’s character is that he believes God is dead.” And everything stems from that belief. That with the absence of God, he was free to do anything he wanted.

Did he always talk like that, like when he was ordering a bagel?

It was pretty much his normal voice. He added a certain drama to [lines], but basically that was Vincent. He was a highly educated man and very intelligent, so he spoke very well. And we simply heightened that somewhat in the films.

The film suffered some major censorship from the Legion of Decency, and the package booklet points out there was church involvement. Did you ever wonder whether you might be going to hell?

No, that never occurred to me. I’m sort of a lapsed Catholic, and I don’t believe there is a hell.

Is Red Death a disease or a sin?

The Red Death is a disease. That’s one of the reasons that’s a plague. You could consider it to be the Black Death of the Middle Ages. It would be the equivalent of coronavirus today.

In the booklet which comes with the DVD, it says that Father Miraliotta said the occult parts of the screenplay were “strung together gibberish” and “mumbo-jumbo Latin.” But did any of the satanic rituals have any validity?

No. We made up pretty much what we wanted. Actually, there were two writers, Chuck Beaumont and Bob Campbell, and I think it started with my discussions with Chuck.

How was Jane Asher to work with?

Jane Asher was wonderful to work with. She was a very young girl. She had worked on the stage. I think she was in the Young Shakespeare Group. And I don’t know if it was her first picture or not, but she was very good. She was an excellent actress and very good and easy to work with.

She was dating Paul McCartney when this was made, and her brother was a musician and a producer. Did you get to experience any Swinging London in-crowd during shooting?

A little bit. As a matter of fact, I can tell you a true story. Jane and I used to have lunch together in the studio commissary. And on a Thursday, she said a friend of hers was traveling through, on his way to London the next day. Would it be all right if he came and watched a shooting during the morning, and we could all have lunch together? And I said, “Sure, fine.”

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When Paul McCartney Braved the Set of Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death

By Tony Sokol

So, I got a director’s chair, sitting next to mine, during the shooting. And it was a nice, young guy, and we talked during the shooting. And I explained to him a little bit between shots how it all worked. And then we all, Jane and he, and I, had lunch together. And it all went very well. I said at the end of it, “Jane tells me you’re going to London. What are you going to be doing in London?”

He said, “Well, I’m with a singing group from Liverpool, and we’re going to be making our debut tomorrow night in London.” He was very cool. He knew that as an American, I didn’t know who The Beatles were or what he was. And as he left, I said, “Well, good luck, Paul, on your debut in London tomorrow night.”

And I remember he was very cool. He understood and he didn’t want to say, “Listen, buddy, we’re the number one group.” He just said, “Well, we’re a singing group.”

And then I saw the paper Sunday morning headlines, “Beatles conquer London.”

Did he ever come back to the set again?

No. But it was very funny. We were at an Academy Award party, which was I think the Vanity Fair party, which was a big thing, of people who were invited and so forth. We were at the Vanity Fair party, and I saw across the room Paul McCartney. And I said, “Oh, there’s Paul over there.”

And my wife, Julie, said, “Let’s go over and talk to him.” And I said, “No. I had lunch with him 60 years or so ago. He isn’t going to remember some guy he had lunch with 60 years ago, and I don’t want to intrude.” because he was in a conversation.

And Julie said, “Well, I want to meet Paul McCartney.” So, she went over and talked to him, and he came over to see me. As he approached, he said, “Masque of the Red Death.” He knew exactly where we’d met.

I interviewed William Shatner a few months ago and I asked about The Intruder, a piece he’s still very proud of. What draws you to consistently infuse your works, in any genre, with at least social questioning?

I’ve always been on the left, liberal side of politics. The Intruder was a time when the desegregation of schools in the South started. The schools in the South had maintained separate schools for Blacks. They were separate, but equal. And the Supreme Court ruled they were separate, but they were not equal, which was correct. They were inferior, and schools had to be integrated rather than keeping them separate. And it caused tremendous rebellion in the South. Chuck Beaumont, who worked with me on a number of pictures, had written the book The Intruder about an agitator, a little bit like somewhere between Joe McCarthy and Trump, who comes in, talking about patriotism and being against integration.

And I bought that book, The Intruder, and made it with Bill Shatner. It was his first picture. He was a Broadway actor, and he just came to Hollywood, and he was wonderful to work with, and the picture got incredible reviews. I’m trying to think of one of them, which was really good. Oh, it said, “The Intruder is a major credit to the entire American film industry.” And it won a couple of awards at minor festivals nobody ever heard of, but it was the first picture I ever made that lost money.

You consistently do social commentary in your work. What brings you back to it?

I stayed with it, but I tried to analyze why The Intruder got such wonderful reviews and such a great reaction, but the audience didn’t come to see it. And I thought, “I think I was too serious in this.” It was almost like delivering a message. And I remember years ago, some Hollywood producer said, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” And I thought, “I broke that rule.” And I thought, “I forgot that motion pictures are really basically an entertainment.”

So, from there on in, I used motion pictures as an entertainment, but as a subtext, with whatever theme or thought I was interested in. But first and foremost, the audience came to see and got the entertainment they paid to see. And as a bonus, as it were, there was the subtext, which sometimes was so slender that people didn’t get it. But [some] people got it. That was fine with me.

The restoration is really beautiful. I’d like to ask about the look. Your translation of Poe’s colors. Nicolas Roeg was the cinematographer. What was that collaboration like?

It went very well. It was the first I had done in England, except for a Formula One racing picture, which was in England and a number of other places. And they showed me a work of a number of English cameramen, and I thought Nic was the best of the group. And the collaboration went very well. I thought he did really, a brilliant job of camera work.

Afterwards he became a director. I never knew, did I inspire him to be a director, or did he feel if Roger can do it, anybody can do it?

So, he didn’t actually go through the Corman school of directors. I know you never produced any of his films.

I did not. He did it on his own.

You shot Masque on the set of Becket. What was different about having that as a cinematic playground, as opposed to shooting Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre?

It wasn’t really the set of Becket. What it is, Danny Heller, my art director, and I, always went to what was called a scene dock in studios where we’re going to work. The scene dock contained flats from previous pictures, just individual flats. Each of the pictures we shot in the United States, we were shooting at small rental studios, and the flats were not particularly impressive, but Danny would use them in the designs of sets.

When we did Masque of the Red Death, we found these magnificent flats from Becket. So they were not the sets, but we used those flats, and used them as an integral part of the sets.

Masque of Red Death was one of the first films that you had a longer shooting schedule. What was the first aspect of filmmaking that you noticed was affected by the extra time?

Well, two things. The English crews were very good. They were fully equal to the Hollywood crews, but they worked a little bit slower than the Hollywood crews. So I had a five-week schedule, whereas I had a three-week schedule in Hollywood. And I always thought I really had a four-week schedule, because we were working a little slowly.

Also, when we’d show up to work at 11:00, we would stop for elevenses. And then we would stop for lunch. And then in the middle of the afternoon, we would stop for tea. And I remember mentioning, I’ve forgotten who the assistant director was, but I said, “We’re spending half the day eating here. We should be shooting.”

But he said, “Well, this is the way we do it.”

In 2009, you made the Joe Dante series, Splatter, and each episode was shot in a week based on audience votes. Was that reminiscent of your early days of shooting on the 10-day schedules?

No. By that time, when I first started, although I did shoot a number of films in five or six days, in one picture, The Little Shop of Horrors, in two days. But my general schedule was two weeks when we started. As we moved along, starting with The Fall of the House of Usher, the first of the Poe pictures, I had three-week schedules. And our standard schedule for everything at that time was three weeks, so it was shot on a three-week schedule.

Did you really edit Little Shop of Horrors during a lunch break?

No. I shot Little Shop of Horrors in two days with a little bit of night shooting. So I’d say maybe two-and-a-half days. What happened, I had an office at a small rental studio in Hollywood and I was having lunch with the head of the studio. And he mentioned they had just finished a fairly big, slightly bigger budget picture. It was still low budget, and they had this really good, big set of an office. And I said, “Can you leave that up for a little while?” And he said, “Sure. We’ll leave it up until somebody comes in and rents the stage. And we’ll tear it down and put up the new set.”

So, after lunch, I went over and looked at it. And it was really a very good set, and I said [that] I was sort of experimenting with the concept of comedy and horror combined. And I thought, “It might be fun.”

I didn’t have a great deal of money at that time and nobody was going to back me with what I wanted to do. I thought, “I could shoot a picture here. And since almost everything is within this set, what I could do, I could shoot it in a couple of days, based upon this.”

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Little Shop Of Horrors & the Tale of its Lost Ending

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The Roger Corman Fantastic Four Movie: The Most Faithful FF Ever

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Screen Actors Guild salary structure was such that if you hired a person for a day, he got more money than one-fifth of what the weekly structure was. So I thought what I’ll do is hire everybody for a week. We’ll rehearse Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, because everything is in this set. And with everything set up, we can come and shoot on two days, on Thursday and Friday, which is what we did. And the whole thing was done sort of as an experimental lark.

It was quite successful. They made a Broadway play out of it and one thing and another, and a musical. And one of the reasons I think it was so successful was that none of us were taking it seriously. We were taking it and just sort of fooling around and having fun. And I think that attitude helped the picture, because the crew had the same attitude, and the whole thing permeated the shooting.

I remember we started shooting Thursday morning at 8:00. And at 8:30, the assistant director announced we were hopelessly behind schedule.

What are your favorite genres to shoot, and are they the same ones as the ones you watch?

Not particularly. I should watch more genre films to keep up with it. Actually, I watch a certain number, specifically to keep up and see what’s going on now. But I’m more inclined towards somewhat more serious films, and particularly foreign films, although I see fewer foreign films now than I did before. I don’t know why.

We were a production/distribution company, New World, which I founded in 1970, and we distributed for Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Volker Schlöndorff, François Truffaut, a number of others. And I was a great fan of those films and went out of my way to distribute them. I was very much interested in that type of film.

In your early films, were you watching Mario Bava to see what he was doing? And were you expanding on that?

Actually, I saw only one film by Mario Bava, who incidentally I think was a brilliant filmmaker. It was because Jim Nicholson, who was the head of American International, had seen the film and liked Barbara Steele in it. He suggested I see the film and possibly use Barbara Steele.

I saw that one film. I don’t remember the name of it, but I thought it was really excellent. And indeed, I did bring Barbara Steele over. I think it was The Pit and the Pendulum. She played the leading lady.

What did Poe bring to your storytelling that, say, Lovecraft’s adaptations didn’t provide?

Well Poe, and this was part of my interpretation of Poe, I think Poe was working with the unconscious mind, from a writer’s standpoint, the same way that Freud, a little later in the same century, was working from a medical standpoint. I think the concept of the unconscious mind was starting to influence thinking in the 19th century, so I always thought that Poe represented the unconscious mind, and I shot according to that. It was one of my themes.

For instance, I felt the unconscious mind doesn’t really see the world. The conscious mind sees the world with eyes, ears, and so forth, and simply transmits information. So I made a point on all of the Poe films of never going outside unless I absolutely had to do it. I wanted to have full control, to shoot within the studio. Whether it came through to the audience, I don’t know. But at least in my own mind, I was able to deal with special effects with a number of things, with the concept of the unconscious mind.

When I did go outside, I tried to make it something that was not normal. For instance, on the very first picture, The Fall of the House of Usher, the only exterior sequence is when a man, played by Mark Damon, rides through a forest on his way to the House of Usher. And before we were shooting, there was a forest fire in the Hollywood Hills. I saw a picture of it in the Los Angeles Times, and all of the trees were burned. Everything was covered with ash, and I immediately put together, I think, a three or four-man crew. And we were up there in the Hollywood, burnt out hills, showing Mark on his horse, riding through that exterior.

I also used the ocean, a number of times. I feel that essentially, we came out of the ocean, and I felt somehow there is something fascinating about the ocean, even today.

Hazel Court’s invocation sequence is exquisite. When you were putting it together, were you having fun experimenting, trying to capture the unconscious mind?

Yes, it was all of the above. It dealt with the unconscious. We were experimenting, and I was having a lot of fun. I give a lot of credit to Danny Heller, the art director on that, because he would construct certain backgrounds. I would then work with different colored lenses on the camera, and then we would go in to a special effects shop, and they would take what I’d shot and overlay certain images. It was just a lot of fun putting them together, but I think I used that concept in almost every one of the Poe films.

And then of course, many, many years later, when I did The Trip, which was about an LSD experience, I really went crazy with those sequences.

On the other hand, I have to say this, at the time they came out, I got a lot of critical praise for that. But if you look at them today, they look primitive because the special effects today are so brilliant and so far advanced, that not only my pictures, but everybody was pictures at that time, when we used special effects, there was no way we could get the effects you can get today.

What do you think we’ve lost from the Mitchell cameras and having to lug things around and meticulously put together special effects? What do you think is lost in technology making filmmaking easier?

What’s gained is the fact that the special effects are just beyond anything anybody ever dreamed of before. They’re just astonishing. What is lost is the fact that there’s a tendency for the special effects to take over the picture, and the story and the characters are secondary to the special effects. And we’ve lost that to a certain extent. I wouldn’t say all the way, but we’ve lost to a certain extent the examination of characterization and the simple narrative, and the writing of dialogue.

How do you work with your composers on your films?

I work with composers probably a little less than most directors do. I don’t pretend to have great knowledge of music. What I do [is] I talk with the composer and discuss the themes, the mood within each individual scene, the basic feeling I want from the music, and then I leave it to him.

For instance, directors are generally on the soundstage when they’re recording the music. I’m never there. I’m not a conductor. I leave that to the composer.

The last movie you directed was Frankenstein Unbound in 1990. What would it actually take to put you back in the director’s seat?

Well, what happened was because when I started in 1970, I started my own production/distribution company. And I had planned simply to take a year off from directing, because I was just tired. I’d directed about 60 films in about maybe 15, 16 years. And I thought I would take a sabbatical, one year off from directing, and just be a producer and a head of the company. But then the company became instantaneously successful.

It was really amazing. Our very first picture was a giant success, and so were all of the following ones. And I got so involved in all of that [that] I just stepped away from directing. But then Universal did some kind of research, and they came up with the idea that “Roger Corman’s Frankenstein” would be a success for a film, and they asked me if I would like to make it, to produce and direct it. And I said, “No. You may have that research, but in my opinion, it’s just going to be another Frankenstein film. There have been so many Frankenstein films. It isn’t worth going back.”

But they kept coming back to me, and they offered me so much money. Finally, I thought, “Geez, I’d be an idiot not to turn this opportunity down for what they’re now offering me.” And I said, “All right, I can’t say yes right now. But if I can find a new version, something that is a different interpretation of Frankenstein, I will do it.”

And I read a novel, Frankenstein Unbound, by Brian Aldiss, a very good English science fiction and fantasy writer. And it was a story of somebody from the future, who, through a time warp, is thrown back into the 19th century and meets Dr. Frankenstein.

In the novel, he was some sort of a diplomat. But in the movie, I changed him from being a diplomat to a scientist, so that the picture essentially brought a 21st century scientist back to meet a 19th century scientist. And I thought that was an original and new interpretation. So I said, “If you can buy that novel, I’ll make the picture.” Which we did.

With all the streaming alternatives now for new projects, do you think it’s easier for an independent director to break in, or is it still just the same corporate-owned studio stuff?

I think you would divide that into two sections. It’s a little bit more difficult today, particularly with the studios, because they’re making now primarily these giant special effects pictures, and they’re not going to give a new director a chance to play with a $200 million budget.

But new directors are breaking in pretty much the way they were when I started, which is on independent films and particularly on low budget films.

You’re both the producer and the director on Masque. Were there things that you wanted to do as a director that you wouldn’t let yourself do as a producer?

I was a producer and director on almost all of my films, so I never really had any problems with the producer. If there was a problem with the producer, it was a problem with myself.

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The Masque of the Red Death is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital now.

The post The Masque of the Red Death: Roger Corman Talks Pandemics and Restoration appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Haunted Hollywood Host David Del Valle Scares Up More Movie Madness

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“The police don’t believe in monsters,” we learned in Ed Woods’ 1955 B-movie horror favorite Bride of the Monster. But Full Moon Features does, and they know where to find them. On Friday, July 31, the channel and app dropped seven cult classics to their new 20-film series Haunted Hollywood. Every Friday for 13 weeks, they will add a new scary flick. Some of these films are frightening in their content, others for the stories behind the film. For some of these movies, the most horrifying thing is they ever got made in the first place. 

Real life and Hollywood history blend in macabre ways, and no one blends these stories better than David Del Valle. The film historian and agent to the stars hosts Haunted Hollywood, opening each showing with a personal story. Del Valle hosted a series of television interviews entitled “Sinister Image,” speaking with moviemakers as varied as Cameron Mitchell to Russ Meyer. He also produced and was the on-camera host of the only interview Vincent Price ever gave about his horror film career.

For the film Flesh Eaters, a guilty pleasure for horror purists where particles eat their way out of victims’ bodies, Del Valle opens with the story of the mad scientist who spiked their drinks. Martin Kosleck spent his career playing onscreen Nazi villains and perverts, Del Valle got to witness the actor’s debauchery first hand. For Horror Express, he tells the story of the stages of grief Peter Cushing passed through after the death of his wife. For Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster, he talks about the delusional world of the man who played Kelton the Cop.

David Del Valle spilled deeper stories all over Den of Geek in a terrifying talk about Haunted Hollywood.

Den of Geek: What cemented you as a horror aficionado rather than any other genre?

David Del Valle: I started going to the movies when I was four, or five, or six years old. So the first movies I saw were the Universal horror films, with Lon Chaney Jr. as the Mummy, and Bela Lugosi as Dracula. And then I started watching the films of Vincent Price, especially at the drive-in, when I was in high school, because that’s what they showed, nothing but triple-feature horror movies. So as a kid, that was what I watched, as an escape from school and all that kind of thing. And I’m sure my story resonates with a lot of people, because you start out with that genre when you’re a little boy. That’s the way that works.

What’s the criteria for the films you choose for Haunted Hollywood?

I was given a list of films, and those were what we chose. They tried to find Vincent Price titles for me, because I’m rather well-known for having done one of the only on-camera interviews with Vincent Price on his entire career, called Vincent Price: The Sinister Image. And if you ever buy from Screen Factory, the Vincent Price Collection has my hour-long interview with him. So the first one I taped was House on Haunted Hill.

We dropped with Horror Express with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. That’s what they call Euro-horror, because it was shot in Spain, and it’s very good. It’s a great movie. It’s called Panic on the Trans-Europa Express, that’s what it was called in Europe. They changed the title for American audiences to something a little more lurid, Horror Express. The cool thing about it, like The Thing, the John Carpenter film, or earlier, the Howard Hawks film, is that the creature absorbs the knowledge of everyone it kills. So by the end of the movie, he’s absorbed dozens of people, so he knows as much as anyone could know about being an alien. That’s a really good movie with a strong narrative, and it’s one of the better pairings of Cushing and Lee, I think.

You tell an interesting story about the death of Peter Cushing’s wife.

When Peter’s wife died, the light just went right out of him, and the only thing he had was work. And if you noticed, and Christopher Lee told me this as well, he lost so much weight, that he weighed like 90 pounds. It was really scary, because his health was at stake. And Christopher would say all he had for lunch is an apple and a slice of cheese. Christopher and his wife, Gitte, invited him for meals, and I think they shot it during the winter, so Cushing spent Christmas with the Christopher Lees.

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I knew Christopher when he lived in Los Angeles, so I would call him up, and he was kind of lonely, because his wife traveled a great deal, and he wasn’t making a lot of films here. He made an Airport movie here. He actually made a film for Charles Band, I believe, called End of the World. I think it’s part of the Full Moon Features.

Vincent Price was dubbed the heir apparent to Boris Karloff after the film Diary of a Madman. Why that film rather than Haunted Hill or The Fly or House of Wax?

Vincent really didn’t become a horror star until he started working for Roger Corman. House of Usher was the film that really put him over, and then he made six more, then he had a contract with American International, and he made a number of horror pictures that really made him a hero amongst the youth culture of that time. Remember, that was the ’60s, so you had drugs, rock and roll, a lot of rebellion. The world was changing, and Vincent Price was like the rock and roll monster. He wound up doing rock videos with Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson, so he had a very different life.

House of Wax would’ve been a turning point, but that was shot in 1953, and he would go back to just being a character for a number of years. And in The Fly, he’s a supporting character. David Hedison is the fly. But House on Haunted Hill is an important picture, because he did that and The Tingler for William Castle. Vincent, he didn’t take a salary, he took a percentage, and House on Haunted Hill made him a millionaire. And then two years later, he did The House of Usher.

Both Karloff and Price appeared in Tower of London. Do you have any interesting stories from that?

Vincent Price was under contract to Universal, and that was the second or third picture he did. He was still very new. He had been a Broadway star. Karloff had already been an established movie star. Vincent’s recollections of Karloff, they became very, very good friends, he said that the first time he was on the set of Tower of London, Karloff was in his makeup as Mord the executioner, with his head shaved, and a hump on his back, and his elevator shoes, and he had an ax. He was the executioner for Richard the Third. And so, he goes up to Vincent, and he goes, “I just want you to know that I’m not as evil as I appear.”

Vincent was just so bowled away by what a cultured, wonderful guy he was. And like Peter Cushing, you will never hear a negative about Boris Karloff. He was beloved by everyone that knew him, as was Vincent Price later on. All these guys of that period were very cultured, very sophisticated men. They were all grateful that they had this niche in which they could work, because they all made other kinds of movies. Vincent Price worked in every genre, and so did all the rest of them, except perhaps for Bela Lugosi. They all did Westerns and costume pictures and film noir and musicals.

One of my favorite Karloff movies is actually a gangster movie, Smart Money. And in Bride of the Monster, Billie Benedict from the Bowery Boys appears just a few scenes from where Kelton the Cop is called a “junior G-man.” Was Ed Wood that clever?

Oh, I’m sure not. I don’t think people were making references and homages in those days. I knew Paul Marco quite well, who played Kelton the Cop, and he was a real character, that guy. I mean, he lived that part. He was one of what you call in Hollywood a “delusional actor.” But those pictures were shot in five or six days.

Smart Money was made in the early ’30s. I think the year that Karloff did Frankenstein. The Criminal Code and Scarface are the movies that Karloff made at the time, because of course, he didn’t realize that that was going to change his life, until the movie came out. He’d been a working actor in Hollywood for 10 years before Frankenstein was made.

You did the last major interview with Vincent Price. Did you learn anything you didn’t expect?

I did my interview with Vincent Price when he had finished a movie called The Whales of August, which was practically his last picture. I worked on one of his last pictures, From a Whisper to a Scream, with Jeff Burr, who’s a great director and needs to come back and make more movies. Vincent, after Witchfinder General, was not really all that comfortable with the violence and the way movies were changing. Edward Scissorhands was really his swan song. I think that’s a beautiful way to go out. Tim Burton just worshiped him. Christopher Lee also made some of his last onscreen appearances for Tim Burton.

Do you think we will see a resurgence of Giallo films like Mario Bava’s?

The era of the killer with the black glove and the white telephone, you’re talking about period films. I did admire The Witch, that’s of course, a period film. And I thought it was very well done, very well-written, very well-acted. Giallo, I love those movies too. But if you compare the two Suspirias, the remake is really a movie on its own. I mean, it really has nothing to do with Suspiria. But the people who didn’t like the remake of Suspiria, didn’t like the aspects of it that weren’t like the old Suspiria, which you can’t remake. You just can’t go back in time and recreate the elements that made those movies work. Mario Bava was a very unique filmmaker, because he was also a cameraman, he was also an art director. He was a renaissance director. Who do you think is interesting of the new directors today?

I’m liking Del Toro a lot.

Yes, Del Toro is a big horror fan. But for me, the best of the Del Toro movies are the ones he made when he was still in Spain. Pan’s Labyrinth and Chronos, I like those a great deal. Richard Stanley is the most intelligent and the most quirky horror director working today. I like The Color Out of Space a great deal, and I’m very anxious to see what he does with The Dunwich Horror.

What about the social horrors of Us and Get Out?

Yeah, I’m not a big fan of those, to be honest with you. But I mean, it’s also, we’re going through a very difficult time now. I don’t enjoy them. They’re not pleasant to sit through, which is why I don’t like the torture porn films that much, like the Saw series. We’re just going through so much now. I would never revisit those pictures, but that’s just me.

Alan Parker died on July31. My personal favorite horror movie is Angel Heart.

I love Angel Heart. I think it’s got one of De Niro’s best. I love Mickey Rourke. I love movies that are set in New Orleans. I love voodoo and hoodoo and aboriginal horror, all of these weird religious things are very quirky. I love The Skeleton Key, which talks about Hoodoo. I like The Believers that talked about Santeria.

Alan Parker, I liked his films. It’s interesting, because Fame doesn’t age well. It’s got some moments in it. The end of it, I Sing the Body Electric is interesting. But for me, the best thing Alan Parker did was Angel Heart. That’s just my favorite of his pictures. He was a very nice man, Sir Alan Parker.

Do you think that the New Orleans voodoo movies might ever steal back the zombie genre from the reanimated corpse?

That is exactly where it needs to go. You absolutely hit it on the head. I said this to Paul Schrader when Cat People came out. That was another one set in New Orleans. Angel Heart is set in New Orleans. The Skeleton Key is set in New Orleans. Yes. And when Dan Curtis was revamping Dark Shadows, I was working for him, and I said, “Dan, if you’re going to remake Dark Shadows, get David Bowie’s wife, Iman, to play Angelique. Don’t get a blonde, blue-eyed woman.” He said, “What are you crazy?” But you couldn’t change Dan’s mind at all.

I wanted to set Dark Shadows in Haiti, and start with Angelique’s curse on Barnabas, but all Dan wanted to do every time you would talk about Dark Shadows, he said, “Forget it. Here’s how it starts. ‘My name is Victoria Winters. I’m on the train to Colinwood.'” Blah, blah, blah. And you couldn’t convince him otherwise. Great lady, by the way, Lara Parker, but Angelique should have been a kind of sorceress. You know what I mean?

I always thought that Angelique was more important than Barnabas. She created him, she created Barnabas.

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Dark Shadows’ Witch Was As Influential As Its Vampire

By Tony Sokol

I think so, I think so. Of course, my favorite character on Dark Shadows was Grayson Hall as Dr. Hoffman. She was a scream, that woman. In fact, if you ever seen a TV movie of the week called Gargoyle’s, Grayson Hall is hanging upside down a telephone, with her hair in curlers, holding a cocktail. She was a hoot, that woman, and she and Jonathan Frid, what a couple. Very sexually ambiguous, shall we say. That was really the fun of Dark Shadows.

But getting back to your original question, I do hope that if zombies are going to be around for a bit longer instead of them just shambling along, eating brains, it would be nice to set it back into the history of voodoo, and to really use New Orleans, which is a marvelous, photogenic place. Isn’t it? I mean, yeah, I’d love to see more of that.

Will there be any White Zombie or those films in Haunted Hollywood?

You know what? I believe White Zombie is. I would love to do a whole series on the Monogram movies that Lugosi and Karloff made, although the Mr. Wong’s are kind of a snooze-fest, so I don’t know if anyone would want to sit through those. They just put out a Karloff movie called The Ape. It’s probably one of the most boring movies ever made, but it’s out on Blu-ray, so go figure. But I would love to do more Lugosi. I’d love to do the Monogram’s Invisible Ghost, and especially Voodoo Man. These were all shot in nine days, with a very low budget, but they were fun. It’s funny, White Zombie was made right after Dracula, and a lot of people admire it more, because once again, a movie like Dracula didn’t age that well. It has an incredible performance by Lugosi, but as far as Todd Browning, it’s one of the worst things Tod Browning ever directed. At that point, he was battling alcoholism, and I don’t think he was very on set with that picture. Dracula, it’s all Karl Freund, who was the cameraman, and then became a director.

Karl Freund directed The Mummy with Karloff, which is basically Dracula set in Egypt, so those pictures are very similar. The plots are almost identical. It’s just, one’s a vampire, and one’s a mummy, but they both have this obsession with one woman, blah, blah, blah. That kind of thing.

I’d like to see some Val Lewton.

My favorite Val Lewtons are I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim, Body Snatcher, The Leopard Man, Curse of the Cat People. I even like Ghost Ship. It’s the first appearance of Lawrence Tierney from Reservoir Dogs. Ghost Ship is really good. Larry gets killed by having chains wrapped around him at the end of it, if you haven’t seen that one.

What is it that you most want to bring out about these films or these stories?

I think the important thing with Hollywood in general, is the movies that we’re talking about in this series, everyone who made them was very passionate about them. Everybody made them with a great deal of love. I mean, on one hand, I’ll say, it’s a job. What are you going to do? It’s a job. But not really. I mean, Val Lewton, and Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff, and Vincent Price, and Todd Browning, and Roger Corman, they all loved what they were doing. And that is what I think we respond to when we watch these pictures, is that everybody had something invested in them. And it makes us love them all the more, I think. Don’t you feel that way about the ones that you’ve seen more than once? What do you keep going back to?

I watch Angel Heart at least once a year, Phantom of the Paradise.

Yes, yes, I love Phantom of the Paradise. We had a big screening at the Cinerama Dome for the Phantom of the Paradise that was sponsored by a store that’s closed now, called Creature Features, and he got everybody, except of course, the late William Finley, to show up. In fact, I was going to post a picture of me with Paul Williams today, who played Swan. And of course, Jessica Harper. Jessica Harper, man, has been in the weirdest movies. She’s in Suspiria, she’s in a Woody Allen. She’s in Phantom of the Paradise, and she’s good in it. And I love the songs in it. What a clever way to reimagine The Phantom of the Opera. I love that movie. I love a lot of De Palma’s pictures too, of course.

I saw Hi, Mom and Greetings in an art-house in New York, years ago, and I loved the work he did with De Niro back then. It was so improvisational.

People don’t realize that Robert De Niro really started his career with Brian De Palma. For a man that’s known for gangster films, De Niro did his share of genre movies too, didn’t he?

Lara Parker also was in Brian De Palma’s early films.

Yeah. And Lara’s in a great little movie, called Race with the Devil. Peter Fonda’s in it, and Warren Oates is terrific.

In some of the stories you tell, it seems like the players are as haunted by Hollywood as the films. Is that often the case?

Oh, definitely, definitely. The Ed Wood group were kind of on the periphery of show business. They weren’t really well-established. The one thing, as is shown in the Tim Burton movie, Ed Wood attached himself to Bela Lugosi because he was a name, but also, because he really admired him and grew up with his pictures. But what Ed couldn’t understand, as the movie points out, Lugosi was in decline. He wasn’t really getting work anymore. And so, having his name attached to something, didn’t really get you very far, whereas Karloff was a far better businessman.

Vincent Price used to say to me that Hollywood could be one of the most evil places to work, because you’re only as good as your last picture, or you’re only admired because you’re good-looking, or you’re young. And if you’re not good-looking and young, then you have to already been established, and then your name is used because you’re established. So these things, I don’t think necessarily change with time. It’s just that in today’s world, there are no horror stars anymore. I think the closest thing you get to a celebrity in the horror genre are the directors.

Roger Corman, of course, is the most respected and the most famous of all the directors, and he goes to every genre. Roger’s a very unique figure in show business. Next you get someone like John Carpenter. John Carpenter is a horror star director. George Romero had that same thing. People like Brian De Palma are established world-class directors. Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, people like that. But I don’t think there are any horror stars anymore.

I mean, yes, there’s Robert Englund, but Robert Englund is known for one character, playing in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and he made a number of other horror pictures. But aside from Robert Englund, I can’t think of anyone that’s known for horror pictures.

Are there any more recent films which you think would make a list of Haunted Hollywood?

Well, that, I couldn’t really say, because you have the independent horror films. I don’t know. I think the future of horror film, really, is in television and cable. The Walking Dead, it’s a phenomenally successful series, it’s known all around the world, as is Game of Thrones. I thought Penny Dreadful was terrific. I love True Blood.

The real acting, the real great writing is all on cable. And now that we’re in this kind of new world with the pandemic, everything’s going to be online. We’re going to be watching all this out of our homes. I’m kind of pleased with the resurgence of the drive-in. Because when I was a kid, when I was in high school, the drive-in, man, that’s where you saw all the horror films, triple-features. And that’s coming back, because I don’t see movie theaters coming back for a long time now. I think people are getting accustomed to watching movies at home.

Could there be a “Haunted Burbank?”

It’s very hard to tell. I’m not Nostradamus. The future of the business is not something I can see. I just can tell you that based on how we’ve been living the last six months, it’s all going to be on television. It’s all going to be streaming. That’s the future, and you might as well get used to it.

The 20-film series Haunted Hollywood will premiere a new cult classic every Friday for 13 weeks starting July 31 on the Full Moon Features channel and app.

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