By Silvia Moreno-Garcia
There are actors who appear in movies and there are actors who embed themselves in our minds. In horror, we have people like Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. These are performers who not only read their lines and donned the appropriate makeup, these are actors who made the movies…well…the movies. They defined, and sometimes redefined, horror and suspense. Key among these is Vincent Price, a personal favourite. My daughter Victoria would have been named ‘Vincent’ if her sex had not intervened. Even then, you can see I managed to keep the “Vi” part of the name. While Peter Cushing was serious and Christopher Lee was sexy, Vincent Price was fun.
Born in May 27, 1911, in St Louis, Missouri, Vincent Price attended Yale, where he studied art history, then went to London for his masters degree and became interested in acting. Theatre led to films and radio, but by the 1950s, his career was in decline, which meant smaller productions and an introduction to the horror genre.
He appeared in House of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958) and House on Haunted Hill (1959), before landing in a low-budget Roger Corman movie which started him on a string of successful Poe adaptations. This is how Poe and Price merged, to the point that, when most horror fans think “Poe hero”, they immediately picture Vincent Price.
With his distinctive voice and aristocratic looks, it is no wonder that Vincent Price eventually starred in a number of Gothic pieces. He enjoyed Poe’s stories, saying, “The American people relegated him to a second place in the history of American literature…In the rest of the world, Poe is considered to be our major contribution to literature. He invented the detective story; he influenced all of the great French poets: Baudelaire, Valery, Verlaine, as well as all of the great English poets. And almost every major artist of the 19th century illustrated Poe: Gustave Dore, Edouard Manet, Odilon Redon. His influence on the world of art was enormous.”
An interview from 1985 sheds more light on Price’s thoughts on Poe and Corman. He said, “The best of those movies that I did were the ones that made fun of themselves” and “I found out something, which I suppose in the back of my mind I’d been told at some time, but I really didn’t realize: that about seventy percent of Poe’s work is satiric.” Price mentions The Raven and Tomb of Ligeia as two flicks that succeeded in capturing some of the spirit of Poe. He also discussed how he portrayed the characters, explaining that “I have tried to bring a sense of style to the thrillers that was in one way pseudo, phony, too much, and at the same time, based on the audience idea of what it should look like, of what I should look like.” One of the fascinating insights from this interview is the revelation that Price decided to play Roderick Usher as an ultra-sensitive fellow, leading Price to bleach himself “like something that lives in a cave.”
In another interview, where he discussed his radio career, Price explained, “I love comedy and it’s very easy to turn the macabre into comedy – it really is. I think of the horror films I have done that have been successful. It’s perhaps because I have done them a little bit tongue-in-cheek.”
In this TV interview, he explains that he didn’t take himself seriously because he thinks “of life as a great expression of joy.” He also said he got tired of playing lots of leading men who were “so good” and wanted to play a villain.
You understand what I said about Price being fun? Because there was often something exaggerated, over-the-top about his performances in the Poe movies. You almost expected him to give you a nodding wink. Yet, it worked because the films demanded such things: big castles, big performances.
Decades after the Corman movies were made, it’s still exciting to see Price in full Gothic getup. Yes, it’s still fun.
You can watch Mr. Price in this YouTube music video. Enjoy!