THE
HAUNTED PALACE
RT: 85mins. Cast: Vincent Price, Debra Paget, Frank Maxwell, Leo Gordon, Lon Chaney Jr, Elisha Cook Jr, John Dierkes, Milton Parson, Cathie Merchant, Guy Wilkerson, Stanford Jolley, Harry Ellerbe, Barboura Morris, Darlene Lucht, Bruno Ve Sota.
By 1963 Roger Corman and American International Pictures (AIP) had largely exhausted the stock of filmable Edgar Alan Poe material that remained in the Public Domain and which they had so profitably exploited since first adapting the author with The House of Usher (60). Deviating early on from straightforward dramatisations of Poe's works, Corman and his collaborators contributions to the cycle included an anthology (Tales of Terror 62), a parody (The Raven 63) and pastiche (The Terror 63). A variation on this was attaching a Poe title to the adaptation of another author's work. As rival producers had discovered there was a market for dramatisations of writers working in a similar vein, typified by the likes of Steve Sekely's Twice Told Tales (62) and Reginald Le Borg's The Diary of Madman (63) which reworked material from Nathanial Hawthorne and Guy de Maupassant respectively. The Haunted Palace therefore borrows its title from an obscure Edgar Alan Poe poem but is in fact the first official screen adaptation of material from H.P. Lovecraft's canon.
17th century New England. Over the village of Arkham a thunder and lightning storm rages while a group of men sit in a tavern. One of the men, Ezra Weedon, is sitting at the window looking out into the village for anything out of the ordinary when he sees a local girl walking through out of the village. Joined by another man, Michael Smith, Weedon sets out to follow the girl and the trail eventually leads to a massive building that is revealed to have a terrible reputation among the townsfolk. The girl is seen being ushered inside and the two men decide to return to Arkham to get help. Inside the building the girl is greeted by its owner Joseph Curwen and his mistress before they prepare her for a ritual ceremony. She is then led, apparently in a trance through a secret entrance into a labyrinth of passageways which end up in an underground chamber at whose centre is a raised platform. Upon the platform is a wooden cover which obscures a deep shaft. The girl is tied to a scaffold on the platform and the cover is raised. The girl screams in horror when she sees what the shaft contains. Shortly after the villagers descend on Curwen's property demanding to see the girl. He hands her over but it appears to the Arkhamites that she is under some sort of spell and so Curwen is dragged from the building and tied to a tree in preparation for being torched. Before the burning can proceed Curwen issues a curse against those present in particular naming a group of men he holds responsible for is impending death. Curwen is burned alive as the storm above the town becomes ever more violent. 110 years later. A coach pulls into Arkham bearing Charles Dexter Ward and his wife. The coachman advises the couple not to stay long in Arkham as the place is reputedly cursed but the Ward dismisses his advice as mere superstition. After the coach departs the couple wander through the strangely deserted town until they come upon a tavern called The Burning Man. They enter and are immediately treated with suspicion by the regulars who closely resemble those who killed Joseph Curwen. The suspicion becomes outright hostility when he asks directions to the Curwen property that he has inherited and he and his warned to leave town immediately or face the consequences. Fortunately they are befriended by the local doctor who gives them directions to the property. After they leave the patrons of the tavern discuss Ward's physical similarity to his ancestor Joseph Curwen. On the way to the palace the couple are disturbed the appearance of a strangely deformed girl. Eventually they make their way to the palace and enter. They explore the interior of the building and soon find themselves in the main hall. Hanging on the wall there is a large portrait of Joseph Curwen who is an almost exact double of Charles Dexter Ward. Ward becomes transfixed by the painting but soon snaps out of it. He then leads his wife on a tour of his newly acquired property...
While based on a posthumous work by H.P. Lovecraft, stylistically and thematically The Haunted Palace is very much a continuation of director Roger Corman's cycle of Poe adaptations. To increase the production values of subsequent films, AIP and Roger Corman had production designer Daniel Haller redress and expand the sets originally used for the first entry in the cycle, The House of Usher. As a result of this imaginative piece of economising viewers familiar with the series will be constantly reminded of reworked settings from The Premature Burial, The Raven and especially The Pit and the Pendulum whose main set has been recycled (complete with graphical art on the walls) as the hidden chamber beneath Curwen's palace. A trademark of the Poe movies that has since become a cliché was of course cinematographer Floyd Crosby's highly mobile camera prowling down Haller's impressively elaborate corridors, and The Haunted Palace is no exception. It is to Crosby and Haller's credit while these sequences are somewhat overfamiliar in this type of film, they can still create a genuine frisson for sympathetic viewers. Another very familiar element from the Poe films employed far less successfully is the climactic conflagration that befalls the Curwen palace, spectacular though it may be. Plotwise, the screenplay by Twilight Zone alumni Charles Beaumont (The Seven Faces of Dr Lau 64) owes more to Edgar Alan Poe than to its supposed source novel. In the novel (set in the 1920s, and so effectively a modern horror novel), both Charles Dexter Ward and Joseph Curwen are necromancers, able to bodily resurrect the dead. Ward revives the long-dead Curwen, whom he resembles physically, and is murdered by him. Curwen then impersonates the man who raised him from the grave. In Beaumont's script, Charles Dexter Ward is in fact a direct descendant of Joseph Curwen, hence the likeness to each other, and is possessed by the spirit or soul of his ancestor. This has been secured within a large portrait of Curwen that hangs over the fireplace in the main hall of the palace. It is never explained how this was achieved but is assumed to be the work of two fellow necromancers who escaped their colleague's fate. Interestingly, the way in which Curwen's influence emanates from a painting resembles that in a short story called "The Judge's House" by another notable Gothic writer, Bram Stoker. A female character in the form of Debra Paget (The Most Dangerous Man Alive 60), as Ward's concerned wife is also introduced, mainly as decoration but also for audience identification purposes. As with Corman's Poe adaptations, The Haunted Palace features a large forbidding house that hides a vile history and appears to have blighted the surrounding landscape. Here the house is in fact a palace that has been transported brick by brick from somewhere in Europe. Dialogue suggests Spain and that Torquemada and the Inquisition were housed there, although the building predates them by many centuries. A theme running through much of Poe's work is that of revenge, and when Curwen finally gains total control of Ward's body one of his first acts is to begin murdering the descendants of those who burned him to death. Additionally, an obsession of Poe's, which also turns up in the work of Lovecraft (who cited the former as a major inspiration for his own writing) is that of madness. In this adaptation a twist is applied when Ward's wife is convinced that the malevolent atmosphere within the Curwen palace has unhinged her husband's mind and tries to convince the local doctor (Frank Maxwell) of this fact, but instead nearly has herself committed when Ward/Curwen persuades the physician that the reverse is true. Screenwriter Charles Beaumont (also a prolific and highly regarded short story writer hin his own right) does deviate from the Corman/Poe formula in a number of respects. Gone are the fears of catatonia, being buried alive and corruption. Also missing is the rarefied, hypersensitive and very paranoid lead males found in these works, including the final entry in the series, The Tomb of Ligeia (64). In this instance Charles Dexter Ward is a strict rationalist who treats the claims by the coach driver (Stanford Jolley, Valley of the Dragons 61) and the villagers that Arkham has been blighted by supernatural means with outright scorn. This haughtiness, bordering on arrogance appears to be a family trait and is strongly echoed in his ancestor's open and deep-seated hostility toward those around him. He is an obsessive and very determined in achieving his goal, one that involves using the bodies of the young female population of Arkham. Unlike most other adapters of H.P. Lovecraft's work, Jean-Paul Ouellette's The Unnameable (90) being a case in point, Charles Beaumont does display knowledge of the writer's oeuvre. In a dialogue exchange between the Wards and the doctor the ultimate purpose of Curwen's activities is discussed. It appears that he and two other necromancers had come into possession of a book called "The Necronomicon", which purported to allow the initiated to communicate with, or indeed summon, the ancient former rulers of earth, the Elder Gods typified by entities with names like Cthulhu and Yog Soggoth. These deities were located on the other side of a metaphysical gate and the three necromancers hoped to open this gate by mating these otherworldly creatures with humans. A classic Lovecraftian touch is that Curwen ultimately has no real idea as to the purpose of his project, only that he must obey unseen forces that control his entire life. It is unfortunate that the script does not place more emphasis on this element of the plot since the nature of Curwen's obsession adds a potentially fascinating extra dimension to an otherwise conventional plot. Instead, it is sidelined to make way for Curwen's revenge against the people of Arkham for their actions against him, a rather more mundane plot device. The script also features some story elements that are frustratingly never properly developed. The most notable is that the people who confront Ward are in fact not the descendants of his ancestor's killers but, because of the intensity of the curse against their town, but in fact the original Arkhamites who exist in some sort of limbo that affecting the whole village. This would explain why the villagers instantly recognise Curwen's double when he appears in their midst, and why outsiders instinctively avoid the place considering it jinxed and literally otherworldly. Another area not really explored is the possibility that Charles Dexter Ward and his wife have not consummated their marriage. This is hinted at early on by the lack of intimate contact between the two and the wife's outright revulsion at being kissed by the possessed Ward, even though she is unaware that he has been taken over. Perhaps this explains why, at the climax, Curwen does not merely dispose of Ward's spouse, but rather prepares her for the "honour" of being impregnated by the entity lurking in the pit. Arkham itself is a perpetually fog enshrouded backwater onto which sunlight never seems to shine, existing in a bizarre twilight state. With its subdued autumnal colours, Daniel Haller's village set is already rich in atmosphere and this is heightened by the use of blue filters on Floyd Crosby's roving camerawork and lashings of dry ice, particularly in the highly surreal graveyard. The air of weirdness generated by the filmmakers is heightened by violent thunderstorms that produce no rain and glimpses of a large three-masted ghost ship lying in the village harbour along with a very impressive matte painting of Curwen's monolithic palace which dominates the skyline. At the time The Haunted Palace was produced, Roger Corman was attracting serious critical attention in Europe, particularly France and while a European sensibility pervades much of his 1960s productions, it is especially acute in this work. This is evident almost immediately with the distinctly Expressionist art direction that emphasises massively high ceilings, impossible architectural lines and oversized features such as doors and padlocks. Because the budget for each of these productions had been used to embellish the sets for previous films, this is arguably the most lavish of the cycle in terms of scale. The European influence extends to Corman's use of camera. Apparently taking a cue from the French nouvelle vague of the late 1950s and early 1960s, typified by the likes of Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451 66) and Jean-Luc Goddard (Alphaville 65), much use is made of framing devices such as doors, windows and fireplaces echoing the theme of entrapment visualised by Armando Acosta's title design in which a spider builds a web to capture a moth. Another visual feature is the use of rapid camera pans illustrated when Curwen lists those he curses personally at his burning, the camera moving from face to face as their name is uttered and where Ezra Weedon (Leo Gordon) frantically searches a room for his escaped mutant son. The use of the zoom lens is, however, unfortunate. The scale of Daniel Haller's sets allow for some impressive high-angled shots especially during the graverobbing scenes and at the climax. Colour is very important in The Haunted Palace with the dark browns and reds used throughout complimenting the bright oranges and yellows of candles and street lamps along with the acute primary colours of the Wards' nightclothes. The first appearance by Joseph Curwen is particularly striking. Interestingly some of Corman's work on this film recalls that of Italian horror maestro Mario Bava, especially his seminal work La Maschera del Demonio (60), released in the US by AIP as Black Sunday. The is particularly true of the sequence where Leo Gordon is attacked by his deformed offspring and they both fall headlong into a fire, their faces shown being graphically burned, and the torching of Joseph Curwen and his resultant curse. Overall the film's visual appearance from camerawork to art direction, with subdued colour schemes and perpetual twilight, resembles that employed by Bava for his essay in sadomasochism La Frusta e il Corpo (63). It's not known whether Corman was aware of that particular production but, in a bizarre set of circumstances, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi says that particular film was inspired by Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum, the star of which was Barbara Steele, a major cult figure in European horror and the lead in La Maschera del Demonio. While Corman relies mainly on creating atmosphere, he does pull of a number of successfully macabre sequences such as when the Wards find themselves surrounded by a group of deformed villagers, here helped by some genuinely unsettling make-up by Ted Coodly (Panic in the Year Zero 62) and the mournful sound of a bell tolling in the distance, Paget being terrorised by a shadowy figure walking down a corridor towards her and, looking forward to the next entry in the Poe cycle The Masque of the Red Death (64), Price soaking Elisha Cook Jr (The House on Haunted Hill 58) in alcohol and calmly setting him alight. Coodley also contributes some realistic looking burn make-up. A major contributor to The Haunted Palace's overall quality is composer Ronald Stein (The Last Woman on Earth 60). While featuring a prominent string section the music's real strong point is the use of horns that feature strongly in the title sequence and really come into their own at the climax as Mrs Ward and the doctor search the palace for the location of the hidden chamber. It is largely Stein's music that makes this sequence so exciting. The climax does in fact feature one of the Elder Gods. Only briefly glimpsed (probably due to budgetary restrictions) and bathed in bright green light, the entity appears to be locked into some form of suspended animation. Disappointing by current standards it would have probably struck a chord with 1963 audiences. Unfortunately the film falls apart at the end with the Arkhamites once again descending on Curwen's palace and successfully torching the place. There are a number of irritatingly loose ends in the plot such as how Curwen manages to regain control of Ward after his portrait is apparently destroyed and what become of the other two necromancers along with Curwen's mistress. Some sources suggest that uncredited second-unit director Gene Corman shot an additional day's footage to cover these loose ends but apparently this was never used. Vincent Price turns in his usual flamboyantly theatrical performance, well suited for the material, and obviously enjoys the prospect of playing two parts. What is remarkable is the dramatic yet surprisingly subtle change in facial features Price employs when moving from one character to another. Price is ably supported by an outstanding cast of character actors, in particular Lon Chaney Jr (Witchcraft 64) as the palace caretaker and fellow necromancer. Also notable are Leo Gordon and Elisha Cook Jr as the most prominent Arkhamites. Debra Paget, in her last role before marrying outside of the industry, meanwhile does well in an underwritten role that mainly requires her to be decorative as the concerned wife, although there is a tangible hint of some fire in her character. While given no dialogue, Cathie Merchant (X - The Man With X-Ray Eyes 63) makes an impression as Curwen's resurrected mistress. Leo Gordon and fellow supporting performer Bruno Ve Sota both had careers outside of acting, with Gordon doubling as a screenwriter with films like Bernard L. Kowalski's Attack of the Giant Leeches (59) and Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman (60) among his credits while Bruno Ve Sota's directorial work includes The Brain Eaters (58), an unofficial adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters". Some sources credit Francis Ford Coppolla (Dementia 13 63) with being this film's dialogue director, although his name does not appear on the credits. Two years after The Haunted Palace, Daniel Haller made his directorial debut with another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, the British-produced Die Monster Die, loosely based on "The Colour Out of Space", and followed it up in 1969 with The Dunwich Horror. A more faithful dramatisation of "The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward" appeared in 1992 under the title
The Resurrected, directed by Dan O'Bannon. |
© Iain McLachlan 2003
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