8. Bringing Edgar Allan Poe To The Big Screen - Pit And The Pendulum, House of Usher, The Raven, Tales of Terror
Richard Matheson was a close friend and the best screenwriter I ever worked with. I always shot his first draft. I will miss him. That was Roger Corman tweeting about his friend and collaborator on four different adaptations of Edgar Allan Poes work, all of them starring Vincent Price and all capturing the essence of Poes morbid mystery while layering an essential gallows humor underneath. Poes short stories are often given to brooding, dour visions but what was refreshing about Mathesons scripts were the way they expanded Poes usually contained and cramped character pieces while adding doses of creepy camp that endeared them to audiences. Fans of Poe will know the writer himself had a grotesque streak of black comedy in him, and in many of these filmsmost notably Tales of Terror and Usher that tricksters sensibility is present. What Corman and Matheson really did was take Poe down off the literary classics shelf and dust him off for the drive-in set, all while casting light on his genius in ways classier than they undoubtedly seemed at the time. Who can forget some of the powerful and haunting final shots of Pit and the Pendulum and Usher? Give Matheson credit too for devising fully realized characters that Price could inhabit and make his own. These four films add as much to our sense of the actor as a horror icon as any others he did. Id also be remiss for not singling out The Raven, the rare comedy of the bunch, transforming the lauded poem into dark fantasy, and giving cause for the sublime trifecta of Vincent Prince, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff to appear on-screen all at the same time. Well, most of the time, anywayLorre does spend large portions of the film voicing the titular bird.