Press Book Collection - Tales of Terror (1962)

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Press Book Collection - The Haunted Palace (1963)

[Cover]

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Press Book Collection - The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

[Cover]

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The Oblong Box (1969)

Dir: GORDON HESSLER
Country: UNITED KINGDOM

aka:
Edgar Allan Poe's The Oblong Box

This troubled production from American International Pictures initially began life as the next project for young British filmmaker Michael Reeves. He had clearly impressed his backers with the strength of his third film Witchfinder General (1968). The death of Reeves during the pre-production of The Oblong Box was a major blow, not only to the film, but to British filmmaking in general. With the death of Reeves any ambition the film might have had began to dwindle and this was signposted by the arrival of the undistinguished Gordon Hessler as his directorial replacement. Hessler was a capable director, but one who rarely achieved any kind of inspiration - and this derivative and clichéd piece of gothic horror was badly in need of inspiration.

Tales of Terror (1962)

Dir: ROGER CORMAN
Country: USA

aka:
Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Terror

It seems only appropriate after stretching the Edgar Allan Poe short stories The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Premature Burial to feature length that Roger Corman for his fourth trip into Poe’s feverish universe should choose the form of the anthology film. By this point the Poe team under the auspices of Corman and production company American International Pictures was familiar and tight nit. Richard Matheson was on hand to contribute his third screenplay to the series, and Floyd Crosby completed a Poe quartet in the department of cinematography, maintaining a lighting scheme that gave the Poe films a uniformity in their visual style. In front of the camera Vincent Price contributes four performances to the anthology, appearing in each segment, and using his silken tones as the narrator. Like any anthology the results are patchy and uneven, with some segments clearly better than others. But Corman and his collaborators once again achieve a delicate and hallucinatory climate of gothic phantasmagoria and hysterical melodrama.