Issues of Problematic Identity in The Terror (1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963)

Issues of Problematic Identity in The Terror(1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963)

F R A N C E S A U L D

One person will say, ‘‘I see this message in a film,’’ and another willsay, ‘‘I see this message in a film.’’ All I can see is that I did the best Ican in a film.

(Corman qtd. in Wiater 45)

ROGER CORMAN PRODUCED AND DIRECTED A SERIES OF LOW BUDGET

Gothic Horror films in the 1960s. These films had popular,commercial success within the era’s accepted Horror genre,

although contemporary critics appeared oblivious to the postmodern,rogue themes that Corman was exploring within these films.1 As GaryMorris noted in his 1985 examination of Roger Corman as filmmakerin the American canon, ‘‘Like other directors who have offered audi-ences a narrow, bleak view of life, Corman has had a preponderantlynegative American press’’ (141). Dismissal by the critics was less of anissue for Corman than his commercial popularity, as he produced mostof these films independently for American International Pictures. Withthe freedom and courage of an independent filmmaker, he chose toexamine problematic identity and circular (rather than linear) narrative,effectively questioning the possibility of any static, knowable history.This fusion of salable, ‘‘recognizable’’ Gothic format such as the motifsof phantoms, crypts, specters, and the uncanny (Punter ix), and post-modern themes such as the relativity of meaning, first became fodder fordrive-in theaters and later became the staple of late-night horror fests.Two of Corman’s best examples of these interrogations of identity andstatic history are The Terror (1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963).

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 41, No. 5, 2008r 2008, Copyright the AuthorsJournal compilation r 2008, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

747

Released in 1963, The Terror starred Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff,and Brenda Knight. It was directed and produced by Roger Cormanwith Francis Ford Coppola as associate producer.2 This film functionsas both a classic Gothic Horror Tale and a B-grade example of inter-rogative and serious filmmaking. The sets and locations offer the pre-scribed medieval Castle perched atop rugged coastline and partiallyenclosed by a deep, secret forest. The sea crashes; the storm rages.Actors Boris Karloff and Dorothy Neuman offer the aging aristocratand the old superstitious witch-woman. Jack Nicholson is a handsome,chivalric, young French officer, separated first from his regiment andthen from a beautiful young maiden (Brenda Knight) who desperatelyneeds his help. As Nicholson’s character Andre Duvalier becomes en-meshed with the mysteries surrounding the other characters and thecastle itself, he responds appropriately and heroically. So how does afilm that fulfills so many aspects of the Hollywood representationalnarrative and Gothic formula resist enough of these same things to beconsidered rogue? Perhaps the answer lies in a combination of Cor-man’s bohemian, existentialist days at Oxford (Corman 15) andGothic’s provenance as the literature of revolution. The Terror referencesthe European nineteenth-century revolution, but it was produced by anauteur living through the American cultural revolution of the 1960s.The Terror interrogates the issues of both identity and historical reality.After eighty-one minutes of exploration there is still no satisfactoryanswer to the primary question asked by Andre to the mysteriousHelene, ‘‘Who are you?’’ Within the first minutes of the film, theaudience cannot be sure if she is a delusion of the exhausted, sun strucksoldier or real within the fiction of the film. Although the woman isdescribed, named, and renamed by every other character, her existenceand identity are constantly problematized. She has at least three namesand three physical manifestations. The closing moments of the filmleave the audience with the same unease that the introduction evoked,‘‘Is she now or was she ever really real?’’ and by extension, ‘‘How do weknow the real?’’

The Terror was not the first of Corman’s films to explore this issue. Inthe early 1960s, Roger Corman produced and directed six films based(in varying degrees) on the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe. None ofthese films is a verbatim retelling of a Poe story. Many of Corman’screations are wild combinations of names, characters, and eventstaken from multiple Poe stories and poems. Rather than a meaningless

748 Frances Auld

pastiche of horrific gothic images, Corman selects particular bits andpieces of story to layer and destabilize meaning. This cannibalization ofwell-known American literature brought its own peculiar authority totitles like The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Tales of Terror (1962), ThePit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Fall of the House of Usher (1960).As in The Terror (1963), Corman repeatedly problematizes the issues ofidentity, especially the idea of a consistent historical identity.3

Perhaps the film that ranges farthest afield from its literary name-sake, while aggressively exploring the identity of its protagonist is TheHaunted Palace (1963). This film merges characters, setting, and sto-ryline from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos (The Case of Charles DexterWard) with a title from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Haunted Palace.Like many of Corman’s other 1960s Gothic style films, the story beginsin a suitably creepy graveyard, complete with thunder and lightening.The figure of the woman is first seen by the male characters that aredrinking in an eighteenth-century public house. The men appear dryand safe, but the sight of the woman traversing the road to the Palacedisturbs them to the point of riot. As the woman receives admittanceto the Palace, the townsmen gather torches and rope to administer‘‘justice’’ to the master of the Palace, a man named Curwen (VincentPrice). Meanwhile, Curwen and his female companion take the youngwoman, Miss Fitch, deep within the house, into inner corridors anddown passageways, until they enter a subterranean chamber with ahuge pyramid. Fitch is chained in front of a grated pit and Curwenchants in what sounds like (but is not quite) Latin.

According to his neighbors, this man is ‘‘Satan himself,’’ yet theaudience has not really been shown any act of brutality committed byhim. He owns a beautiful, luxurious home; his female companion isbeautiful and well dressed. His status is conferred by the people whoforcibly extract him from his home, tie him to a tree, and set him on fire.The crowd takes the execution of Curwen upon itself, after the youngFitch woman does not answer the question ‘‘What is your name?’’ Theringleader of the mob, Mr. Wheaton, calls out, ‘‘He’s taken her soul!’’4

This opening scenario suggests that the relationship of name toidentity is not complete unless it is self referential, yet Curwen nevernames himself. The villagers call him ‘‘warlock’’ and ‘‘devil,’’ but untilhe is burned alive, the only crime this man appears to be guilty of ischaining and unchaining a beautiful village girl. As Curwen dies,he curses the townspeople for three generations, calling each of his

Issues of Problematic Identity 749

murderers by name. The camera pans from face to face, each individualresponding to his own name. After Curwen’s death, the scene fades toblack and the narrative begins again with the matte painting of thevillage of Arkham. This is a sustained shot and the painting is rep-resentational but not realistic, a soft watercolor wash over pen and ink.This invasion of the two dimensional art into the cinematic construc-tion of story calls attention to the cinematic frame of the story. Like thesketch of the tall ship in Arkham’s harbor in the background of thepainting, the film is a romantic construction of an unreachable, hazypast. Vincent Price’s voice reads part of the final stanza of Edgar AllanPoe’s poem The Haunted Palace,

And travelers, now, within the valley,Through the red-litten windows seeVast forms that move fantasticallyTo a discordant melody. (41 – 44)

This intrusion of Poe’s language may be an attempt to legitimize thetitle of the film, but it also works to place the scene in the nineteenthcentury, a substantially different time period than H.P. Lovecraft’stwentieth-century setting for the modern portion of The Strange Case ofCharles Dexter Ward. When Corman’s camera moves back to the set, itfollows a carriage containing Curwen’s descendant, Charles DexterWard, back into the town. The words on the screen proclaim that 110years have passed. The narrative appears to start again, with an iden-tical cast of characters, but three generations later than the originalopening. Time is made spiral, with reoccurring faces and places.

Similarly, in The Terror when Andre throws away his spinningcompass and collapses onto the sand, he has fallen from the liminalworld of the shore into something far more polymorphous. The seawakes him without drowning him. Although he will circle back andforth from the shoreline to the forest to the castle to the sea, he neverreally goes beyond the point on the beach where the water wakes him.He travels in loops and spirals, but the road is spinning inward,returning him to the moment when the water wakes him, rather thanextending outward toward the town of Colbin, and his reunion withthe regiment that he has lost, as well as the larger Napoleonic worldthat he claims to inhabit. Time is not so much ruptured as indefinablein any linear way. Characters in both films are enacting cycles that fuse

750 Frances Auld

identities and negate a static knowable individual at a recognizablepoint in a set story.

In The Haunted Palace, Corman interrogates the inability of struc-tures to remain consistent through time. The Palace came from‘‘somewhere in Europe,’’ although it is denied any particular country oforigin. The Palace was deconstructed in Europe and reconstructed inMassachusetts. The nineteenth-century Wheaton character says that noone wants to know any more about where it came from than theyalready know. The inappropriateness of the aristocratic title ‘‘palace’’ isquestioned by both Charles Ward and his wife Ann, but they never geta clear answer for the question ‘‘An American Palace?’’ When Curwenis possessing Ward he mentions the great age of the structure and notesthat Torquemada spent many pleasant hours there. While this referenceto the sixteenth-century Grand Inquisitor returns his listener to Poe’sfictional short story ‘‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’’ it also suggests that ahistory for the structure of the Palace does exist, it has merely becomeunattached to the physical structure.5 Just as the physical structure ofthe Palace will not stay in one geographical locale, neither is its historyavailable in a static or linear model. Even without a specific, verifiablehistory, the structure connects the distant (prehistorical) past of theelder gods to the medieval era to a proposed future. The Palace holdswithin it an interior space (the pit) that functions as both enclosure forthe demon gods Cthulu et al., and the point of expansion to alternatedimensions. If the nature of the Gothic alternates between the claus-trophobia of over-tight spaces and the disorientation of limitless spaces,Corman has found a way to conflate this imagery and edit it intoseconds of cinematic viewing.

Like space, time is further disintegrated by the appearance of Cur-wen’s coconspirators, Simon and Jarvis. Although they were not pre-sented in the initial scenes of eighteenth-century Arkham, they appearin the nineteenth century. Simon and Jarvis walk, talk, and continuetheir task of attempting to breed the elder gods with mortal women.They function despite lacking any particular history. Are they dead andreanimated, as is Curwen’s companion Hester? Have they withstood110 years of life without succumbing to the natural aging process? LikeCurwen’s casual reference to Torquemada, these characters have alsobroken loose from their particular place in history. Their existencedenies the knowability of a linear history by suggesting gaps andaccelerations.


In 1963s The Terror, Andre’s persona is a layer of half-truths. He isan officer in Napoleon’s Republican Army. Although his father waskilled in the French Revolution (a reference to the historical ‘‘Terror’’),young Andre is at once conscious of his aristocratic background andready to call in the Republican Army to control the Baron. His nature,like his history and his politics, is unsettled and inconsistent. Andre’sseparation from his military unit is never truly framed by a reference totime. The audience does not know how long the separation has lasted,nor what real attempts he has made to rejoin his men.

The Terror tackles the question of identity as it is coded into lan-guage by way of proper names. The Baron Von Leppe who speaks of‘‘the remains of a noble house’’ and the ‘‘ghosts of past glory’’ is in factErik, the peasant who murdered the real Baron twenty years earlier. Histitle, ‘‘the Baron’’ becomes sufficient for the other characters to identifyhim, yet it obscures his identity from the woman trying to avengeErik’s supposed death. More than an example of mistaken identity, thetitle becomes far stronger than the human being who holds it. Afterbeing ‘‘the Baron’’ for years, Erik’s personality is lost to himself and hisphysical image is lost to the old peasant woman who attempts toavenge her son. This transmutation seems to suggest that when thearistocrat dies and the peasant fills his position, both identities merge,yet neither survives. Critic Gary Morris notes that in Corman’s Poe-derived films, ‘‘the films represent death as both the alternative to themerging of the divided consciousness and the result of it’’ (91). Al-though The Terror is not directly related to a specific Poe story, Cormanstates that he ‘‘tried to out-Poe Poe himself and created a gothic talefrom scratch’’ (88).

As ‘‘the Baron’’ Eric tells his made up memories of the aristocrat’slife and his love for Ilsa, he speaks with the authority of his title andfrom the position of class and wealth. Living as Baron Von Leppe, Erichas never gone into the village, nor has he accepted any visitors. ‘‘TheBaron’’ is a character being performed for the one person (Stephen theservant) who knows it to be a facade. Although Leo Gordon worked onthe script, this twist of problematizing the Baron’s identity was spe-cifically Corman’s contribution (Corman 92). This enactment of iden-tity within the narrative seems to mirror Corman’s production theory,as well as practice, ‘‘Titles and job descriptions mean virtually nothing.There’s an aura through the halls that everybody can-and eventuallywill-do everything’’ (Corman ix).

752 Frances Auld

Further manipulation of identity through language occurs in thehypnotism of the young peasant woman into Baroness Ilsa Von Leppe.Just as Erik/the Baron has constructed and played the role of the deadaristocrat, so his peasant mother, Katharina the Heretic, finds a youngpeasant woman and uses spinning lights to mesmerize her into thetwenty year dead Ilsa. The question of whether or not Katharina is awitch is hedged by the scientific imagery that surrounds her. There isno eye of newt or toe of frog in her little shack. Although Katharina islabeled a ‘‘heretic’’ and a ‘‘witch,’’ these names are undercut by hersteaming Florence flasks, her use of medicine and psychology to hyp-notize her subject. She calls out to the Dark Powers while manipu-lating the tools of science. The supernatural possibilities are underlinedby her method of death. When Andre attempts to pull her into thedecommissioned chapel, she breaks away from him, explaining that sheserves another power. Clutching the metal frame of the fence, she isstruck by lightning and falls outside the churchyard, engulfed byflames. Was she the victim of the powerful natural science that was herally? Was she being struck down by an almighty God for her trafficwith the devil? There is no absolute and consistent explanation.Katharina’s hawk may have been a pet (if she was a naturalist/herbalist),or may have been Helene (if Katharina had the supernatural power totransform the young woman), or may have been a vehicle for Katharinaherself (if she had the supernatural authority to manipulate physicalmatter).

Similarly, The Haunted Palace lacks the comfort of absolute andconsistent explanations. The nineteenth-century characters of Whea-ton, Willet, et al are played by the same actors as those who portrayedthem in the beginning of the film (the eighteenth century). The simpletactic of using the same actors to play their own great grandchildrenand placing them on the identical set of the Burning Man PublicHouse negates the passage of time. Just as using Vincent Price to playboth the roles of Curwen and his great great grandson Ward calls bothcharacters’ individualities into question, so the faces of the men ofArkham become more real than their chronological identity. TheHaunted Palace suggests that visual image is at least as real as, andperhaps more consistent than, time.

Image is then problematized by the meta-cinematic issue of vision.The impossibility of a historical vision is played out by rampantblindness in the village. The first visual presentation of the villagers’


inability to see, and thereby know themselves, is the young blind childbeing led down the streets of Arkham by a middle-aged woman. Thelittle girl runs into a lamppost in a moment of painful and dark humor.Her blindness is painful for the newly arrived Wards to view and theaudience shares their gaze. This physical manifestation of Curwen’scurse on Arkham is part of the overall mutation of the descendants ofthe men who murdered the (possible) warlock.

Called by a bell, children and adult men stagger and grope their wayinto the town square, blind and grotesquely shaped. Their loss of visionis represented by the complete absence of eyes and the plates of scartissue in their eye sockets. The peculiar gait of some of the mutantsseems related to a discontinuity of their physical frames. In one scene, aman shambles with one hip turned inward too far and his shoulderhyper-rotated outward on the same side. He is as disjointed as thenarrative of The Haunted Palace, turning inward on itself, rather thanmoving in a conventional way. Another man’s mouth appears to besealed, although a lower opening has appeared on his chin. As a met-aphorical and physical analog, the source of narrative voice has slippedand now issues from an unlikely place. Like Corman reassembling thecomponents of Poe’s and Lovecraft’s fictions, some creative power hasdeconstructed the basic human form and reconstructed it in forms farmore abstract than the original. This may be a part of the 1960szeitgeist. David Skal notes that, ‘‘the entire twentieth-century history ofincreasingly abstracted human forms in fine art was recapitulated in thepop medium of horror, science-fiction and fantasy films’’ (313).

The mutants’ blindness is not fully comprehended by the rationalDoctor Willet. Science cannot offer a complete explanation for thedeformities that surround him. Willet suggests the same reason forboth Ward’s resemblance to Curwen and the mutation of the towns-people: genetics and heredity. Yet even as he explains that there is amultitude of precise combinations necessary for a conventional humanbeing, he does not claim any control over, or precise understanding of,this process. He does not deny order, but he recognizes his inability tolabel it. The scientific approach to the curse is no more rational thanthe nineteenth-century Arkham mob’s fear that Wade/Curwen has beendoing, ‘‘. . . something up there at the palace . . . for a week.’’ Analysisfails and the audience is left with the paranoia that something is goingon outside of their ability to see and classify it. Corman is playingoutside the rules of representational filmmaking. The force behind the

754 Frances Auld

mutation remains ambiguous. If Curwen’s curse is responsible, then thedeformities are his revenge for the destruction of his own body. If theelder gods are breeding with the women of Arkham, then transdi-mensional genetics are at fault. If, as everyone claims, no one visitsArkham, then perhaps the physical and mental aberrations are a resultof inbreeding in a very small village. By leaving all of these possi-bilities open, Corman drastically changes the tone and theme of theliterature from which he borrows. Lovecraft’s fears of racial pollutionand Poe’s ethereal beauty are subsumed by Corwin’s destabilized re-ality. Questions remain unanswerable because there are simply toomany variables to grasp and even if the audience could grasp thesevariables, they are liable to morph, denying their previous physicalidentity.

Helene’s identity in The Terror is, perhaps, the most suspect of any ofthe characters in either film. She appears to Andre as he stumbles alongthe beach. Framed by a natural looking window within the large rockgrotto encircling the shore, Helene appears very suddenly and disap-pears just as quickly. Her existential validity is open to question fromthe beginning. How did she get out to the rocks? Why is she filling ahole in the rocky formation, at once protected and endangered by thesea that surrounds her? While she takes Andre to fresh water, she leadshim on a great spiral trip back to the same section of beach on which heawakened. Her promise of ‘‘I have something to show you . . .’’ isrealized by showing Andre nothing but the beach, the fresh water,trees, and the very same beach. During this trip, she shows him noth-ing but his obvious surroundings, while explicitly promising some ill-defined answer. This promise is deferred until the end of the film whenHelene does show Andre ‘‘something,’’ as her body dissolves, liquefies,and melts away. Yet, even then the audience is hard pressed to un-derstand what they have just been shown. Was the body that melted afigment created by Katrina? Was Helene’s body being manipulated byIlsa’s spirit? Not only is the simple physical nature of the corporealframe denied, the identity of the animating spirit is formulated as aseparate question. Identity cannot sit in the physical, the spiritual, orin the social realm, nor can it be coded into a portrait or a text.

When Andre draws a physical representation of Helene and offersthat as proof of her existence, the Baron tells him that it is no morevalid than what the officer has seen with his eyes. As in The HauntedPalace, visual reality and illusion are constantly fused as film questions


the authenticity of art, especially film. This issue seems to be dem-onstrated by Andre’s initial view of Katharina’s shack, when he seesHelene’s young image fade into Katharina’s old face bending over him.However, if human eyes cannot recognize identity, then why mustKatherina’s servant Gustav be blinded when he attempts to offer Andremore information about Helene and Erik? Corman again connectsblindness, the possibility of communicating history, and identity.

Gustav seems privy to the identities of some of these people, but heis blinded by the hawk and falls to his death (a drastic form of the samedirectional problems that Andre is suffering). In perhaps the grisliestscene of the film, Gustav’s lacerated face and punctured eyeballs are thefocus of two sustained shots. The camera pans back to take in his corpsebouncing and dragging off the hill until it comes to rest on the beach.In a bizarre over the shoulder shot, the audience sees Andre’s head andear as he bends over Gustav’s body, but Gustav’s face remains hidden byAndre’s body. Even if this scene was motivated by the cost or difficultyof recreating the make-up, the effect keeps Gustav partially hidden ashe reveals his death secrets. Just as Helene had earlier promised to showAndre (and by extension the audience) something remarkable, so nowthe audience’s expectations are again denied. They know what Gustav’sface looks like and they know what an over the shoulder shot usuallydisplays. The result of this shot is tension and even a little frustrationat this rupture in cinematic formula.

Another form of deferred satisfaction occurs when Corman layersimagery of doors throughout The Haunted Palace. Rather than an es-cape, these are doors that seem to draw the individual deeper into aninteriority. Once again Corman offers a very circuitous and problematicinward spiral. When the characters physically move through an en-closed space, either the physical space morphs and constricts thestructure, or the characters are drawn deeper into the complexities ofthe plot. Narrative structure is sabotaged by the door icon that usuallymarks progression. At the beginning of the film, the young Fitchwoman enters the Palace through its massive, arched front doors. Theyappear to open without agency, until an interior shot reveals Hester andCurwen, just inside the entryway, waiting for their victim much likethe spider trapping a butterfly in the opening credits. While the au-dience cannot know who opened the first set of doors, Curwen nowbecomes the door opener for both the women, although he does notlead them through the house. Often it is Fitch herself who seems eager

756 Frances Auld

to proceed along a path with which she is familiar. Curwen opens asmall door by the fireplace, another door within the corridor, the gratein the floor leading to the dimension of the elder gods, and finally hisown front door (again). Fitch has cycled back to the moment of entry,the same expression on her face and once again wearing the cloak thatwas removed from her when she entered the Palace. Doors cannot becounted on to effectively lead characters out or in; their function andsymbolic meaning for the audience are no longer certain. Withoutclearly marked portals, how can the structure of the Palace remaindistinct from the surrounding countryside or the village of Arkham?Perhaps the Palace, like film itself, is an unfixed portal with no absolutepromises of destination.

In the nineteenth century, when Ann Ward attempts to escape anightmare, she rises from sleep, walks out of her bedroom and enters acorridor. This corridor draws her deeper within the house and althoughshe passes through a second doorway and into a second corridor, she isfaced with a blank wall. Turning to face a menacing shadowy formadvancing down the corridor, she recognizes Simon and faints, return-ing to the sleep state she was trying to escape. Like Ann Ward’sabortive attempt to leave the Palace and the town itself, progress seemsto return the individual to the beginning of the journey, both tem-porally and physically. Ann’s attempt to orient herself by reaching aperspective ‘‘outside’’ the Haunted Palace may be forever daunted byher inclusion and implication in these interior events. Likewise, couldthe audience ever really escape the control of the director? Does not adirector write the audience into each scene, implying that the scenewill be viewed and interpreted?

At the heart of the story in The Haunted Palace is the question ofCurwen’s identity. In the eighteenth century he is verbally labeled andphysically destroyed before his identity can be fully explored. In thenineteenth century he exists as a memory held by the descendants ofthe men who murdered him, as visual representation through a por-trait, and in the physical make up of his great great grandson, CharlesDexter Ward. As the spirit of Curwen says as he attempts to take overWard’s body, ‘‘Your blood is my blood. Your mind is my mind. Yourbody is my body.’’ While Vincent Price attaches different vocal into-nations and physicality to the two personalities, the audience is stilllooking at the same actor. Like the rotted body of Hester that Curweneventually reanimates, Curwen’s own body has been reformed from


whatever portion of his blood remains in his descendant. Physical lawsare negated at the same time that they are reinscribed as scientificexplanation, heredity.

The internal identity of the Ward/Curwen character is constantly influx and often at odds with the identity that the other charactersperceive. The initial shots of Charles Dexter Ward are fragmentedimages of his head and upper body viewed through a moving carriage.There is no introduction by name until Ward enters the Public Houseto ask directions to the Palace. This juxtaposition of meaning andvisual image against the textual message undercuts the validity oflanguage.

Another peculiar aspect of problematic text occurs in The Terror inreference to the Baron’s wives. As Erik tells the story, the Baron had awife (unnamed) who died and it was after her death that the Baron fellin love with the peasant Ilsa. Ilsa becomes the Baroness and the originalwife drops out of the story. The Baron (or the man pretending to be theBaron) did not seem too broken up over the death of his first wife. Theaudience can presume that she is buried with all those other aristocrats,somewhere in the crypt, but her physical position, like her character,remains hazy. Perhaps the original wife, apparently a real aristocrat,rather than the peasant Ilsa, is present by virtue of the name engravedon the plate in the entrance to the crypt. The engraving states:

IlsaBaroness Von Leppe

1761 – 82

The inconsistency is in the dates. The Baron claims that Ilsa died in1786. If the woman for whom the plate was originally engraved died in1782, then she would have to be the original Baroness. Perhaps Erik/the Baron added Ilsa’s name to the plate belonging to the original wife.The Baron recommends that Andre not trust his eyes when he looks ata portrait or a sketch. Perhaps the same is true of writing, visual textsare neither stable, nor reliable in this place. Like film itself, visual textis constantly open to editing and interpretation.

The ‘‘chapel’’ itself has been renamed and recycled. Although Andrerecognizes its form, he asks where the religious objects have beentaken. The Baron replies that it is no longer a chapel; it has beenturned to other uses. As a ‘‘front’’ for Ilsa’s crypt, the ex-chapel is a

758 Frances Auld

perfect representation of the whole cast of characters. Just as the cru-cifix is present as an empty outline on the wall and Ilsa’s name isengraved on a plate without her body resting behind it, so all thecharacters exist as representations of an unavailable original. The name,the outline, some residue of the form keeps acting as the original,without any explicit recognition of this ongoing lack of substance. Theterror in The Terror seems to be the lack of a consistent referent for therepresentations of the classic Gothic characters. What literary criticJerrold E. Hogle calls Gothic’s ‘‘recounterfeiting of the already coun-terfeit’’ (295) in reference to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lit-erature is documented both in and by a film that was shot without afinished script on a leftover set and inspired by a missed tennis date(Corman 89 – 92).

In the final minutes of The Haunted Palace, Dr. Willet saves thetriumphant Charles Dexter Ward who has fought and broken throughCurwen’s possession. His portrait, like the house, has supposedly beendestroyed by the fire. Shielding his face from the flames and smoke,Ward is carried out by Dr. Willet and leans against a tree for support.The ‘‘happy ending’’ is reversed when Ward turns around and answershis wife’s concerned question about his health, ‘‘Are you certain thatyou are all right?’’ Vincent Price evokes the persona of Curwen throughfacial gesture, vocal intonation, and ironic language, as he says, ‘‘Per-fectly sure.’’ However, as The Haunted Palace has demonstrated, neitheridentity, history, nor narrative itself can ever be ‘‘perfectly sure.’’

These Horror films raised questions for any audience member whowas willing and capable of looking for the depth in Corman’s art. Theirfusion of postmodern thought and blatant popular commercialism wasno accident. Corman used the stereotypical visual elements of theGothic to destabilize the label ‘‘Gothic,’’ and in so doing he createdrogue films.

NOTES

1. An exception to Roger Corman’s lack of recognition, David Wills and Paul Willemen’s RogerCorman: The Millenic Vision (1970) cites the director’s work in the context of contemporary

cutting edge film of the 1960s. They recognize a sense of nonlinear vision in the Corman ouvre.

2. According to Charles P. Mitchell, the film’s title was a concession to the American popularity

of Corman’s previous Poe adaptations. In both France and Australia publicity attached the film

to H. P. Lovecraft, but producers feared American audiences would not recognize the name

(128).


3. Unlike H. P. Lovecraft’s novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Corman’s film does not supply a

protagonist who willingly and literally digs up his ancestor to examine the past.

4. In The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Ed Naha cites critic Judith Crist’s response

in The New York Herald, ‘‘The Torquemada line is almost worth the price of admission but not

quite’’ (174). Crist seems to appreciate the humor of the line with no recognition of post-

modern artistic reference.

5. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Oval Portrait,’’ Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, and H. P.

Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward all connect human essence to artistic representation

and cultural recognition. Corman’s production of The Haunted Palace (named after Poe’s poem)

is based on Lovecraft’s novel, which references Oscar Wilde as the emblem of a man under

cultural erasure.

Texts Cited

Corman, Roger, and Jim Jerrome. How I Made a Hundred Movies inHollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York: Random House, 1990.

Hogle, Jerrold, E. ‘‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process ofAbjection.’’ A Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Oxford:Blackwell, 2000. 293– 304.

Lovecraft, Howard Philip. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. 1941. NewYork: Random House, 1987.

Mitchell, Charles P. The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography. Westport:Greenwood, 2001.

Morris, Gary, and Roger Corman. Brilliance on a Budget. New York:Arco, 1982.

Poe, Edgar Allan.‘‘The Haunted Palace.’’ 1839. Great Tales and Poems ofEdgar Allan Poe. New York: Washington Square Press, 1963.

Punter, David. ‘‘Introduction.’’ A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford:Blackwell, 2000. viii – xiv.

Wiater, Stanley. Dark Visions: Conversations with the Masters of Horror.New York: Avon, 1992.

Will, David, and Paul Willemen. Roger Corman: The Millenic Vision.Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1970.

Skal, David. The Monster Show. Norton: New York, 1993.

Films Cited

The Haunted Palace. Dir. Roger Corman. Cinematographer FloydCrosby. Perf. Vincent Price, Debra Paget, Frank Maxwell, LonChaney, Jr., Leo Gordon, Elisha Cook Jr. American InternationalPictures, 1963.

760 Frances Auld

The Terror. Dir. Roger Corman. Cinematographer John Nicholaus. Perf.Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Sandra Knight, Dorothy Neumann,Richard Miller, Jonathan Haze. American International Pictures,1963.

Frances Auld is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of SouthFlorida St. Petersburg where she teaches Medieval British Literature, as well asCultural Studies. Her teaching and research interests include monstrousbodies in early British Literature, as well as their irruption into contemporarypopular culture. She has published and presented on Anglo-Saxon, Medieval,and contemporary monsters in text and film, as well as the pedagogy of horror.


Documents

Issues of Problematic Identity in The Terror (1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963)