October Edition #25: THE TOMB OF LIGEIA

Director: Roger Corman
Screenplay: Robert Towne, from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe
Starring: Vincent Price, Elizabeth Shepherd, John Westbrook, Derek Francis
Release Date: 1964


Today I turned to Netflix to check out a movie that has been sitting in my queue since last October,  THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, another Edgar Allan Poe adaptation directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. Corman and Price collaborated on a series of these films in the 1960s, producing such classics as HOUSE OF USHER, THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, and TALES OF TERROR, all of which took full advantage of Technicolor’s rich color palette to create stunningly gothic visual poems of madness and the macabre. I fucking love it when these two work together, so you can understand how excited I was to check this flick out.

THE TOMB OF LIGEIA begins as Verden Fell (Price) lays to rest the body of his beloved wife Ligeia (Shepherd) beneath a large stone monument in the ruins of an abbey on their estate. A priest warns Fell that his wife was an unholy creature, and thus should not be buried in God’s earth. Fell tells the preacher to take a hike and that he’ll bury her wherever he damn well pleases, but not before a stray black cat jumps onto the coffin, which has a glass opening over the corpses’ face, causing the eyes to eerily pop open. Fell quickly closes his dead wife’s eyes and buries her against the priests’ warnings. After an undisclosed period of time, we pick up the story with Lady Rowena ( Shepherd, again) who goes exploring what looks like an abandoned abbey and is startled when she bumps into Verden, who is keeping watch over his wife’s grave. Fell is obsessed with Ligeia, convinced that her will to live was so strong that it will surpass death itself, allowing to return to him someday. He spends all of his time wandering the dark passages of the abbey alone, surrounded by sculptures of Egyptian iconography, and during the day wears a pair of odd-looking sunglasses to shield his eyes against a severe aversion to sunlight.

Despite his devotion to Ligeia, Rowena and Verden develop an infatuation with one another and are quickly married, with plans to sell the abbey and move on with their lives. Once they return home from their honeymoon, however, Verden once again dons the sunglasses and begins to behave strangely, disappearing at odd hours of the night with no explanation as to where he has been. The next day their lawyer Christopher (Westbrook) confides in them that Ligeia was never legally declared dead, meaning the deed to the abbey remains in her name, negating any plans to sell it, and also making Rowena and Verden’s marriage involuntarily bigamous. It soon becomes apparent that some force is trying to keep Verden at the abbey, and Rowena out of his life, as various strange goings-on begin to take place throughout the castle, most involving the black cat who seems to guard the tomb of Ligeia and whom is always present during moments of distress. Is Ligeia really attempting to return to her husband from beyond the grave? Or is this all some contagious form of madness that is taking hold of Rowena just as it already has Verden?

THE TOMB OF LIGEIA is a rich, atmospheric, lushly photographed piece of old-fashioned movie making, full of moments of genuinely beautiful horror, and it absolutely bored me to fucking tears. Even at a slim running time of an hour and twenty one minutes, after the first half hour I quickly began to tire of  this film’s dry dialogue and languorous pacing. Now, to be fair, the other Poe adaptations could be fairly slow-paced as well, but at least in a movie like HOUSE OF USHER, which also deals with phantoms that might exist only in the mind of its antagonist, there was a very real sense of urgency to the proceedings, as the audience is immediately made aware of the full extent of Roderick Usher’s madness and the danger that he poses to the protagonists. THE TOMB OF LIGEIA instead is composed of scene after scene of endless dialogue, with Price constantly slipping into reveries about the power of his love for his wife and her desire to outlive death that just go on and on. There are no real scares or any kind of action until the last ten minutes or so, which of course involve the abbey being consumed in a massive inferno. But the entirety of the movie before that consists mainly of scenes of people roaming around spooky art-directed corridors, calling out each others names, and waiting for something, for God’s sake anything, to happen.

I greatly appreciated the production design on display, as the immense sets and outdoor locations amped up the atmosphere to a much-needed level. The ruins of the abbey are obviously a very real, possibly ancient location and they are a breathtaking sight to behold. But all of the pretty visuals in the world don’t mean anything if nothing of interest happens in them. The screenplay by Robert Towne, who would eventually go on to write CHINATOWN, while quite ornate and literate, meanders far too much to add up to a cohesive whole. I will admit that I know nothing of the short story on which this is based, so I can’t say how much of that can be blamed on a lack of substantial plot to spread out to feature length. However, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH was based on a short poem that had absolutely no real plot or main characters, and Richard Matheson was able to construct a fantastic thematic tribute that retained all of the apocalyptic atmosphere of the source material while simultaneously telling its own twisted story.

This film, which was the last of the Poe films made by Corman, falls back into a formula established in HOUSE OF USHER and continued on through THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM that by this point had grown quite tired. As the formula goes, "Vincent Price is a recluse who lives in a castle/abbey/mansion who is obsessed with some dead bitch and is stubbornly hiding a ghoulish secret that isn’t revealed until the final ten minutes, oh and also he may or may not be crazy, but we’ll just leave that up to your imagination!" That formula, which worked amazingly well in the prior Poe films, simply didn’t do anything for me this go-round, probably because I’ve already seen it too many times before.

Another thing missing from this film is the impeccable sense of style Corman exhibited in the previous films. Again, the photography is beautiful, but it completely lacks the hallucinogenic color palette of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH and HOUSE OF USHER. The eye-popping red, blue, and green hues that crowded the frames of those movies created an awe-inspiring mood of gothic terror that is sorely lacking here. This movie even has the requisite distorted camera lens acid trip dream sequence that appeared in all of these movies, but this one shares none of the colorful nightmarishness of the same scenes in the other movies.

While I have many complaints against THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, I still don’t think it is a bad movie. It’s just dull, is all. Incredibly well-made, impeccably acted, gorgeous to look at, and boring, boring, boring. I wanted to like this, and found quite a bit to appreciate, but there was simply not enough of substance to make me ever want to revisit it.

My Rating:

5.5/10