[5]

Roger Corman directs and Vincent Price stars in their only collaboration based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft. Price plays a man claiming an inherited castle where he gets possessed by the spirit of his great grandfather, who is hellbent on exacting his revenge on the relatives of the villagers who burned him alive one hundred years ago. Price plays both the possessed and the possessor, while Debra Paget is gussied up to play the vacuous love interest, and Lon Chaney Jr. is rolled out to play the castle’s creepy caretaker.

Like most American International releases, the pacing can get a bit sleepy at times, but The Haunted Palace gets remarkable production value out of its meager budget. The entire film was shot on studio sound stages, including the seaside village street and the forest outside the eponymous castle. The massive indoor sets are equally stunning, aided by the Panavision, Pathécolor efforts of cinematographer Floyd Crosby (The Old Man and the Sea, High Noon). Ronald Stein delivers a brooding if redundant score, and the film offers a few nifty makeup effects, especially when Price and Paget encounter some of the village’s mutant denizens. Too bad the climactic reveal of an otherworldly beast-god is a bit of a let-down.

Even though the film is based on Lovecraft’s ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,’ American International saw fit to take advantage of Corman and Price’s previous successes with films based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. They haphazardly slapped two small pieces of narration into the film from Poe’s poem, ‘The Haunted Palace’ and used Poe’s name in the marketing of the movie.