The Tomb of LigeiaRoger Corman's final - and arguably most accomplished - Edgar Allan Poe adaptation saw the director expand his pictorial milieu by filming on location in the UK, preferring to shoot several thrilling sequences outdoors, instead of on sound stages.
Vincent Price re-teams with the director in the role of a tormented (what else?!) widower whose embrace of new-found love in the comely form of the Lady Rowena Trevanion (Elizabeth Shepherd) antagonises the unquelled spirit of his dead, deep-in-denial wife (shades of Burton's The Corpse Bride), who promptly rematerialises in the form of a feral feline.
"One of the finest achievements of the literary cinematic horror genre. The gothic enormity of the script by Robert Towne (Chinatown) still disturbs as it positively crawls to a sensuous, shocking end. Arthur Grant, regular director of photography for Hammer, handles the contrast between the bright English sunlight and the highly detailed period sets with ease, giving the film a different tone and feel from its predecessors in the Poe cycle. A true Gothic triumph" 2009 Edinburgh Film Festival
Imported print.
Screens with Tim Burton's early stop-motion short film Vincent (6 mins, USA, 1982), in which young Vincent - the tormented hero of our story - imagines a transformed suburban world worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. Narrated by Vincent Price.
