Triple Distilled Horror: In Memory of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing

Three faces of horror: 

Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price 

Photo by Terry O'Neill (1983)

 

 

Today is the birthday of both Vincent Price (1911-1993) and Christopher Lee (1922-2015), two legends of the cinema; as is Peter Cushing (1913-1994), who, coincidentally, was born on the 26th of May. 

 

Interestingly, the three men were not just professional colleagues, but very close friends on and off set, as this rather touching short video in which Lee talks about Cushing and Price with obvious affection demonstrates: click here.      

 

As their acting styles and the roles they played were very distinct, it's hard to say which of them I admired most, but - like the Carry On actors - each left an indelible impression on my imagination as a child who grew up watching Hammer horror films on TV in the early 1970s.  

 

And so, I wanted to publish this short post in their memory: if it's very easy to hate many actors, it's impossible not to love these three.

 

 

Notes 

 

Whilst Vincent Price and Christopher Lee shared the screen on only three occasions - and Price and Cushing appeared in just the one film together - Lee and Cushing were cast in over twenty films with each other and their collaborations were a significant feature of their careers: a full list of these films can be found here. 

 

All three actors can be seen in Scream and Scream Again (dir. Gordon Hessler, 1970) and House of the Long Shadows (dir. Pete Walker, 1983).

      The first of these films marks the second teaming - after The Oblong Box (1969) - of actors Price and Lee with director Gordon Hessler, although the iconic stars only share a brief scene in the film's climax, whilst Cushing, unfortunately, shares no screen time with either Price or Lee in his even shorter scene (essentially just a cameo appearance). Click here to watch the trailer. 

      As for House of the Long Shadows, a murderously funny British horror-mystery, it also starred the great American character actor John Carradine, who played Dracula in the Universal horror House of Frankenstein (1944), alongside Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. Click here to watch the trailer. 

 

 

Further Reflections on a Black Cat

Gino Severini: The Black Cat (1910-11)
Oil on canvas (54.4 x 73 cm)

Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Black Cat (1843) not only influenced many other writers, but also those working within the visual arts, including, for example, the Italian Futurist Gino Severini, whose painting above was included in the first Futurist exhibition, held in Paris, in 1912. 

But perhaps the most interesting work drawing inspiration from Poe's disturbing tale of alcoholism, animal cruelty, and domestic violence, is the 1934 film, The Black Cat,* directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (the first of eight films to pair the gruesome twosome).

Actually, despite listing Poe's name in the credits, Peter Ruric's screenplay (based on Ulmer's scenario) has no resemblance to the narrative events of Poe's story and the film gets its real inspiration from the life of Aleister Crowley, particularly Karloff's character, Hjalmer Poelzig, a mad Austrian architect with a penchant for chess and black cats, who comes to a grisly end shackled to an embalming rack and skinned alive. 
 
Although it was a box office hit, the film didn't much impress the critics upon its original release, who mostly found it, in the words of one reviewer, more foolish than horrible.

However, Ulmer's movie is now recognised as a bizarre and stylish masterpiece; one that unfolds with the crazy logic of a nightmare and brilliantly develops the psychological horror genre with its creepy atmosphere, sinister soundtrack and an emphasis on the darker (more perverse) elements of the human psyche; including the propensity for incest, sacrifice, necrophilia, and devil worship.

Click here for the trailer

Notes

* Not to be confused with the 1941 film also entitled The Black Cat, dir. Albert S. Rogell and starring Basil Rathbone, which also claims to have been inspired by Poe's short story and also features Lugosi in a cameo role.  

Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one, Reflections on a Black Cat (In Memory of Pluto): click here. 

This post is for Anna, the Italian dental nurse.