THE HAUNTED PALACE 1963
The Haunted Palace (1963) is a swirling mist of Gothic horror and cosmic dread, a film that finds its haunted heart in the dual performance of Vincent Price and the eerie vision of director Roger Corman. Though marketed as part of Corman’s celebrated Poe cycle, the film is in fact a bold adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, with only a Poe poem lending its title and a sense of poetic doom.
This fusion of literary titans sets the stage for a story where the boundaries between sanity and possession, past and present, are as porous as the fog that curls around the cursed village of Arkham.
Vincent Price commands the film in a bravura dual role as both the gentle Charles Dexter Ward and his ancestor, the warlock Joseph Curwen. His performance is a dark waltz in transformation between menace and melancholy: with a mere shift of posture or the glint in his eye, he glides from kindly innocence to fiendish malevolence.
Price’s energy is magnetic yet controlled, never tipping into parody, and his voice, by turns silken and sibilant, makes the supernatural possession feel chillingly plausible.
Watching Price, one marvels at how he can summon both sympathy and terror, often within the same scene. The film’s most unsettling moments come as Charles, standing before Curwen’s portrait, is slowly overtaken by his ancestor’s will – a psychological duel rendered with nothing but Price’s expressive face and the camera’s hungry gaze.
Corman, ever the resourceful auteur, brings a starker, surreal visual palette to Lovecraft , aided by the atmospheric cinematography of Floyd Crosby. The muted blue and brown hues, drifting ground fog, and looming sets evoke a world where the past refuses to stay buried.
Daniel Haller’s art direction, honed on earlier Corman films, gives the palace itself a brooding, labyrinthine presence, its secret passageways and shadowed corners as much a character as any of the villagers. Ronald Stein’s score, lush and occasionally bombastic, heightens the film’s sense of mounting dread and otherworldly pull, like a tide tugging at the edge of reason..
The supporting cast is a gallery of horror icons and character actors: Debra Paget brings both vulnerability and resolve to Anne Ward, the wife caught in the crossfire of ancestral evil; Lon Chaney Jr. is memorably sinister as Simon, Curwen’s loyal henchman, his mournful eyes masking monstrous intent; Frank Maxwell, Elisha Cook Jr., and others round out the cursed townsfolk, each bearing the weight of Curwen’s vengeance.
The story unfolds with the precision of a nightmare: in 1765, Joseph Curwen is burned alive by Arkham’s villagers for his occult crimes, but not before cursing them and their descendants. Over a century later, Charles Dexter Ward inherits the palace and is inexorably drawn into Curwen’s legacy. As Charles succumbs to possession, the film becomes a study in psychological horror. Curwen’s revenge is visited upon the villagers through a series of grotesque murders, while Anne desperately tries to save her husband from the grip of the past.
Ted Coodley’s makeup effects deliver the villagers of Arkham to a state of grotesque deformity, transforming their faces and bodies into unsettling, crumbling statues of Curwen’s lingering curse. Visages warped by ancestral sin. Masks of suffering, their features melting like wax, twisted by generations of Curwen’s retribution, they wander the mist-shrouded streets with faces warped and features askew, their bodies bearing the tragic poetry of nightmare-living testaments to a legacy of unnatural evil.
Joseph Curwen’s dead mistress, Hester Tillinghast- played by Cathie Merchant- is resurrected by Curwen (in control of Charles Dexter Ward’s body) and his fellow warlocks. Once revived, Hester joins Curwen and his followers in their sinister rituals and is present for the climactic attempt to sacrifice Anne Ward to the creature in the pit, making her an active participant in the film’s final horrors.
Key moments linger in the mind: the torch-lit mob scene where Curwen, defiant to the end, promises vengeance “until this village is a graveyard”; the hypnotic power of Curwen’s portrait, a silent sentinel of evil; the chilling sequence where deformed villagers surround Charles and Anne, their presence a living testament to the curse; and the final conflagration, as the palace burns and the boundaries between the living and the dead dissolve.
The climax of The Haunted Palace erupts in a frenzy of fire and supernatural reckoning. As the villagers, torches in hand, storm the cursed palace to end Joseph Curwen’s reign once and for all, Anne is chained and offered as a sacrifice to the monstrous Lovecraftian creature lurking in the pit below. In the chaos, Dr. Willet and Anne discover the secret dungeons and are ambushed by Curwen and his resurrected cohorts. The villagers set the palace ablaze and, crucially, destroy Curwen’s portrait, breaking his hold over Charles Dexter Ward. Freed from possession, Charles rushes to save Anne, urging Dr. Willet to get her to safety as the inferno consumes the palace. Though Charles and Willet narrowly escape the flames, the film closes on an unsettling note: a glimmer in Charles’s eyes and a sinister tone in his voice hint that Curwen’s evil may not have been vanquished after all.
The Haunted Palace stands as a bridge between Gothic melodrama and cosmic horror, its atmosphere thick with dread and its themes as old as original sin. With Price particularly mercurial, Corman at his most atmospheric, and Lovecraft’s shadow looming over every frame, the film is a haunted house of the mind, where the past is never truly dead, and evil waits patiently for the door to be opened.