Poeana Memorial Now in the puppet theater of the Lumiere brothers, Roger Corman gets his puppets. This performance is in a very English taste. "I suppose you've never had tea in the kitchen" - how much Britain sitting in a comb helmet and a spear - in a few words. But not surprisingly: Roger Corman, an American, is invited to the banks of Albion, and brought with him his favorite character, an infernal neurosthenic performed by American Vincent Price, as well as Robert Town, in the future – the screenwriter of Chinatown Roman Polanski. Foreigners very vividly and succinctly stylize the islander drama of characters, from the outside it is more visible. Here's a smug baron who says nothing but nonsense, this pale cold lady Rowena, a grace without beauty, noticed in the character of Christine Scott Thomas by the Coyote narrator in The Bitter Moon by the same Polanski. So, the daughter of the Baron, with her straw-red hair, here is her selfless and phlegmatic admirer, with a puffy-lent mine (John Westbrook), the unwitting confidant of the demonic widower Fell, and here is the unflappable butler in sideburns.
Ligeia's Tomb was the last film in Corman's Gothic, Edgarian cycle, which we love very much. After this cycle, he became known mainly as a producer of the so-called “category B” films, where the motto can be considered the words “The public wants dirt”. We do not find anything annoyingly shocking, criminally tasty or cheaply sham, however, in Korman’s pseudohistorical “horrors” of Edgarovsky-Lovecraft, especially in this very refined horror: “The Tomb of Ligeia”. Here the author quoted - through the image of a swaying bell threatening to stun or even break the frightened Rowena - his "well and pendulum." And here is the Black Cat, who often meowed in previous Corman films, but here already quite representatively pretends to be a quote of the story of the same name. He's not just whispering to himself - he's a psychopomp of the Hermetic tradition, bringing the soul of previous films into this one. Combining almost from the beginning of the cycle one of the plots of Poe with others and even with the plots of Lovecraft, Corman in “The Tomb of Ligeia” brought together the actual “Liga”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, which served as material for the first film adaptation of Poe, “Black Cat” and partly “The Well and the Pendulum”, as was said. It even migrated black glasses Verdun Fell, used in the science fiction films Corman.
Patinum, cactus and velour tones are habitually well combined with dotted stone interiors. The traditional ass with a conventionally drawn castle was replaced by very convincing, almost to the touch, exteriors of the dilapidated abbey. Korman also mastered new types of shooting for the cycle - panoramic from the side on top, mass spectacular interspersed with chamber scenes or, for example, mise-en-scene, "peeped" through the languages of the fireplace. The beveled frame, previously used only in flashbacks and nightmares, became a means of whipping up anxiety in the representation of the present and “real”. Lady Ligeia, Verdun Fell's wife, died, but "she does not betray herself to death," as she said on her bed to her husband. Accidentally meeting the daughter of the baron, Verdun became interested in her, impetuously and confusedly. Meanwhile, the presence of Ligeia does not leave the ruins of the monastery. And Vincent Price is already known to the viewer Corman as the destroyer of naive women, free and involuntary.
It will be terrible, of course, not for our brother, raised on all sorts of iron lumberjacks who rose from hell and other things. Our brother, a lover of “horrors” will be outraged that he was given some melodrama, sprinkled with musty water of old-fashioned mysticism, where she cares about “Sylent Hill”. Or maybe our brother is a lover of writing reviews - or rather, a sister - and will write inspired lines, openwork like stockings, about the frosty patterns of timid hints of psychological feasting, gently and spiderly touching naked wire citation on the cheek...