Retrospective Film Review

Tomb of Ligeia (1964) • 60 Years Later — an eerie classic of Gothic horror

A man’s obsession with his dead wife drives a wedge between him and his new bride.

Originally, Roger Corman hadn’t intended to make his series of definitive Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, but the first, House of Usher (1960), was a big hit for American International Pictures (AIP) and studio producer Samuel Z. Arkoff realised they had a winning formula. The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) confirmed that Roger Corman directing Vincent Price was a perfect pairing. Over the ensuing three years, the Corman-Poe cycle expanded to seven or eight titles — depending on whether one includes The Haunted Palace, which was actually based on the H.P Lovecraft novel The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward but subsequently renamed with the title of a Poe poem and marketed as another Poe adaptation. It was Corman’s attempt to change direction, but AIP reined him back in. Which turns out to have been a good decision as the penultimate entry into the Poe sequence, The Masque of the Red Death (1964), is arguably the best of the bunch, vying with Tomb of…