Onibaba (1964) – Review

Few horror films slither under your skin quite like Onibaba. Kaneto Shindō’s tale of wartime desperation, lust, and moral decay feels at once ancient and timeless. A fever dream of sex and survival set in a world where human cruelty makes ghosts redundant. Stark, sensual, and shot in eerie black-and-white splendour, it’s a film that transforms a windswept field of reeds into the gates of hell itself.

In 14th-century Japan, not far from Kyoto, two women—a mother-in-law (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura)— eke out a grim existence amid the chaos of civil war. As soldiers flee through the endless sea of reeds, the women ambush them, murder them, strip them of armour and weapons, and toss the corpses into a deep pit hidden in the tall grass. Their grim routine is interrupted only when they take their loot to a wily merchant named Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama), who trades them food and lewd propositions. The world outside is disintegrating, but the reeds whisper that survival, however monstrous, must go on.

“It’s a living.”

One day, a familiar face returns: Hachi (Kei Satō), a neighbour who had gone to war with the older woman’s son, Kishi. When the women ask about Kishi’s fate, Hachi grimly admits that they deserted the army, and Kishi was killed while stealing food. The mother-in-law blames Hachi for her son’s death and warns the younger woman to stay away from him. Naturally, this only makes the younger woman want him more, because nothing spices up forbidden love like a haunted swamp and the constant threat of starvation.

Splendour in the Grass.

Hachi and the younger woman’s nightly escapades soon become the talk of the reeds. She sprints through the grass like an Olympic athlete just to get some action, while her mother-in-law grows furious and jealous, worried that she will be left to die alone. When seduction and pleading fail to stop the affair, the older woman turns to supernatural measures. Enter a lost samurai general (Jūkichi Uno), wearing a grotesque Hannya mask to protect his supposedly beautiful face. She kills him, steals his mask, and discovers his face beneath is a nightmare of rot and ruin. Inspired, she dons the mask to terrify her daughter-in-law away from her lover.

Yep, that would scare me straight.

The deception works, for a while. But as rain falls and passions flare, nature itself seems to turn against the older woman. Her mask fuses to her face, her trick becomes her curse, and the line between demon and human blurs into a moral quagmire. When she begs her daughter-in-law to help remove the mask, her flesh tears away with it, revealing a monstrous visage beneath. The younger woman, convinced her mother-in-law has truly become a demon, flees into the night. The older woman follows, shouting, “I’m human!” as they leap across the pit, the final boundary between sin and damnation, before the screen cuts to black.

This is something right out of E.C. comics. 

Stray Observations:

• The reed field was real and enormous—director Kaneto Shindō shot on location in sweltering heat, where the cast had to dodge snakes and mosquitoes. That’s a solid work ethic.
• Hachi is basically the horniest man in medieval Japan, and the younger woman runs to him like she’s training for Onibaba: Tokyo Drift.
• The “pit of death” is never explained—was it natural? A sinkhole? The world’s worst well? Either way, it’s a convenient plot device and a health hazard.
• The mother-in-law states, “We’ve done nothing wrong. No demon can come after us.” I guess multiple murders weren’t considered “wrong” back in feudal Japan.
• That mask? Based on an actual Noh theatre mask used to represent jealous female spirits. It’s beautiful, creepy, and cursed—a triple threat.
• The demon mask in Onibaba was so creepy it gave William Friedkin ideas; he basically said, “What if this nightmare had a cameo in The Exorcist?” and thus, the white-faced demon was born.

Behold, the Japanese Pazuzu!

Kaneto Shindō directs Onibaba like a ritual etched in flesh and shadow. The film’s pacing is hypnotic—repetitive by design—drawing viewers into the same endless loop of violence and desire that ensnares its characters. His camera doesn’t merely observe the reeds; it breathes with them. The landscape itself seems alive, whispering, moaning, moving in rhythm with lust, guilt, and fear. Shindō’s horror comes not from sudden shocks but from suffocating atmosphere, the terror of being trapped in a godless world where the reeds always grow back, no matter how many bodies lie rotting beneath them.

“Did I discover a plot hole?”

Kiyomi Kuroda’s cinematography is nothing short of exquisite. The high-contrast black and white accentuates both the sensuality and savagery of the story. Light flickers across wet skin, blades of grass glint like knives, and shadows seem to devour the characters whole. The scenes of the women navigating the reeds at night are among the most striking in all of Japanese cinema, like watching ghosts haunt the living. Every frame could be mistaken for a still photograph, yet the restless motion of wind and grass keeps the film alive, pulsing with primitive energy.

Every shot is a postcard of beauty and darkness.

While Onibaba is often categorized as a horror film, it transcends genre boundaries. It sits comfortably alongside Kwaidan (1964) and Kuroneko (1968)—also by Shindō—as part of Japan’s rich tradition of folk-inspired horror that blurs the line between ghost story and moral allegory. Unlike Western horror, which often externalizes evil in monsters or murderers, Onibaba internalizes it; the true horror comes from within. The supernatural here is psychological, born from hunger, jealousy, and fear of abandonment. It’s as much a feminist parable as a ghost story—an examination of women reduced to savagery by a world that has stripped them of everything else.

Fear is the mind killer.

In Japanese cinema, Onibaba occupies a fascinating middle ground between the postwar realism of Kurosawa and the surrealism of Kobayashi or Teshigahara. It’s grounded in historical suffering but elevated by mythic imagery. Shindō uses folklore not as escapism but as confrontation: a way of showing that even in the absence of warlords and spirits, humans are more than capable of becoming demons on their own.

We all have our own masks. 

In conclusion, Onibaba remains one of the great works of Japanese horror, not for its scares, but for its raw, poetic exploration of human depravity. It’s erotic, brutal, and strangely beautiful, a film that asks whether damnation is something we earn or something we inherit. In the end, the reeds keep swaying, the pit keeps yawning, and humanity keeps falling in.

Matango (1963) – Review

Sometimes Japanese horror goes for ghostly chills, sometimes for kaiju-sized spectacle. 1963’s Matango, however, takes the road less travelled: stranding a group of bourgeois day-trippers on a rotting island and feeding them psychedelic mushrooms until they lose their humanity and their dignity. Directed by Ishirō Honda, best known for Godzilla, this damp, mouldy little nightmare is equal parts survival tale, psychological study, and “Just Say No” campaign ad, with mushrooms playing the role of heroin, LSD, and dessert buffet all in one.

We open in a Tokyo psychiatric ward, where Professor Kenji Murai (Akira Kubo) is being grilled by doctors about how he ended up a gibbering wreck. He tells them his story: he went on a little yacht outing with his friends, because nothing says relaxation like day-drinking at sea with your boss, a spoiled singer, and a smarmy writer. Along for the ride: industrialist Masafumi Kasai (Yoshio Tsuchiya), skipper Naoyuki Sakuda (Hiroshi Koizumi), shipmate Senzō Koyama (Kenji Sahara), celebrity writer Etsurō Yoshida (Hiroshi Koizumi), songbird Mami Sekiguchi (Kumi Mizuno), and wholesome student Akiko Sōma (Miki Yashiro). Naturally, a storm blows in, because nobody in Japanese cinema ever rents a boat and has a nice time.

Safety Tip: Don’t brag that your boat is unsinkable.

Shipwrecked and hungry, the gang stumble onto an island where the mushrooms are man-sized, the water is fresh, and the vibe is “Gilligan’s Island” if Gilligan had a fungal infection. They soon discover a derelict research vessel, once home to scientists studying the effects of radiation, now transformed into a mouldy mausoleum of bad decisions. The logbook inside, half-rotted but still legible, warns them not to eat the mushrooms. A note, Murai, the resident voice of reason, takes very seriously. He insists the scientists went mad after consuming them. Naturally, no one listens, because otherwise this would just be a short educational film called Mushrooms: Don’t Do It.

“Could be worse, it could be haunted.”

The cracks in the group widen faster than a mushroom cap in a rainstorm. Kasai hoards the food like a corporate dragon, Yoshida starts losing his grip on reality, and Koyama still dreams of turning a profit even while starving on a deserted island. Soon enough, the crew are at each other’s throats: betrayals, hogtied rich guys, a pistol-waving writer threatening violence, basically, your average yacht party gone wrong. By the time Mami starts luring people into the woods to feast on fungi like a woodland temptress, it’s clear they’re not escaping with their sanity—or their humanity—intact.

Peer pressure on Mushroom Island.

Eventually, Kasai joins the shroom rave, hallucinating Tokyo nightlife as he munches his way into a mushroom monster. Akiko too, falls to temptation, with Murai desperately trying to pull her back before realizing it’s hopeless. The island’s “residents” are revealed: once-humans, now fungal freaks, swaying in the mist like they’re at an eternal, moist Burning Man. Murai barely escapes by yacht, but the real horror is yet to come: back in Tokyo, he’s already sprouting the first signs of fungus. He concludes, with eerie calm, that humanity isn’t much different from mushroom people anyway. Somewhere in Japan, a PSA about “magic mushrooms” writes itself.

“Go ask Alice. When she’s ten feet tall.”

Stray Observations:

• Everyone immediately ignores the “Don’t Eat the Mushrooms” rule, which is the entire plot of the movie.
• At one point, the group actually cleans mould off the wrecked ship with cleaning products—as if Lysol is going to save them from radioactive fungus.
• They find one of those Hollywood rifles, the kind that has unlimited ammunition. Sadly, it’s not all that effective against mushroom people.
• Honda originally wanted the mushroom creatures to be more grotesque, but Toho demanded they be softened so they wouldn’t scare children. (As if they weren’t already nightmare fuel.)
• This movie was marketed in the U.S. as Attack of the Mushroom People, which sounds more like the name of a Scooby-Doo episode.

“We need some meddling kids and a dog.”

Ishirō Honda was no stranger to cinematic catastrophe, but Matango represented a turn toward something far bleaker than giant monster smackdowns. Gone are the city-crushing spectacles of Godzilla or the patriotic optimism of Mothra. Instead, Honda leans into slow decay: an island of rot, a group of increasingly desperate castaways, and the horrifying suggestion that surrendering to pleasure—even when you know it’s self-destructive—might be the most human instinct of all. It’s survival horror before the term existed, laced with postwar anxieties about nuclear fallout and moral collapse.

Danger: Mad Science at Work.

Hajime Koizumi’s cinematography deserves credit for transforming a single soundstage island into a damp, oppressive purgatory. The mist rolls endlessly, the jungle seems alive, and the shipwreck is one of the great haunted sets of Japanese horror cinema. But while the mood is strong, the special effects are another matter: the mushroom people costumes wobble, bulge, and flap like papier-mâché parade floats left out in the rain. What should be terrifying is instead oddly goofy, which paradoxically makes them creepier, because they suggest bodies and minds warped into grotesque parodies of themselves.

Lord of the Flies Mushroom Version. 

Placed within the larger landscape of Japanese horror in the 1960s, Matango is something of an anomaly. Where ghost stories like Kwaidan and The Ghost of Yotsuya drew from folklore and kabuki tradition, Honda’s film feels firmly modern, even cynical, rooted in the atomic age and consumerist decay. It’s less about revenge from beyond the grave and more about how people, when pushed, will devour each other, or anything they can find. In that sense, Matango is less a horror story than an allegory, and one that feels unsettlingly timeless.

“Curiouser and curiouser!”

In conclusion, Matango may not boast the spectacle of Honda’s kaiju epics or the elegance of Japan’s classic ghost tales, but it stands as one of the strangest and most haunting horror entries of its era. The pacing can feel a little too deliberate, taking its time to reach the full-blown mushroom people madness, but that slow burn seeps into your bones. It’s equal parts camp, cautionary tale, and bleak moral parable, proving that sometimes the scariest monsters aren’t atomic lizards but the choices we make when we’re hungry, desperate, and surrounded by mushrooms.

Beauty and the Beast (2009) – Review

Somewhere along the line, someone looked at Beauty and the Beast, a story that has survived centuries of retellings, and decided it needed to be dragged through a bargain-bin fantasy filter. The 2009 adaptation arrived with the cinematic grace of a dropped cinder block, armed with bad acting, worse effects, and a script that felt like it was assembled during a lunch break. This is less an interpretation of a classic tale and more a cautionary example of what happens when nobody involved stops to ask, “Should we?”

We begin with King Maximilian (Tony Thurbon) dramatically dying in bed while his relatives circle like vultures who’ve just discovered ambition. Count Rudolph (Rhett Giles), clearly auditioning for the role of “Most Obvious Villain,” solves the succession issue by murdering his cousin. Subtlety isn’t just absent; it’s been legally declared dead. The throne is up for grabs, and the film wastes no time establishing that everyone here has the moral compass of a damp sock.

 

“Can someone find me a girl to tie to some train tracks?”

Cut to Belle (Estella Warren), who is introduced as intelligent in a rather unique way…she makes scented laundry mixtures. Apparently, in this universe, fabric softener is the gateway to intellectual superiority. She wanders into the forest for herbs, because of course she does, and is immediately attacked by a wolf. Enter the Beast (Victor Parascos), who saves her life and then, in a bold display of social skills, fires a crossbow at her to scare her away. Nothing says “misunderstood romantic lead” like attempted intimidation with medieval weaponry.

 

Yes, folks, this is our heroic Beast.

Meanwhile, Count Rudolph and his merry band of future corpses stumble through the woods and run into Belle, who tells them about the Beast. They initially dismiss her, then instantly believe her, because the script needs them to. One of the soldiers suggests killing the Beast to win public favour, which is apparently the kingdom’s version of a campaign strategy. They track the Beast, someone gets brutally killed, and naturally, they assume it’s him. Evidence is for people in better movies.

 

“Do we even have a medieval CSI?”

Things spiral further when Belle learns from a random villager that the Beast is actually harmless, because exposition must be delivered somehow. She tracks him to his hideout and discovers the real killer: a troll created by Lady Helen (Vanessa Gray), who is this movie’s version of the “Enchantress” but is more a version of the Wicked Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Belle and the Beast bond because proximity equals romance, and he turns out to be a cursed prince. You know, like always, except with significantly less charm and far more awkward staring.

 

“Belle, our best way out of this movie is over those mountains.”

Rudolph and Helen team up to frame the Beast, because villains love teamwork when it involves unnecessary complexity. Belle gets captured, escapes with minimal effort, and Helen decides the Beast might secretly be the king’s long-lost son. This revelation is treated with all the weight of a grocery list. Helen manipulates events so the Beast is blamed for more murders, leading to his arrest. Belle tries to break the curse with a kiss through prison bars, which fails, possibly because even the magic system has standards.

 

She should have baked a file inside a cake instead. 

At the trial, witnesses lie, justice takes a day off, and the Beast is sentenced to death. Belle rescues him in a scene that suggests urgency but looks like a leisurely jog. Helen’s troll suddenly develops independence, because why not add a betrayal subplot at the last minute? The Beast kills Helen, confronts Rudolph, and declares himself the rightful heir. Cue a final battle where logic, continuity, and dignity all take fatal hits. In the end, the Beast wins, the curse breaks, and he transforms back into a human who looks like he just wandered in from a different casting call. He and Belle rule the kingdom, bringing peace and prosperity, which is impressive considering the entire country was run by idiots five minutes earlier.

 

Roll credits before anyone notices.

Stray Observations:

• The film opens with narration insisting this is “how it really happened,” which is a bold claim for a story involving curses, monsters, and spontaneous magical makeovers. Sure, let’s call it a historical record while we’re at it.
• Count Rudolph casually throws a rival heir out a window and calls it an accident, which the remaining heirs accept without hesitation. Apparently, defenestration is just one of those things that happens in royal succession and not worth bringing up again.
• The Beast saves Belle’s life, then immediately threatens her. Mixed signals, medieval edition.
• Rudolph switches from disbelief to full belief in the Beast in record time. Character consistency is for overachievers.
• The soldiers decide that killing a mythical creature will boost public approval. Polling data must be fascinating in this kingdom.
• A villager casually explains the Beast isn’t dangerous, and everyone just accepts it like it’s common knowledge they somehow missed.
• Belle thinks kissing the Beast through prison bars will break a powerful curse. Physics and magic both decline to participate.
• The troll switches allegiances mid-story for no clear reason. Even the monster is confused.
• As an actress, Estella Warren delivers the kind of performance that really highlights her background as a synchronized swimmer. Graceful, poised… and not especially concerned with dialogue.

 

“Hey, for your information, I was great in Kangaroo Jack.”

Director David Lister and cinematographer Nino Gaetano Martinetti bring a distinct lack of vision to the entire production. Scenes are lit flatly, staged without imagination, and shot like a low-budget TV commercial that forgot what it was selling. There’s no sense of atmosphere, no attempt to build tension, and certainly no visual identity. Forests look like random patches of greenery, castles feel like borrowed sets, and action scenes unfold with all the excitement of people waiting in line. It’s not that the film fails to elevate the material, it barely acknowledges that elevation is an option.

 

I’ve seen high school productions with more prestige.

This isn’t even Lister’s first swing at Beauty and the Beast, which somehow makes the result more impressive in all the wrong ways. After helming the disastrous Blood of Beasts, which dragged the fairy tale into Viking territory and still managed to misplace the point entirely, you’d expect at least a hint of growth or, at minimum, a lesson learned the hard way. Instead, this plays like a second attempt that learned nothing from the first, repeating the same mistakes with even less confidence. It has that faint déjà vu quality, like watching someone trip over the same step twice, only now the special effects seem even worse and the fall somehow less interesting. While the Beast design in this outing is an improvement, the other effects are definitely…special

 

It would take true sorcery to make this CGI look convincing.

As for the performances… well, calling them that feels generous. Estella Warren as Belle has the presence of someone who was told five minutes prior that acting involves emotions. Her line delivery floats somewhere between bored and confused, which might accidentally mirror the audience’s state. Victor Parascos, as the Beast, spends most of his time lumbering around like he got lost on the way to a fantasy convention and decided to stay. There’s no menace, no tragedy, just a lot of heavy breathing and awkward pauses. Rhett Giles chews scenery with enthusiasm, but even that energy can’t compensate for dialogue that sounds like it was written by a committee of sleep-deprived interns.

 

“I shall attempt to conjure up a proper script.”

Compared to other adaptations of Beauty and the Beast, this one doesn’t just fall short; it actively digs a hole and jumps in. Where versions like Cocteau’s poetic 1946 film or even the more polished modern retellings aim for atmosphere, romance, or thematic depth, this one settles for noise and confusion. It borrows familiar elements but strips them of meaning, leaving behind a checklist of plot points with none of the emotional connective tissue. It’s like someone skimmed the fairy tale once and decided that was enough research.

 

This was a very Grimm version of Beauty and the Beast.

In conclusion, this 2009 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast is the cinematic equivalent of reheated leftovers that were never good to begin with. It takes a story built on nuance, transformation, and emotional growth and replaces it with clumsy plotting, lifeless performances, and visuals that feel assembled rather than crafted. Every element seems to operate independently, as if no one involved compared notes before hitting “record.” And yet, buried somewhere under the layers of incompetence, there’s a faint reminder of why this tale endures, which almost makes the experience more frustrating. The potential is there, stubbornly refusing to die, even as the film does everything in its power to smother it.

Tales of Terror (1962) – Review

Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror is the cinematic equivalent of a gothic wine flight: three mini-doses of Edgar Allan Poe, poured into one luridly lit glass, swirled with gallows humour, and gulped down with Vincent Price’s velvety voice as the chaser. Released in 1962 at the height of Corman’s “Poe cycle,” it’s both spooky and silly, lavish and lurid, a film that’s as comfortable with melodrama as it is with morbid laughter. What results is a trio of macabre vignettes that manage to be creepy, campy, and unmistakably Corman-esque.

The film presents three short sequences adapted from Poe’s stories — “Morella,” “The Black Cat” (mashed together with “The Cask of Amontillado”), and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Each is introduced by Vincent Price, whose honeyed narration sets the mood somewhere between bedtime story and funeral sermon. While the tales differ in tone — tragic, comedic, and horrifying in turn — they share a preoccupation with death, decay, and the foolishness of mankind, all served with a side of cobwebs and candlelight.

Morella

Lenora (Maggie Pierce), an unfortunate young woman who looks like she’s walked straight out of a soap commercial and into a haunted house, visits her estranged father (Vincent Price) in his gloomy estate. He’s drunk, dishevelled, and deeply resentful — blaming her for the death of his beloved wife, Morella (Leona Gage), who inconveniently died giving birth to her. Unfortunately, Morella’s body is still hanging around, literally decomposing upstairs like a houseguest who never left. Lenora wants to reconcile with her bitter father, but things get awkward when her terminal illness is revealed, and Morella’s restless spirit decides to even the score by swapping corpses. Soon, it’s body-swap mayhem, ghostly strangulation, and a fire that burns down the house — because in a Roger Corman movie, no family reunion ends without arson.

The Black Cat

Montresor Herringbone (Peter Lorre) is a slovenly drunk with a talent for self-pity and a hatred for both his wife Annabelle (Joyce Jameson) and her feline companion. One night, he stumbles into a wine-tasting event and challenges the debonair Fortunato Luchresi (Vincent Price) to a contest of oenophilic superiority. What begins as a drunken duel of the palates turns into a comic bromance between Lorre and Price, complete with priceless facial expressions and some truly heroic sipping. But when Montresor discovers that his new drinking buddy is now his wife’s lover, he gets revenge the only way Poe knows how: by bricking them up alive. Sadly, for him, the black cat has other plans — meowing his way into the evidence piles and ensuring Montresor’s downfall. It’s the only Poe story that doubles as a buddy comedy and a feline revenge tale.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

In this final segment, the tone turns deadly serious — and delightfully grotesque. The dying M. Valdemar (Vincent Price, looking like death warmed over and then re-frozen) seeks relief from agony through hypnosis by the ever-creepy Mr. Carmichael (Basil Rathbone). Unfortunately, Carmichael keeps Valdemar trapped between life and death like a spiritual insurance scam. As weeks pass, the hypnotized corpse begins to rot but still talks, begging to be released. When Carmichael tries to force himself on Valdemar’s widow (Debra Paget), the corpse decides enough is enough — rising from the bed in a ghastly, dripping fury to enact supernatural vengeance. It’s Poe at his gloomiest, and Price’s putrescent zombie finale is pure, gooey gold.

A truly messy end.

Stray Observations:

• The “Black Cat” segment alone justifies the film’s existence — Peter Lorre and Vincent Price are the gothic Abbott and Costello we never knew we needed.
• The wine-tasting montage between Lorre and Price in “The Black Cat” might be one of the funniest sequences Corman ever shot — it’s less Poe and more Sideways with corpses.
• The smoke budget alone could have funded another movie. Every hallway looks like it’s on the verge of spontaneous combustion.
• The “Morella” house decor is peak early-’60s haunted chic: one part cobweb, two parts rot, and a generous helping of Victorian guilt.
• The ending of “Morella” is the house burning down, which is how about 80% of these Roger Corman horror films end.
• When Rathbone’s Carmichael hypnotizes Valdemar, it’s unclear whether he wants to help him or date him — the ambiguity is deliciously unsettling.
• Vincent Price doesn’t just star in all three segments—he dies in all three, too. It’s like a morbid game of Whac-A-Mole where every time he pops up, fate (or Roger Corman) gleefully smacks him back down.

It’s not easy being in a Roger Corman/Poe film.

Roger Corman’s direction in Tales of Terror strikes a perfect balance between gothic grandeur and B-movie efficiency. Working within modest budgets, Corman once again conjures opulent decay out of coloured gels, fog machines, and recycled sets from The Pit and the Pendulum. His pacing is brisk, but never rushed, allowing each story its own rhythm — tragic lament, black comedy, and existential nightmare. The use of the widescreen Panavision frame enhances the claustrophobia: every wall feels like it’s pressing inward, every flicker of candlelight like the last breath before doom. Corman, often accused of churning out quickies, proves here that he can blend atmosphere and irony better than most prestige directors of his era.

He adds a bit of ghoulish flair to his Poe outings.

Cinematographer Floyd Crosby, a frequent Corman collaborator, turns the film into a visual feast of colour and shadow. His use of deep reds and violet hues gives each sequence a painterly, otherworldly quality — like Poe’s stories being told through stained glass. Morella glows with ghostly blues and deathly whites, The Black Cat pops with garish pub lighting and drunken gold tones, and Valdemar sinks into putrid greens and corpse-gray shadows. Crosby’s work is so rich that it almost distracts you from the papier-mâché sets — almost.

Crosby knows his way around coloured gels. 

Screenwriter Richard Matheson, already known for I Am Legend and The Twilight Zone, adapts Poe’s tales with a deft mix of faithfulness and flair. He doesn’t just transcribe the stories — he modernizes their rhythm, injects humour where needed, and gives the characters sharper, more relatable neuroses. The Black Cat especially benefits from Matheson’s wit, transforming grim horror into near-farcical domestic tragedy. He even manages to make the metaphysical horror of Valdemar intelligible, which is no small feat when your main character spends half the runtime dead but talking.

You can’t silence Vincent Price.

And then there’s the cast — a veritable horror all-star lineup. Vincent Price, of course, is the beating heart (and sometimes rotting corpse) of the film, alternating between tragic romantic, comic drunk, and doomed victim with effortless charisma. Basil Rathbone’s icy presence in Valdemar is chilling; he plays Carmichael like Sherlock Holmes’s evil twin who minored in necromancy. Together, these actors elevate Tales of Terror from pulp anthology to something approaching high art — if your definition of high art includes ghost moms and talking corpses. Peter Lorre, deliciously unkempt, gives The Black Cat a loopy vitality — his slurred one-liners are pure magic.

“Pardon me, ladies, but could you spare a coin for a moral cripple?”

In conclusion, Tales of Terror is one of the crown jewels of Corman’s Poe series — an elegant, eccentric, and oddly charming blend of high Gothic horror and low-budget ingenuity. It’s a film where laughter and dread share the same coffin, where Price’s sardonic grin meets Rathbone’s villainous glare under Floyd Crosby’s dreamlike lighting. Whether you come for the chills, the chuckles, or the sheer theatricality of watching three horror legends relish every line of purple prose, Tales of Terror remains a masterclass in how to do anthology horror right. Like a good bottle of Amontillado, it only gets better with age — assuming you don’t get bricked up before finishing it.

The Premature Burial (1962) – Review

Roger Corman’s The Premature Burial is a morbidly elegant slice of Gothic terror, a film drenched in fog, obsession, and the soft echo of “Molly Malone.” The third of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations—though notably the only one without Vincent Price—it trades sardonic grandeur for subdued melancholy. What results is an eerie and atmospheric exploration of fear, madness, and the perils of marrying into a household with its own private catacomb.

In the misty Victorian gloom, Guy Carrell (Ray Milland), an aristocrat with more neuroses than a Hitchcock villain, is convinced that his family is cursed to be buried alive. His father, he swears, screamed from his tomb as a child, though his sister Katie (Heather Angel) insists that little Guy’s overactive imagination was the real culprit. Guy’s fiancée, Emily Gault (Hazel Court), seems unbothered by his macabre fixation and agrees to marry him anyway, proving that love truly is blind, or at least tone-deaf to the sound of coffin lids slamming shut.

“You’re not plotting to murder me, are you?”

The wedding goes smoothly enough until Emily, in a display of hauntingly poor timing, plays “Molly Malone” on the piano. A tune that sends Guy spiralling into despair like a Poe protagonist who just discovered caffeine. His fears escalate, and soon he’s constructing a state-of-the-art mausoleum equipped with a bell, a door mechanism, and even a self-administered poison option. Miles Archer (Richard Ney), Guy’s skeptical friend, and Emily both worry that Guy is one step away from joining his father prematurely.

“Emily, everyone needs a hobby.”

To shake him out of his graveyard funk, Emily suggests a stroll through the moors—an outing that goes about as well as a honeymoon in a morgue. When a whistling gravedigger plays “Molly Malone,” Guy faints and dreams he’s trapped in his own tomb, only to wake and have Emily insist the gravedigger never existed, because gaslighting your cataleptic husband is always sound therapy. Finally fed up, she gives him an ultimatum: get rid of his tricked-out tomb, or she’s gone. Guy chooses love over coffins, destroys his vault, and seems on the mend, that is until Miles suggests opening his father’s tomb for closure, which promptly sends Guy into another cataleptic fit, this time for good.

How about some mad science to make sure he’s actually dead?

Declared dead by Emily’s father (Alan Napier), Guy is buried, but fate intervenes when grave robbers dig him up just as he reanimates. Driven insane, he returns home seeking vengeance, electrocuting Emily’s father in the lab and confronting Emily, who’s now making eyes at Miles. In full Gothic meltdown mode, Guy buries Emily alive in poetic irony, only for his sister Katie to shoot him dead. Emily dies anyway—because no one in a Poe story ever gets out unscathed—and Katie reveals Emily’s entire campaign of gaslighting and graveyard manipulation. Turns out Emily orchestrated Guy’s mental collapse all along, proving once again that if you’re afraid of being buried alive, maybe don’t marry a sociopath with a fondness for Irish folk tunes.

A debt paid in screams.

Stray Observations:

• The song “Molly Malone” has never sounded so sinister. Somewhere in Dublin, an old pub pianist weeps in confusion.
• Ray Milland spends half the movie looking like he’s about to faint, and the other half actually fainting.
• Emily gaslighting Guy with cats stuck in walls, secret whistling, and spring-loaded corpses? That’s not marriage, that’s performance art.
• The elaborate anti-burial tomb Guy builds would make Batman jealous. It’s basically Wayne Manor for corpses.
• In the tomb, Carrell calls dynamite a “new invention.” Impressive, since Poe died in 1849 and dynamite wasn’t invented until 1867.  Apparently Carrell’s tomb came with a time machine.
• Dick Miller, as always, pops up for five minutes to class up the place and remind us it’s a Roger Corman film.
• Watching Milland’s descent into madness is like watching someone argue with their own furniture—grimly compelling but slightly ridiculous.

I’ll say this: he fully commits.

Roger Corman’s direction here is restrained and moody, leaning less on shock and more on slow, suffocating atmosphere. Premature Burial doesn’t have the sardonic flamboyance of his Vincent Price collaborations like The Fall of the House of Usher, but it makes up for it with an icy elegance. Corman lets dread seep through the walls, as though the entire film is exhaling a death rattle. The pacing is deliberate—some might say glacial—but it works for a story about paralysis and helplessness. Every movement feels like it’s dragging itself toward the grave.

A moody piece right up to its fog-shrouded conflict.

Floyd Crosby’s cinematography, as ever, is the true star. His lens transforms Corman’s budget-conscious sets into painterly nightmares of mist and candlelight. The earthy browns and sickly greens of the catacombs contrast beautifully with the genteel pastels of the manor, visualizing Guy’s split psyche: one foot in life, one in the tomb. Crosby’s camera floats like a restless ghost, pulling us into Guy’s claustrophobic terror until the line between hallucination and reality blurs entirely.

He certainly knows how to film a graveyard.

Screenwriters Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell adapt Poe’s short story with an impressive mix of fidelity and invention. Poe’s original tale was more of a clinical essay on the fear of being buried alive; Beaumont and Russell turn it into a full-blown Gothic melodrama. They flesh out characters, inject some diabolical twists, and deliver a final act worthy of a Poe fever dream. The dialogue veers toward the florid, but that’s half the fun. These characters speak like they’ve swallowed a thesaurus dipped in laudanum.

I’d readily watch Hazel Court read a thesaurus. 

Ray Milland, stepping into the role Price might have played, brings a tragic dignity to Guy Carrell. He’s overwrought but never unwatchable, his descent into madness genuinely sympathetic. Hazel Court, as Emily, is radiant and duplicitous in equal measure, and her performance makes the final reveal all the more deliciously cruel. Heather Angel lends warmth as the loyal if creepy sister, while Dick Miller pops in as a gravedigger just long enough to remind us this is still a Corman picture, not a BBC costume drama.

“Alas, poor Miller, I knew him well.”

In conclusion, The Premature Burial may not boast the fiery theatricality of Corman’s Price-led Poe cycle, but it stands as one of the more psychologically interesting entries. Its power lies not in its shocks, but in its mood. A slow dance with mortality, obsession, and betrayal. It’s Gothic horror by way of quiet hysteria, anchored by Milland’s haunted performance and Crosby’s stunning visuals. For fans of Corman’s elegant morbidity, it’s a buried treasure worth digging up.