Issues of Problematic Identity in The Terror

(1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963)

F RANCES AUL D
One person will say, I see this message in a lm, and another will
say, I see this message in a lm. All I can see is that I did the best I
can in a lm.
(Corman qtd. in Wiater 45)
R
OGER CORMAN PRODUCED AND DIRECTED A SERIES OF LOW BUDGET
Gothic Horror lms in the 1960s. These lms had popular,
commercial success within the eras accepted Horror genre,
although contemporary critics appeared oblivious to the postmodern,
rogue themes that Corman was exploring within these lms.
1
As Gary
Morris noted in his 1985 examination of Roger Corman as lmmaker
in the American canon, Like other directors who have offered audi-
ences a narrow, bleak view of life, Corman has had a preponderantly
negative American press (141). Dismissal by the critics was less of an
issue for Corman than his commercial popularity, as he produced most
of these lms independently for American International Pictures. With
the freedom and courage of an independent lmmaker, he chose to
examine problematic identity and circular (rather than linear) narrative,
effectively questioning the possibility of any static, knowable history.
This fusion of salable, recognizable Gothic format such as the motifs
of phantoms, crypts, specters, and the uncanny (Punter ix), and post-
modern themes such as the relativity of meaning, rst became fodder for
drive-in theaters and later became the staple of late-night horror fests.
Two of Cormans best examples of these interrogations of identity and
static history are The Terror (1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963).
The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 41, No. 5, 2008
r 2008, Copyright the Authors
Journal compilation r 2008, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
747
Released in 1963, The Terror starred Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff,
and Brenda Knight. It was directed and produced by Roger Corman
with Francis Ford Coppola as associate producer.
2
This lm functions
as both a classic Gothic Horror Tale and a B-grade example of inter-
rogative and serious lmmaking. The sets and locations offer the pre-
scribed medieval Castle perched atop rugged coastline and partially
enclosed by a deep, secret forest. The sea crashes; the storm rages.
Actors Boris Karloff and Dorothy Neuman offer the aging aristocrat
and the old superstitious witch-woman. Jack Nicholson is a handsome,
chivalric, young French ofcer, separated rst from his regiment and
then from a beautiful young maiden (Brenda Knight) who desperately
needs his help. As Nicholsons character Andre Duvalier becomes en-
meshed with the mysteries surrounding the other characters and the
castle itself, he responds appropriately and heroically. So how does a
lm that fullls so many aspects of the Hollywood representational
narrative and Gothic formula resist enough of these same things to be
considered rogue? Perhaps the answer lies in a combination of Cor-
mans bohemian, existentialist days at Oxford (Corman 15) and
Gothics provenance as the literature of revolution. The Terror references
the European nineteenth-century revolution, but it was produced by an
auteur living through the American cultural revolution of the 1960s.
The Terror interrogates the issues of both identity and historical reality.
After eighty-one minutes of exploration there is still no satisfactory
answer to the primary question asked by Andre to the mysterious
Helene, Who are you? Within the rst minutes of the lm, the
audience cannot be sure if she is a delusion of the exhausted, sun struck
soldier or real within the ction of the lm. Although the woman is
described, named, and renamed by every other character, her existence
and identity are constantly problematized. She has at least three names
and three physical manifestations. The closing moments of the lm
leave the audience with the same unease that the introduction evoked,
Is she now or was she ever really real? and by extension, How do we
know the real?
The Terror was not the rst of Cormans lms to explore this issue. In
the early 1960s, Roger Corman produced and directed six lms based
(in varying degrees) on the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe. None of
these lms is a verbatim retelling of a Poe story. Many of Cormans
creations are wild combinations of names, characters, and events
taken from multiple Poe stories and poems. Rather than a meaningless
748 Frances Auld
pastiche of horric gothic images, Corman selects particular bits and
pieces of story to layer and destabilize meaning. This cannibalization of
well-known American literature brought its own peculiar authority to
titles like The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Tales of Terror (1962), The
Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Fall of the House of Usher (1960).
As in The Terror (1963), Corman repeatedly problematizes the issues of
identity, especially the idea of a consistent historical identity.
3
Perhaps the lm that ranges farthest aeld from its literary name-
sake, while aggressively exploring the identity of its protagonist is The
Haunted Palace (1963). This lm merges characters, setting, and sto-
ryline from H.P. Lovecrafts Cthulu mythos (The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward) with a title from Edgar Allan Poes poem, The Haunted Palace.
Like many of Cormans other 1960s Gothic style lms, the story begins
in a suitably creepy graveyard, complete with thunder and lightening.
The gure of the woman is rst seen by the male characters that are
drinking in an eighteenth-century public house. The men appear dry
and safe, but the sight of the woman traversing the road to the Palace
disturbs them to the point of riot. As the woman receives admittance
to the Palace, the townsmen gather torches and rope to administer
justice to the master of the Palace, a man named Curwen (Vincent
Price). Meanwhile, Curwen and his female companion take the young
woman, Miss Fitch, deep within the house, into inner corridors and
down passageways, until they enter a subterranean chamber with a
huge pyramid. Fitch is chained in front of a grated pit and Curwen
chants in what sounds like (but is not quite) Latin.
According to his neighbors, this man is Satan himself, yet the
audience has not really been shown any act of brutality committed by
him. He owns a beautiful, luxurious home; his female companion is
beautiful and well dressed. His status is conferred by the people who
forcibly extract him from his home, tie him to a tree, and set him on re.
The crowd takes the execution of Curwen upon itself, after the young
Fitch woman does not answer the question What is your name? The
ringleader of the mob, Mr. Wheaton, calls out, Hes taken her soul!
4
This opening scenario suggests that the relationship of name to
identity is not complete unless it is self referential, yet Curwen never
names himself. The villagers call him warlock and devil, but until
he is burned alive, the only crime this man appears to be guilty of is
chaining and unchaining a beautiful village girl. As Curwen dies,
he curses the townspeople for three generations, calling each of his
Issues of Problematic Identity 749
murderers by name. The camera pans from face to face, each individual
responding to his own name. After Curwens death, the scene fades to
black and the narrative begins again with the matte painting of the
village of Arkham. This is a sustained shot and the painting is rep-
resentational but not realistic, a soft watercolor wash over pen and ink.
This invasion of the two dimensional art into the cinematic construc-
tion of story calls attention to the cinematic frame of the story. Like the
sketch of the tall ship in Arkhams harbor in the background of the
painting, the lm is a romantic construction of an unreachable, hazy
past. Vincent Prices voice reads part of the nal stanza of Edgar Allan
Poes poem The Haunted Palace,
And travelers, now, within the valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody. (4144)
This intrusion of Poes language may be an attempt to legitimize the
title of the lm, but it also works to place the scene in the nineteenth
century, a substantially different time period than H.P. Lovecrafts
twentieth-century setting for the modern portion of The Strange Case of
Charles Dexter Ward. When Cormans camera moves back to the set, it
follows a carriage containing Curwens descendant, Charles Dexter
Ward, back into the town. The words on the screen proclaim that 110
years have passed. The narrative appears to start again, with an iden-
tical cast of characters, but three generations later than the original
opening. Time is made spiral, with reoccurring faces and places.
Similarly, in The Terror when Andre throws away his spinning
compass and collapses onto the sand, he has fallen from the liminal
world of the shore into something far more polymorphous. The sea
wakes him without drowning him. Although he will circle back and
forth from the shoreline to the forest to the castle to the sea, he never
really goes beyond the point on the beach where the water wakes him.
He travels in loops and spirals, but the road is spinning inward,
returning him to the moment when the water wakes him, rather than
extending outward toward the town of Colbin, and his reunion with
the regiment that he has lost, as well as the larger Napoleonic world
that he claims to inhabit. Time is not so much ruptured as indenable
in any linear way. Characters in both lms are enacting cycles that fuse
750 Frances Auld
identities and negate a static knowable individual at a recognizable
point in a set story.
In The Haunted Palace, Corman interrogates the inability of struc-
tures to remain consistent through time. The Palace came from
somewhere in Europe, although it is denied any particular country of
origin. The Palace was deconstructed in Europe and reconstructed in
Massachusetts. The nineteenth-century Wheaton character says that no
one wants to know any more about where it came from than they
already know. The inappropriateness of the aristocratic title palace is
questioned by both Charles Ward and his wife Ann, but they never get
a clear answer for the question An American Palace? When Curwen
is possessing Ward he mentions the great age of the structure and notes
that Torquemada spent many pleasant hours there. While this reference
to the sixteenth-century Grand Inquisitor returns his listener to Poes
ctional short story The Pit and the Pendulum, it also suggests that a
history for the structure of the Palace does exist, it has merely become
unattached to the physical structure.
5
Just as the physical structure of
the Palace will not stay in one geographical locale, neither is its history
available in a static or linear model. Even without a specic, veriable
history, the structure connects the distant (prehistorical) past of the
elder gods to the medieval era to a proposed future. The Palace holds
within it an interior space (the pit) that functions as both enclosure for
the demon gods Cthulu et al., and the point of expansion to alternate
dimensions. If the nature of the Gothic alternates between the claus-
trophobia of over-tight spaces and the disorientation of limitless spaces,
Corman has found a way to conate this imagery and edit it into
seconds of cinematic viewing.
Like space, time is further disintegrated by the appearance of Cur-
wens coconspirators, Simon and Jarvis. Although they were not pre-
sented in the initial scenes of eighteenth-century Arkham, they appear
in the nineteenth century. Simon and Jarvis walk, talk, and continue
their task of attempting to breed the elder gods with mortal women.
They function despite lacking any particular history. Are they dead and
reanimated, as is Curwens companion Hester? Have they withstood
110 years of life without succumbing to the natural aging process? Like
Curwens casual reference to Torquemada, these characters have also
broken loose from their particular place in history. Their existence
denies the knowability of a linear history by suggesting gaps and
accelerations.
Issues of Problematic Identity 751
In 1963s The Terror, Andres persona is a layer of half-truths. He is
an ofcer in Napoleons Republican Army. Although his father was
killed in the French Revolution (a reference to the historical Terror),
young Andre is at once conscious of his aristocratic background and
ready to call in the Republican Army to control the Baron. His nature,
like his history and his politics, is unsettled and inconsistent. Andres
separation from his military unit is never truly framed by a reference to
time. The audience does not know how long the separation has lasted,
nor what real attempts he has made to rejoin his men.
The Terror tackles the question of identity as it is coded into lan-
guage by way of proper names. The Baron Von Leppe who speaks of
the remains of a noble house and the ghosts of past glory is in fact
Erik, the peasant who murdered the real Baron twenty years earlier. His
title, the Baron becomes sufcient for the other characters to identify
him, yet it obscures his identity from the woman trying to avenge
Eriks supposed death. More than an example of mistaken identity, the
title becomes far stronger than the human being who holds it. After
being the Baron for years, Eriks personality is lost to himself and his
physical image is lost to the old peasant woman who attempts to
avenge her son. This transmutation seems to suggest that when the
aristocrat dies and the peasant lls his position, both identities merge,
yet neither survives. Critic Gary Morris notes that in Cormans Poe-
derived lms, the lms represent death as both the alternative to the
merging of the divided consciousness and the result of it (91). Al-
though The Terror is not directly related to a specic Poe story, Corman
states that he tried to out-Poe Poe himself and created a gothic tale
from scratch (88).
As the Baron Eric tells his made up memories of the aristocrats
life and his love for Ilsa, he speaks with the authority of his title and
from the position of class and wealth. Living as Baron Von Leppe, Eric
has never gone into the village, nor has he accepted any visitors. The
Baron is a character being performed for the one person (Stephen the
servant) who knows it to be a facade. Although Leo Gordon worked on
the script, this twist of problematizing the Barons identity was spe-
cically Cormans contribution (Corman 92). This enactment of iden-
tity within the narrative seems to mirror Cormans production theory,
as well as practice, Titles and job descriptions mean virtually nothing.
Theres an aura through the halls that everybody can-and eventually
will-do everything (Corman ix).
752 Frances Auld
Further manipulation of identity through language occurs in the
hypnotism of the young peasant woman into Baroness Ilsa Von Leppe.
Just as Erik/the Baron has constructed and played the role of the dead
aristocrat, so his peasant mother, Katharina the Heretic, nds a young
peasant woman and uses spinning lights to mesmerize her into the
twenty year dead Ilsa. The question of whether or not Katharina is a
witch is hedged by the scientic imagery that surrounds her. There is
no eye of newt or toe of frog in her little shack. Although Katharina is
labeled a heretic and a witch, these names are undercut by her
steaming Florence asks, her use of medicine and psychology to hyp-
notize her subject. She calls out to the Dark Powers while manipu-
lating the tools of science. The supernatural possibilities are underlined
by her method of death. When Andre attempts to pull her into the
decommissioned chapel, she breaks away from him, explaining that she
serves another power. Clutching the metal frame of the fence, she is
struck by lightning and falls outside the churchyard, engulfed by
ames. Was she the victim of the powerful natural science that was her
ally? Was she being struck down by an almighty God for her trafc
with the devil? There is no absolute and consistent explanation.
Katharinas hawk may have been a pet (if she was a naturalist/herbalist),
or may have been Helene (if Katharina had the supernatural power to
transform the young woman), or may have been a vehicle for Katharina
herself (if she had the supernatural authority to manipulate physical
matter).
Similarly, The Haunted Palace lacks the comfort of absolute and
consistent explanations. The nineteenth-century characters of Whea-
ton, Willet, et al are played by the same actors as those who portrayed
them in the beginning of the lm (the eighteenth century). The simple
tactic of using the same actors to play their own great grandchildren
and placing them on the identical set of the Burning Man Public
House negates the passage of time. Just as using Vincent Price to play
both the roles of Curwen and his great great grandson Ward calls both
characters individualities into question, so the faces of the men of
Arkham become more real than their chronological identity. The
Haunted Palace suggests that visual image is at least as real as, and
perhaps more consistent than, time.
Image is then problematized by the meta-cinematic issue of vision.
The impossibility of a historical vision is played out by rampant
blindness in the village. The rst visual presentation of the villagers
Issues of Problematic Identity 753
inability to see, and thereby know themselves, is the young blind child
being led down the streets of Arkham by a middle-aged woman. The
little girl runs into a lamppost in a moment of painful and dark humor.
Her blindness is painful for the newly arrived Wards to view and the
audience shares their gaze. This physical manifestation of Curwens
curse on Arkham is part of the overall mutation of the descendants of
the men who murdered the (possible) warlock.
Called by a bell, children and adult men stagger and grope their way
into the town square, blind and grotesquely shaped. Their loss of vision
is represented by the complete absence of eyes and the plates of scar
tissue in their eye sockets. The peculiar gait of some of the mutants
seems related to a discontinuity of their physical frames. In one scene, a
man shambles with one hip turned inward too far and his shoulder
hyper-rotated outward on the same side. He is as disjointed as the
narrative of The Haunted Palace, turning inward on itself, rather than
moving in a conventional way. Another mans mouth appears to be
sealed, although a lower opening has appeared on his chin. As a met-
aphorical and physical analog, the source of narrative voice has slipped
and now issues from an unlikely place. Like Corman reassembling the
components of Poes and Lovecrafts ctions, some creative power has
deconstructed the basic human form and reconstructed it in forms far
more abstract than the original. This may be a part of the 1960s
zeitgeist. David Skal notes that, the entire twentieth-century history of
increasingly abstracted human forms in ne art was recapitulated in the
pop medium of horror, science-ction and fantasy lms (313).
The mutants blindness is not fully comprehended by the rational
Doctor Willet. Science cannot offer a complete explanation for the
deformities that surround him. Willet suggests the same reason for
both Wards resemblance to Curwen and the mutation of the towns-
people: genetics and heredity. Yet even as he explains that there is a
multitude of precise combinations necessary for a conventional human
being, he does not claim any control over, or precise understanding of,
this process. He does not deny order, but he recognizes his inability to
label it. The scientic approach to the curse is no more rational than
the nineteenth-century Arkham mobs fear that Wade/Curwen has been
doing, . . . something up there at the palace . . . for a week. Analysis
fails and the audience is left with the paranoia that something is going
on outside of their ability to see and classify it. Corman is playing
outside the rules of representational lmmaking. The force behind the
754 Frances Auld
mutation remains ambiguous. If Curwens curse is responsible, then the
deformities are his revenge for the destruction of his own body. If the
elder gods are breeding with the women of Arkham, then transdi-
mensional genetics are at fault. If, as everyone claims, no one visits
Arkham, then perhaps the physical and mental aberrations are a result
of inbreeding in a very small village. By leaving all of these possi-
bilities open, Corman drastically changes the tone and theme of the
literature from which he borrows. Lovecrafts fears of racial pollution
and Poes ethereal beauty are subsumed by Corwins destabilized re-
ality. Questions remain unanswerable because there are simply too
many variables to grasp and even if the audience could grasp these
variables, they are liable to morph, denying their previous physical
identity.
Helenes identity in The Terror is, perhaps, the most suspect of any of
the characters in either lm. She appears to Andre as he stumbles along
the beach. Framed by a natural looking window within the large rock
grotto encircling the shore, Helene appears very suddenly and disap-
pears just as quickly. Her existential validity is open to question from
the beginning. How did she get out to the rocks? Why is she lling a
hole in the rocky formation, at once protected and endangered by the
sea that surrounds her? While she takes Andre to fresh water, she leads
him on a great spiral trip back to the same section of beach on which he
awakened. Her promise of I have something to show you . . . is
realized by showing Andre nothing but the beach, the fresh water,
trees, and the very same beach. During this trip, she shows him noth-
ing but his obvious surroundings, while explicitly promising some ill-
dened answer. This promise is deferred until the end of the lm when
Helene does show Andre something, as her body dissolves, liquees,
and melts away. Yet, even then the audience is hard pressed to un-
derstand what they have just been shown. Was the body that melted a
gment created by Katrina? Was Helenes body being manipulated by
Ilsas spirit? Not only is the simple physical nature of the corporeal
frame denied, the identity of the animating spirit is formulated as a
separate question. Identity cannot sit in the physical, the spiritual, or
in the social realm, nor can it be coded into a portrait or a text.
When Andre draws a physical representation of Helene and offers
that as proof of her existence, the Baron tells him that it is no more
valid than what the ofcer has seen with his eyes. As in The Haunted
Palace, visual reality and illusion are constantly fused as lm questions
Issues of Problematic Identity 755
the authenticity of art, especially lm. This issue seems to be dem-
onstrated by Andres initial view of Katharinas shack, when he sees
Helenes young image fade into Katharinas old face bending over him.
However, if human eyes cannot recognize identity, then why must
Katherinas servant Gustav be blinded when he attempts to offer Andre
more information about Helene and Erik? Corman again connects
blindness, the possibility of communicating history, and identity.
Gustav seems privy to the identities of some of these people, but he
is blinded by the hawk and falls to his death (a drastic form of the same
directional problems that Andre is suffering). In perhaps the grisliest
scene of the lm, Gustavs lacerated face and punctured eyeballs are the
focus of two sustained shots. The camera pans back to take in his corpse
bouncing and dragging off the hill until it comes to rest on the beach.
In a bizarre over the shoulder shot, the audience sees Andres head and
ear as he bends over Gustavs body, but Gustavs face remains hidden by
Andres body. Even if this scene was motivated by the cost or difculty
of recreating the make-up, the effect keeps Gustav partially hidden as
he reveals his death secrets. Just as Helene had earlier promised to show
Andre (and by extension the audience) something remarkable, so now
the audiences expectations are again denied. They know what Gustavs
face looks like and they know what an over the shoulder shot usually
displays. The result of this shot is tension and even a little frustration
at this rupture in cinematic formula.
Another form of deferred satisfaction occurs when Corman layers
imagery of doors throughout The Haunted Palace. Rather than an es-
cape, these are doors that seem to draw the individual deeper into an
interiority. Once again Corman offers a very circuitous and problematic
inward spiral. When the characters physically move through an en-
closed space, either the physical space morphs and constricts the
structure, or the characters are drawn deeper into the complexities of
the plot. Narrative structure is sabotaged by the door icon that usually
marks progression. At the beginning of the lm, the young Fitch
woman enters the Palace through its massive, arched front doors. They
appear to open without agency, until an interior shot reveals Hester and
Curwen, just inside the entryway, waiting for their victim much like
the spider trapping a buttery in the opening credits. While the au-
dience cannot know who opened the rst set of doors, Curwen now
becomes the door opener for both the women, although he does not
lead them through the house. Often it is Fitch herself who seems eager
756 Frances Auld
to proceed along a path with which she is familiar. Curwen opens a
small door by the replace, another door within the corridor, the grate
in the oor leading to the dimension of the elder gods, and nally his
own front door (again). Fitch has cycled back to the moment of entry,
the same expression on her face and once again wearing the cloak that
was removed from her when she entered the Palace. Doors cannot be
counted on to effectively lead characters out or in; their function and
symbolic meaning for the audience are no longer certain. Without
clearly marked portals, how can the structure of the Palace remain
distinct from the surrounding countryside or the village of Arkham?
Perhaps the Palace, like lm itself, is an unxed portal with no absolute
promises of destination.
In the nineteenth century, when Ann Ward attempts to escape a
nightmare, she rises from sleep, walks out of her bedroom and enters a
corridor. This corridor draws her deeper within the house and although
she passes through a second doorway and into a second corridor, she is
faced with a blank wall. Turning to face a menacing shadowy form
advancing down the corridor, she recognizes Simon and faints, return-
ing to the sleep state she was trying to escape. Like Ann Wards
abortive attempt to leave the Palace and the town itself, progress seems
to return the individual to the beginning of the journey, both tem-
porally and physically. Anns attempt to orient herself by reaching a
perspective outside the Haunted Palace may be forever daunted by
her inclusion and implication in these interior events. Likewise, could
the audience ever really escape the control of the director? Does not a
director write the audience into each scene, implying that the scene
will be viewed and interpreted?
At the heart of the story in The Haunted Palace is the question of
Curwens identity. In the eighteenth century he is verbally labeled and
physically destroyed before his identity can be fully explored. In the
nineteenth century he exists as a memory held by the descendants of
the men who murdered him, as visual representation through a por-
trait, and in the physical make up of his great great grandson, Charles
Dexter Ward. As the spirit of Curwen says as he attempts to take over
Wards body, Your blood is my blood. Your mind is my mind. Your
body is my body. While Vincent Price attaches different vocal into-
nations and physicality to the two personalities, the audience is still
looking at the same actor. Like the rotted body of Hester that Curwen
eventually reanimates, Curwens own body has been reformed from
Issues of Problematic Identity 757
whatever portion of his blood remains in his descendant. Physical laws
are negated at the same time that they are reinscribed as scientic
explanation, heredity.
The internal identity of the Ward/Curwen character is constantly in
ux and often at odds with the identity that the other characters
perceive. The initial shots of Charles Dexter Ward are fragmented
images of his head and upper body viewed through a moving carriage.
There is no introduction by name until Ward enters the Public House
to ask directions to the Palace. This juxtaposition of meaning and
visual image against the textual message undercuts the validity of
language.
Another peculiar aspect of problematic text occurs in The Terror in
reference to the Barons wives. As Erik tells the story, the Baron had a
wife (unnamed) who died and it was after her death that the Baron fell
in love with the peasant Ilsa. Ilsa becomes the Baroness and the original
wife drops out of the story. The Baron (or the man pretending to be the
Baron) did not seem too broken up over the death of his rst wife. The
audience can presume that she is buried with all those other aristocrats,
somewhere in the crypt, but her physical position, like her character,
remains hazy. Perhaps the original wife, apparently a real aristocrat,
rather than the peasant Ilsa, is present by virtue of the name engraved
on the plate in the entrance to the crypt. The engraving states:
Ilsa
Baroness Von Leppe
176182
The inconsistency is in the dates. The Baron claims that Ilsa died in
1786. If the woman for whom the plate was originally engraved died in
1782, then she would have to be the original Baroness. Perhaps Erik/
the Baron added Ilsas name to the plate belonging to the original wife.
The Baron recommends that Andre not trust his eyes when he looks at
a portrait or a sketch. Perhaps the same is true of writing, visual texts
are neither stable, nor reliable in this place. Like lm itself, visual text
is constantly open to editing and interpretation.
The chapel itself has been renamed and recycled. Although Andre
recognizes its form, he asks where the religious objects have been
taken. The Baron replies that it is no longer a chapel; it has been
turned to other uses. As a front for Ilsas crypt, the ex-chapel is a
758 Frances Auld
perfect representation of the whole cast of characters. Just as the cru-
cix is present as an empty outline on the wall and Ilsas name is
engraved on a plate without her body resting behind it, so all the
characters exist as representations of an unavailable original. The name,
the outline, some residue of the form keeps acting as the original,
without any explicit recognition of this ongoing lack of substance. The
terror in The Terror seems to be the lack of a consistent referent for the
representations of the classic Gothic characters. What literary critic
Jerrold E. Hogle calls Gothics recounterfeiting of the already coun-
terfeit (295) in reference to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lit-
erature is documented both in and by a lm that was shot without a
nished script on a leftover set and inspired by a missed tennis date
(Corman 8992).
In the nal minutes of The Haunted Palace, Dr. Willet saves the
triumphant Charles Dexter Ward who has fought and broken through
Curwens possession. His portrait, like the house, has supposedly been
destroyed by the re. Shielding his face from the ames and smoke,
Ward is carried out by Dr. Willet and leans against a tree for support.
The happy ending is reversed when Ward turns around and answers
his wifes concerned question about his health, Are you certain that
you are all right? Vincent Price evokes the persona of Curwen through
facial gesture, vocal intonation, and ironic language, as he says, Per-
fectly sure. However, as The Haunted Palace has demonstrated, neither
identity, history, nor narrative itself can ever be perfectly sure.
These Horror lms raised questions for any audience member who
was willing and capable of looking for the depth in Cormans art. Their
fusion of postmodern thought and blatant popular commercialism was
no accident. Corman used the stereotypical visual elements of the
Gothic to destabilize the label Gothic, and in so doing he created
rogue lms.
NOTES
1. An exception to Roger Cormans lack of recognition, David Wills and Paul Willemens Roger
Corman: The Millenic Vision (1970) cites the directors work in the context of contemporary
cutting edge lm of the 1960s. They recognize a sense of nonlinear vision in the Corman ouvre.
2. According to Charles P. Mitchell, the lms title was a concession to the American popularity
of Cormans previous Poe adaptations. In both France and Australia publicity attached the lm
to H. P. Lovecraft, but producers feared American audiences would not recognize the name
(128).
Issues of Problematic Identity 759
3. Unlike H. P. Lovecrafts novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Cormans lm does not supply a
protagonist who willingly and literally digs up his ancestor to examine the past.
4. In The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Ed Naha cites critic Judith Crists response
in The New York Herald, The Torquemada line is almost worth the price of admission but not
quite (174). Crist seems to appreciate the humor of the line with no recognition of post-
modern artistic reference.
5. Edgar Allan Poes The Oval Portrait, Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Grey, and H. P.
Lovecrafts The Case of Charles Dexter Ward all connect human essence to artistic representation
and cultural recognition. Cormans production of The Haunted Palace (named after Poes poem)
is based on Lovecrafts novel, which references Oscar Wilde as the emblem of a man under
cultural erasure.
Texts Cited
Corman, Roger, and Jim Jerrome. How I Made a Hundred Movies in
Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York: Random House, 1990.
Hogle, Jerrold, E. The Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of
Abjection. A Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000. 293304.
Lovecraft, Howard Philip. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. 1941. New
York: Random House, 1987.
Mitchell, Charles P. The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography. Westport:
Greenwood, 2001.
Morris, Gary, and Roger Corman. Brilliance on a Budget. New York:
Arco, 1982.
Poe, Edgar Allan.The Haunted Palace. 1839. Great Tales and Poems of
Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Washington Square Press, 1963.
Punter, David. Introduction. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000. viii xiv.
Wiater, Stanley. Dark Visions: Conversations with the Masters of Horror.
New York: Avon, 1992.
Will, David, and Paul Willemen. Roger Corman: The Millenic Vision.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1970.
Skal, David. The Monster Show. Norton: New York, 1993.
Films Cited
The Haunted Palace. Dir. Roger Corman. Cinematographer Floyd
Crosby. Perf. Vincent Price, Debra Paget, Frank Maxwell, Lon
Chaney, Jr., Leo Gordon, Elisha Cook Jr. American International
Pictures, 1963.
760 Frances Auld
The Terror. Dir. Roger Corman. Cinematographer John Nicholaus. Perf.
Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Sandra Knight, Dorothy Neumann,
Richard Miller, Jonathan Haze. American International Pictures,
1963.
Frances Auld is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of South
Florida St. Petersburg where she teaches Medieval British Literature, as well as
Cultural Studies. Her teaching and research interests include monstrous
bodies in early British Literature, as well as their irruption into contemporary
popular culture. She has published and presented on Anglo-Saxon, Medieval,
and contemporary monsters in text and lm, as well as the pedagogy of horror.
Issues of Problematic Identity 761