HAUNTED PALACE
In 1960, AIP’s go-to director for cheap, quickly produced science fiction and horror double bills convinced the powers that be to gamble on letting him make a stand-alone film, in color, with double the production time and more money. Granted that, compared to other studios, this still meant an incredibly lean budget and an incredibly short production schedule. The result was Roger Corman’s Fall of the House of Usher, a landmark film in the history of American horror and one of the best Gothic horror films from any country. With the runaway success of House of Usher, Corman found himself free to direct a rapid succession of follow-up films that all relied on the same basic formula. In 1963, flush with success and probably more than entitled to do so, Corman asked if he could do something just a little bit different.
#1 by lyzard on October 22, 2008 - 6:34 pm
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Is it just me, or is Debra Paget one of the loveliest actresses ever? Granted, I’m a sucker for the dark hair, blue eyes thing (and I hated her brief flirtation with blondeness, circa From The Earth To The Moon). And yes, she could act. I really like her in Tales Of Terror, too.
#2 by KeithA on October 23, 2008 - 9:40 am
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Your assessment of Debra Paget is indeed right on the money.
#3 by Nathan Shumate on October 23, 2008 - 10:16 am
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Although I consider myself a Lovecraft aficionado, it was just this year that I realized I didn’t know what a gambrel roof was. I look it up. It’s a barn-style roof, the kind with a shallow pitch near the center beam that then changes to a deeper pitch about halfway to the eaves.
In other words, one of the least scary kinds of roofs.
#4 by Chad R. on October 23, 2008 - 10:53 am
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The Amityville Horror house had a gambrel roof and that place was pretty creepy. Moreso even than most of the movies it was in.
#5 by KeithA on October 23, 2008 - 11:12 am
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So you aren’t afraid of gambrel roofs, huh? Well then how about…CYLOPEAN ARCHITECTURE!
And if you aren’t afraid of barns, that’s because you didn’t grow up in farm country. Those things are usually jam packed with wasps, hornets, yellow jackets, mud daubers, jumping spiders, and these things that look like wasps but with two inch long stingers. Also, murderers with burlap sacks over their head.
#6 by Nathan Shumate on October 23, 2008 - 11:46 am
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On the contrary, I grew up rural as rural can be. Got my fair share of stings, as well as those inflamed scratches you get when you go jumping around on the haybales and get hay fragments in your waistband. Didn’t have too much trouble with the burlap guys, though; they were always out joyriding on their tractors, loaded to the gills.
#7 by Blake Matthews on October 23, 2008 - 12:27 pm
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I lived in the sticks in a NE Brazilian for a few months (the setting of a short story I recently wrote) and our house was routinely visited by tarantulas. That’s to say nothing of the iguanas, frogs, tegus, scorpions, tarantula hawks, walking sticks, termites and multi-colored grasshoppers that infested the tall grasses around our house.
#8 by KeithA on October 23, 2008 - 12:48 pm
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Ugh. Hay. I used to have to bale it every year. Awful, awful job for which most people now use a machine. But my grandfather decided why buy a machine when you have so many hungry teenagers around?
Actually, I don’t even know if the horror barn (as we called it, to differentiate it from the horse barn, which was quite nice and made of metal, and the “murder barn” which was back a ways in the woods, all rotting and abandoned and full of terror) had a gambrel roof. All I knew was that, apart from the many stinging insects and venomous snakes, it’s where we hung the tobacco to dry. It would hang up there, in the filtered sunlight seeping through the cracks, all yellow and looking, I swear, like some horrible pod person thing out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
And Nathan — it was while flying in and out of SLC that I was looking out at Utah (which I’ve driven through, but with a different perspective) and realized that, contrary to what I’d been thinking, there is an awful lot of open, uninhabited space left in this country where lurking terror can…uhh…lurk. And then I started dreaming up a remake of Manos: The Hands of Fate with an added layer of Cthulhu mythos, and I began to tremble as a wave of abject terror swept over me…
for I knew then that I had peered into an abyss of pure madness!
#9 by Nathan Shumate on October 23, 2008 - 1:22 pm
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The “lurking terrors”? We call ’em “polygamist compounds.”
#10 by El Santo on October 23, 2008 - 1:43 pm
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“the Hammer films upon which these films were modeled rarely featured female characters of any real note beyond the size of their heaving bosoms.”
I quote Marie Devereux (who played one of the crazy-hot vampire girls in The Brides of Dracula): “They always want me in these films because I’ve got such big boobs, and they like to put them on the posters.”
#11 by lyzard on October 23, 2008 - 2:42 pm
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And you didn’t invite ME!!??
….muttermuttermutter….
#12 by KeithA on October 23, 2008 - 3:51 pm
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Says the woman from a country with more poisonous snakes than any other place on earth.
#13 by lyzard on October 23, 2008 - 9:37 pm
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But of course! And spiders, and fish, and jellyfish, and octopodes, and monotremes…..sigh. 🙂
#14 by Nathan Shumate on October 23, 2008 - 9:38 pm
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I think that I have never seen
A poem as lovely as a monotreme…
#15 by lyzard on October 23, 2008 - 9:44 pm
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And you never will.
#16 by The Rev. D.D. on October 24, 2008 - 9:36 am
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Ah, Australia. So many interesting ways to die…can’t wait to visit.
Except for the scorpions, that place in Brazil sounds pretty fun. Tegus…those are lizards, right?
#17 by Blake Matthews on October 24, 2008 - 9:45 am
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Yeah. The place also had ants that were nearly two inches long and, according to a biology teacher friend of mine, very venomous. So that was pretty cool, too. It was also in that place that I got bit by a katydid.
#18 by The Rev. D.D. on October 24, 2008 - 9:50 am
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Not sure I’m familiar with poisonous ants in South America. You always just hear about the army ants, seems like.
Speaking of ants, aren’t there about 3 or 4 species in Australia dangerous to humans? Bulldogs, bullet, and those jumping ones?
I never would’ve guessed katydids would bite. Huh. I guess it makes sense though; I had a ‘hopper nip me once.
#19 by Blake Matthews on October 24, 2008 - 9:56 am
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“Bulldogs, bullet, and those jumping ones?”
That would be the Jack Jumper Ant (Myrmecia pilosula). They hunt and kill wasps and other insects. Wow.
#20 by Joshua on October 26, 2008 - 7:30 am
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This:
Still, it’s weird for me to think that there’s a whole crop of kids who go to Wal-Mart during the Halloween season, see all those Frankenstein cut-outs, and just see some random, generic monster with no connection to anything from the past.
made me sad.