The Haunted Palace was marketed as one of a series of Corman films based on the writing of horror master Edgar Allan Poe—but the film is in fact based on H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the only full-length novel Lovecraft ever wrote, and one of his most autobiographical works. It tells the story of a young man growing up, as Lovecraft did, in Providence, Rhode Island; like Lovecraft, he has a taste for walking around at night, admiring old buildings, and looking things up in libraries. He stumbles on the story of a lost ancestor, the mysterious Joseph Curwen, whose name and biography have been erased from nearly every public record, and thus begins an obsession that leads to young Ward’s raising his ancestor from the dead. As you might guess, this turns out to be a bad idea.

Corman’s adaptation brings in elements from other Lovecraft tales: the town of Arkham, where all sorts of creepy Lovecraftian things happen; strangely deformed people who turn out to be the result of a project to interbreed human women and extra-cosmic monsters; and the Necronomicon, a book of forbidden knowledge that grants great power to the person who reads it but also has a tendency to drive him or her mad. The film also features the talents of Vincent Price, who plays both Ward and the evil Joseph Curwen; and Lon Chaney Jr., as Curwen’s friend, the centuries-old warlock Simon Orne.

Lovecraft might have cringed at the way Corman mixed up his storylines, squeezed them into a few sets that are manifestly too small for the action they contain, and lit the whole thing in lurid yellows and greens; but The Haunted Palace, which was the first screen adaptation of Lovecraft’s work, is a delight to watch. - Paul La Farge