This is later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast. More of what you
here weekday afternoons on the Drive. Chris Alexander is a Canadian editor, music
composer, writer, filmmaker. He's the former editor in chief of the iconic
horror film magazine Fangoria, and he's composed a book that is very interesting to
me. It is called Corman Poe Interviews and Essays, exploring the making of
Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films from nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty four. Let's
just start with the man himself, Edgar Allan Poe, Chris, was he
the first author of the maccabbren know, he was the first Chris to say,
but he certainly is one of the most, the most probably important of
them for sure, the most inspirational and influential outside of Baby hp Lovecraft,
which Roger Corman also mined for one of these films secretly on the side,
but certainly Poe's shadow looms large to this day in the context of psychological and
gothic horror. You're correct, well, yeah, I mean his stories are
still as popular today as they were when he wrote them. So they're definitely
timeless. Well, and nudge of that. I mean, even if you're
no matter what kind of horror story you're writing or what horror film you're making,
if you're not conscious of being influenced by Poe, you're still borrowing from
Paul, whether you're aware of it or not. I mean, he's so
his words and sensibilities are so ingrained in the genre it's impossible to separate him.
Well, it's also so very quoted. Absolutely absolutely, he's He's the
first mainstream horror writer, let's put it that way, if not one of
the first successful writers of the American short story. But anyway, the book
is about Roger Corman and Roger Corman taking these stories and bringing them to life.
But he wasn't the first to bring them to life. We wasn't the
first, that's for sure. Now, the reason why these films are so
important are not even necessarily the fact that they were based on pol faithfully,
because they weren't, and none of the previous Poe films necessarily were faithful either,
Because to adapt Poe for film, you have to realize that as you
as you mentioned po being the master of the short story. To expand that
to feature length is a challenge. So even the previous Poe influenced films like
The Black Hat and The Raven from the nineteen thirties still borrowed elements of other
post stories and other has other subplots in contemporary settings and were much different.
But what they did, and what Corman did with those eight, these eight
remarkable films, was take the essence of Poe, the soul of Poe,
and distill them and blend them and turn them into something radically different than unique,
using his crew is literally called the Corman Crew of collaborators. We're talking
with Chris Alexander. He's a Canadian writer and the composer of Corman Poe Interviews
and essays exploring the making of Roger Corman and his Edgar Allen Poe films.
What did he do that other producers did not or could not Well, I
mean, the back of up this, the whole idea behind these films was
pretty pretty avant garde, pretty daring, pretty bold, and that was Roger
was the house director for a company called American International Pictures in the nineteen fifties,
and they were the first studio to really kind of capitalize and exploit to
the burgeoning youth market that was obsessed with rock and roll and rebellion and horror
movies and Monster. I felt like I was a teenage Wrewolf. I was
a teenage Frankenstein, a lot of teenage stuff. And Corman was the king
of these sorts of pictures. But what he decided, being a student of
English literature and an ardent admirer of Poe, was to convince American International Pictures
to invest in out of three black and white movies back to back, to
invest into one single, more evolved, more sophisticated and expensive, full blooded
color film, and that film was nineteen sixties to follow the House of Usher,
and it was so successful. Of course, when you have a success
in your hands, you try to repeat that success. And American International Pictures
persuaded Roger to keep going back to the Well, and he did so seven
more times. While six more times nineteen sixty three is The Haunted Palace was
really an HP Lovecraft story that AIP kind of insidiously morphed into a Poe film
to trick audiences into thinking that's what they were seeing. But it's still part
of the series Well and Chris Chris Alexanders, who were talking to and his
new book about the making of Roger Corman films based upon Edgar Allen post stories.
You mentioned expense because at that time, usually the horror genre was shot
in black and white, I gather because horror films of that time required special
effects that could get expensive. So if you shot in black and white,
at least you were cutting costs there. But he didn't do that. He
went for color. Well, I mean he did cut costs. He's notoriously
and where's this is a badge of bara cheap. He's a cheap producer,
cheap day. He likes to save money. So a lot of those movies
were lower budget. But we remember, history repeats itself, so now we
have this new modern age with him several different, dozens and hundreds of different
platforms to watch movies on. Well, back in the late nineteen fifties,
suddenly we had an explosion of theaters catering to inner cities and down markets and
teenage markets. And then we also had the drive in and television, so
there was a bigger market and that needed more content. So movies started being
produced cheaply. And the thing about horror movies is you can produce them cheaply,
because generally speaking, you don't go to a horror movie based on who's
in it, so it's not based on an above the credit star. You
don't need a star to have a hit. So that was kind of Corman's
but he tried to step up this game. He's a guy, He was
a filmmaker who to this day gets bored really easily likes to change things up.
So that was the whole impetus behind making The Fall of the House of
Usha is that he was bored making these movies. He wanted to do something
a little bit more refined and upskill. He was lucky he was able to
do it because he was smart. He knew that there was a milliad of
talented artists working in Hollywood who were out of work. So he used a
cinematographer named Floyd Crosby, the father of Rockstar Departed Rockstar David Crosby actually,
who was an Academy Award winning cinematographer, and he was out of work because
you know, Hollywood and his agist. So he found that he could get
a lot of great talents that weren't employed and give them work in volume,
and therefore he would get better production values. He was always a master of
saving money but stretching dimes into dollars. Chris Alexander, author of Corman Poe
Interviews and essays exploring the making of Roger Korman Edgar Allen Poe films from nineteen
sixty to sixty four. So that's how Price arrived on the scene. I
was about to ask, and did he jump at the opportunity or have to
be cajoled? Well, yeah, you mentioned that Price was around for a
long time. He was a Hollywood character actor. He was an auto Premat's
Laura he was. He was actually an invisible man returns. But he wasn't
a horror star. You always see horrors. You always see older actors who
are on the way out starring in horror films and younger actors who are on
the rise. They kind of crossed paths on the silver screen. But Price
was sort of at the at the not the end, but certainly a lull
in his career. He had started in a couple of horror films in the
fifties, including the first three D horror film, House of Blacks in nineteen
fifty three and the Fly and William Castle's house on Hunted Hill. But Roger
could get Price for a good quote unquote price. Yeah, and he gave
him good material, and he gave him good roles and meaty dialogue written by
heavyweights like Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. So he gave him, you know,
a great canvas to paint on and to create these roles, and thus,
whether accidentally or on with intent, ended up creating one of the that
era as first de facto or stars. I mean, Vincent Price wouldn't be
Vincent Price today if it wasn't for his collaborations with Roger Corman on these pictures.
After seeing Vincent Price on several several videos of his interviews, I'm remarketing
now that he had a wonderful, biting sense of humor. Vincent Price,
well, like Roger Corman, he was a very He was an intellectual and
certainly that's what you get when you see him on screen. That's why Rogers
movies kind of stand apart too, because he had a degree in English literature.
He was the first guy to actually bring Igmar Bergman films and Kurosawa films
to American drive ins in the nineteen seventies and late nine sixties, so he
had a real sense of cinema and history and literature. And Price was no
slouch either, incredibly intelligent man, a refined collector of art and wrote many
books on art collecting, and was also an accomplished chef. No, he
was a real, real gadfly, a really interesting dude, an esoteric individual
who just happened to in order to pay the bills and keep the machine running.
Starring these bizarre, wonky weird movies, Chris Alexander. The book is
Corman Poe Interviews and essays exploring the making of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films
from nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty four. If you're like my producer Mike Gan
and the love Cannon, who just devours this kind of stuff, this is
going to be a great summer read for you. And Chris, we thank
you for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. I really
appreciate thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast,
and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and
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