No Halloween season is a true Halloween season without a
healthy dose of Vincent Price movies. But wait! Don’t sit down to shudder along
with House of Wax or The Abominable Dr. Phibes just yet! To
truly appreciate the man and his work, you’ll first want to bolster your
Priceducation with these 20 Things You
May Not Have Known About Vincent Price!
1. That Vincent
Price was a gourmet chef and cookbook author is well known among fans, but they
might not be aware that culinary interests ran deep in his bloodline. His
grandfather, Vincent C. Price, invented baking powder and pioneered cornstarch
as a baking ingredient, and his father, Vincent Leonard Price, was the
president of the National Candy Company.
2. Vincent
Price’s first wife, Edith Barrett, didn’t become as synonymous with horror as
her husband did, but she did star in the creepy classic I Walked with a Zombie.
3. Price’s
daughter Victoria is a serious writer who wrote scripts about Richard Widmark
and her dad’s old friend Roddy McDowall for A&E’s Biography series and an extensive and refreshingly objective
biography about her dad. She also had a brief role as a reporter in Price’s
final film, Edward Scissorhands.
4. As a young man
from an unquestioningly conservative St. Louis family, Price expressed sympathy
with this burgeoning Nazi party. However, he underwent a major liberal
awakening upon moving to Hollywood where he became active in such causes as the
Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Ironically, Joseph McCarthy targeted Price as a
possible communist in the fifties, citing Price’s anti-Nazi inclinations as
proof that he was some sort of dangerous radical. McCarthy was one loony piece
of work.
5. Vincent Price
never got the chance to play Dracula, but he did have tea with the wife of the
count’s creator when Florence Stoker invited Price to her house in 1934.
6. When getting
drowned in a vat of “wine” at the climax of Tower
of London, Price was actually submerged in mere water. Boris Karloff and
Basil Rathbone had thoughtfully filled the water with whatever trash they could
find as a prank on their young costar.
7. Price felt
that a single peeper was all that kept House
of Wax from being a piece of schlock. Andre de Toth only had one eye, which
kept the depth perception-deprived director from fully exploiting his film’s 3D
gimmick.
8. The climax of The Fly, in which tiny Al Hedison chirps
“Help Meee!” from a spider’s web, may be one of the most disturbing scenes in a
fifties horror film, but Vincent Price and co-star Herbet Marshall didn’t quite
greet the scene with appropriate disturbance. Instead of cowering in fear,
Price and Marshall were overcome with fits of laughter, cracking up so much
that director Kurt Neumann had a hell of a time capturing the take that appears
in the finished film.
9. After noting
how pale Conrad Veidt was in The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari, Price suggested that his own Roderick Usher should have
exaggeratedly white hair and skin in House
of Usher.
10. While making The Pit and Pendulum, Price liked to
wear pink socks under his costume. To costar Barbara Steele, he confided that
it was “Just a little kink of mine, darling.”
11. One of the
most trying scenes Vincent Price had to film was the boa constrictor scene in The Raven. Price had a terrible fear of
snakes.
12. Price (wrongly)
assumed that Jack Nicholson was AIP producer James Nicholson’s son. He and
Boris Karloff delighted in chanting “Nepotism! Nepotism!” at the future
superstar on the set of The Raven.
13. Vincent Price
was Roger Corman’s first choice to star in one of the director’s most
notoriously shoddy pictures, but when Price proved unavailable for the project,
Boris Karloff took his place opposite Jack Nicholson in The Terror.
14. Vincent Price
delivered the eulogy at the funeral of old friend and co-worker Peter Lorre.
15. As many
horror stars do, Vincent Price had funny ideas about what constituted horror…
ideas that exempted him from the genre. He classified his Edgar Allan Poe
movies as “Gothic” tales while more realistic fare such as Marathon Man and Taxi Driver
were true horror movies.
16. Vincent Price
was a serious art aficionado, collector, and historian devoted to exposing
everyone, no matter their economic or social standing, to fine art. He curated
a collection of art to be sold by Sears department stores, and in a grand coup,
convinced master surrealist Salvador Dalí to paint The Madonna and the Mystical Rose exclusively for Sears’ Vincent Price Collection.
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| The Madonna and the Mystical Rose |
17. In the “Ogg
Grows in Gotham” episode of TV’s Batman,
narrator Desmond Doomsday (voiced by Batman
creator William Dozier) refers to Vincent Price’s Egghead as “The World’s
Greatest Criminal Mind.” The descriptive phrase was also the title of song sung
by Professor Ratigan in Disney’s The
Great Mouse Detective. Voicing Ratigan was none other than Vincent Price.
18. Price really
made Trevor Crole-Rees earn his keep while filming The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Price says he laughed so much while
playing the title ghoul that makeup man Crole-Rees had to touch up the
elaborate scars “every five minutes.”
19. After
contributing a spooky rap to the title track of the best selling album in U.S.
pop history, Vincent Price was deeply irritated that he did not get a piece of
the royalties for “Thriller”. When Michael Jackson got wind of this, he sent
Price what the pop star thought was adequate recompense: a few framed gold
records and a poster of himself. Price was not thrilled.
20. In 1973,
Vincent Price finally got the chance to share scenes with the man who could be
his British counterpart, Peter Cushing, in Madhouse.
The two horror stars had missed chances to work together twice before: once
when they both appeared in Scream and
Scream Again but shared no scenes and then in The Abominable Dr. Phibes when Cushing dropped out to attend to his
ailing wife, Helen, while the role of Dr. Vesalius went to Joseph Cotten.
Later, Price and Cushing loaned their voices to the radio serial Aliens in the Mind and their voices and
bodies to the late-career film House of
the Long Shadows, costarring Christopher Lee, a close friend of Price’s who
shared his birthday. In a most unusual collaboration, Price and Cushing
inspired the name of Roddy McDowall’s vampire-hunter Peter Vincent in Fright Night.
