Roger Corman Directs Edgar Allan Poe • Criterion Channel Teaser

Now playing on the Criterion Channel! When exploitation cinema’s most visionary impresario took on American literature’s greatest horror writer, it was a match made in hell. Having honed his knack for genre filmmaking with the string of B movies he produced fast and cheap for American International Pictures in the 1950s, Roger Corman began one of the most artistically ambitious projects of his heroic career with a series of brilliantly inventive, hair-raising adaptations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. These menacing and macabre films, produced between 1960 and 1964, found Corman experimenting with color, lighting, and art direction in sometimes avant-garde ways to achieve their otherworldly gothic atmosphere. They also cemented the immortality of genre legend Vincent Price, who, as star of seven of the eight films, tore into the scenery with diabolical relish.