Geoffrey O’Brien at The Current:
Between 1960 and 1964, Roger Corman directed eight films loosely derived from Edgar Allan Poe and in all but one case starring Vincent Price: House of Usher (1960) was followed by The Pit and the Pendulum (1961); the omnibus feature Tales of Terror (1962); The Premature Burial (1962), with Ray Milland in the leading role; the visually inventive comedy The Raven (1963); The Haunted Palace (1963), named after a Poe poem but based on H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; and the two final films, The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), both made in England. There doesn’t seem to have been any grand plan in view from the outset; if House of Usher had not been so immensely successful, one wonders how many, if any, of its successors would have come to be. Yet they form a body of work not only deeply coherent but uniquely inspired.
In retrospect they seem to have been made in response to an aesthetic impulse as irresistible as the ghostly or mesmeric commands to which their protagonists are often subject. Corman drew on the gifts of many collaborators—cinematographers Floyd Crosby (for the first six), Nicolas Roeg, and Arthur Grant; writers Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and Robert Towne; composer Les Baxter; and above all production designer Daniel Haller—but the films have a quality of singularly focused intent that sets them apart as an oeuvre within an oeuvre in Corman’s abundant filmography.
more here.