Simon Cordier (Vincent Price) is a well-respected magistrate who visits a condemned prisoner, Louis Girot (Harvey Stephens), just before the man's execution... and finds him to be possessed by a demon!
The film's plot goes in directions one might not expect. The inmate has a very small role, and Price's character is shown to be dead at the beginning -- how far in the future is this? He spends much the time courting a woman and sculpting her bust. None of this is really in any way related to the demon-possessed prisoner.
When the demon is free of a body, it may be less murderous, but no less influential, and I find that a nice twist. The demon is a "horla", whatever that is. The original story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity. If this film is important to horror history in any way, it may be seen as an offshoot of Lovecraft.
Mike Mayo calls the film "one of Vincent Price's best but least remembered efforts." While I consider Price's greatest but least known role to be "The Mad Magician", Mayo's point is still true. Going into this one with no expectations (having not heard of it), I was fairly impressed. It ranks much higher on my list than others would rank it on theirs, I think.
On Scream Factory's excellent disc (part of the Vincent Price Collection, Volume 3) we have another Steve Haberman audio commentary. We must talk about Haberman's style. Rather than discuss anything happening on screen, Haberman goes on a long, passionless tangent about the story's author... but he does make up for this a bit by offering an amusing abbreviated history of Vincent Price's cinematic wives. Haberman is a person who is very smart, does very good research, but has not mastered the way to present it -- he essentially writes bios of people in the film's he is reviewing and reads their biographies. This is very dry and often does not offer much more than Wikipedia could, unfortunately.
The film's plot goes in directions one might not expect. The inmate has a very small role, and Price's character is shown to be dead at the beginning -- how far in the future is this? He spends much the time courting a woman and sculpting her bust. None of this is really in any way related to the demon-possessed prisoner.
When the demon is free of a body, it may be less murderous, but no less influential, and I find that a nice twist. The demon is a "horla", whatever that is. The original story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity. If this film is important to horror history in any way, it may be seen as an offshoot of Lovecraft.
Mike Mayo calls the film "one of Vincent Price's best but least remembered efforts." While I consider Price's greatest but least known role to be "The Mad Magician", Mayo's point is still true. Going into this one with no expectations (having not heard of it), I was fairly impressed. It ranks much higher on my list than others would rank it on theirs, I think.
On Scream Factory's excellent disc (part of the Vincent Price Collection, Volume 3) we have another Steve Haberman audio commentary. We must talk about Haberman's style. Rather than discuss anything happening on screen, Haberman goes on a long, passionless tangent about the story's author... but he does make up for this a bit by offering an amusing abbreviated history of Vincent Price's cinematic wives. Haberman is a person who is very smart, does very good research, but has not mastered the way to present it -- he essentially writes bios of people in the film's he is reviewing and reads their biographies. This is very dry and often does not offer much more than Wikipedia could, unfortunately.