The Tomb of Ligeia

After his long sequence of Poe movies filmed in various studio interiors, Corman decided that The Tomb of Ligeia demanded a change of style and emphasis. Consequently he shot it on a number of highly effective English locations, having commissioned Robert Towne (who subsequently wrote Chinatown) to script it. The result is one of the best in the whole series, an ambiguous, open-ended film which features one of Vincent Price's most decisive performances. There is a long early sequence involving a long monologue by Verden Fell (Price), juxtaposed against Rowena (Shepherd) climbing a gothic tower, which has a syntactic originality that has rarely been equalled in horror movies. But even more importantly, Corman - like Michael Reeves in Witchfinder General - utilised the English landscape in a way that Hammer had often neglected.