Madhouse (1974): the Price is right

There’s a point in a horror icon’s career, usually when they’re still bankable but aren’t the newest fright any more, when they go meta. The roots of this can probably be traced back to all those Universal movies that pitted the studio’s once-formidable monsters against Abbott and Costello. Later on, though, franchises like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Child’s Play achieved genuine creative rebirths by breaking the fourth wall, playfully bringing Freddy Krueger and Chucky into the real world of their creators and stars. In this, they were following the lead of Vincent Price, whose wry, self-aware villainy was perfect for self-reflexive satire. Just one year after the second and final Dr. Phibes film, he made Theatre of Blood, in which his embittered ham actor inflicts a series of Shakespearean deaths on his harshest critics. Then, one year after that, he made the Amicus film Madhouse, in which he plays a horror-movie actor forced against his will to reprise his performance as a Phibes-like villain, in defiance of the string of murders that seem to be linked to the character’s prior appearances.

Theatre of Blood is, for most fans, up there with Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe adaptations as one of Price’s most exquisite works, so Madhouse has always existed in its shadow. And while it’s not Theatre of Blood, Eureka’s new Blu-Ray release of Madhouse reveals a film with plenty to recommend it. Price plays Paul Toombes, star of the somewhat Phibes-like horror series Doctor Death, which ended in real-life horror when Toombes’s fiancee Ellen was beheaded at the wrap party. Toombes was widely assumed to be the killer, particularly as he’d just discovered unsavoury facts about Ellen’s history in pornographic films, and he was briefly institutionalised.

There are a lot of asylums in 1960s and ’70s horror – it’s as if movie producers knew Care in the Community was about to rob them of a genre-standard location. Despite offering the film a title, though, Jim Clark’s film doesn’t spend much time on Toombes’s psychiatric treatment. The meat of the film’s plot comes when Herbert Flay – these names! – the writer of the Doctor Death films, comes to him with a proposal to make a BBC television series about the character. Flay is played by the inestimable Peter Cushing, reminding us that, at the time, Cushing’s old bosses at Hammer were making that exact leap to the small screen. Back then, this was considered to be a sign of a franchise’s decline, unlike today when the likes of Star Wars and Marvel can hop back and forth between TV and cinema (although it arguably isn’t doing them much good either). Regardless, the offers haven’t been rolling in since Toombes got out of hospital, so he agrees to don Doctor Death’s make-up again.

Price pitches his performance as Toombes very well. He’s haughty, arrogant, rude – you fully understand why so many people are convinced he killed his fiancee, and yet he’s also Vincent Price, so he’s delightful and sympathetic at the same time. His friendship with Cushing is lived-in and convincing, despite the actors only having appeared on-screen together once before, in Scream and Scream Again. The fact that mid-century film horror was so reliant on workhorse character actors means every single one of these films is an Ocean’s Eleven for fans of genre films of this vintage. Therefore, as well as Price and Cushing, we get Blood on Satan’s Claw‘s Linda Hayden, Count Yorga himself Robert Quarry as Oliver Quayle, the sleazy porn producer who spills Ellen’s secrets, and Ghostwatch‘s Michael Parkinson as, er, Michael Parkinson, a genial Yorkshire chat show host who interviews Toombes. It’s such a stacked cast, it doesn’t need the dubiously tasteful gimmick where the opening credits promise “special appearances” from the recently-deceased Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone. (They appear in clips from Price’s Roger Corman films, which are repurposed as Toombes’s prior work)

Most of all, there is Adrienne Corri, a fantastic actress whose career is somewhat overshadowed by her most famous role as the ill-fated wife of Patrick Magee’s character in A Clockwork Orange. Corri plays one of Toombes’s co-stars, one who’s arguably had an even worse time following the Doctor Death franchise than he has, and like Price her presence gives the film a little extra-textual weight. Having the star of the most notorious scene in A Clockwork Orange on hand reminds you that movie-copycat crime was a live debate in the early ’70s. Angus Hall’s source novel Devilday was published in 1969, but in adapting it, screenwriters Ken Levison and Greg Morrison (plus producer Milton Subotsky, who earned Price’s ire with frequent uncredited rewrites) must have been at least partly inspired by such then-frequent controversies, as well as the birth of the ‘cursed movie’ mythology thanks to Satanic-themed hits like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.

It all feeds into a rich, entertaining film, full of luridly colourful characters doing juicily sadistic things to each other. The satire on screen-violence debates makes it feel hipper than most Price and Cushing vehicles of this era, and the horror scenes are similarly conscious of new developments in the form. In the introduction to the film supplied on this disc, horror author Stephen Laws correctly notices a certain Mario Bava influence, while the skull-like mask of Doctor Death closely resembles the English master thief Kriminal, part of the 1960s wave of Italian supervillain comics now best-remembered for inspiring Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. Its attention to the ancillary detritus of horror franchises – TV spin-offs, pinball machines – is surprisingly close to this summer’s hottest meta-horror, Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The queerness of Schoenbrun’s work is also prefigured, if only because, well, it’s a Vincent Price movie.

And that’s the thing – it’s a Vincent Price movie, maybe not the most famous, maybe not the most prestigious, but if you wanted to pull out a film that illustrated exactly what the pleasures of such a film are, Madhouse is a surprisingly good demonstration. Extras include a booklet with new writing by Christopher Stewardson and an archival interview with Clark, a video essay by Mary Going and an audio commentary by David Del Valle, plus the aforementioned introduction by Laws which ends with him, rather charmingly, coming up with better ideas for the film’s title and tagline. He’s right that the marketing is a little lacklustre; he’s also right that it conceals a hugely entertaining Gothic treat.