The Timeless Partnership of Roger Corman and Edgar Allen Poe

With the death of movie director and producer Roger Corman, 98, here's a few words on his greatest collaboration.

What magical mystical wonders Roger Corman’s Poe movies held for me as a youngster. Vincent Price’s hammy derangement, the otherworldly staginess of the sets, the garish Hollywood medievalism of the costumes, the wispy FX, the nightmarish creepiness of it all. I came to them because I’d grown up reading Poe (yes, probably not something I’d advise for children now I’m a grown up), and Corman’s visualisation of those horrors — the way they brought a cartoonish, pantomimic colour to them without ever diluting the horror — was the auteur calcifying the qualities in Poe I had recognised.