October Horror Challenge #84: "The Tomb of Ligea"

 

Aren't those movie posters cool? This  movie had so many great posters that I had a hard time narrowing it down to just three. This  is another Vincent Price horror movie. I just love him. He's always in these angsty Gothic productions, isn't he? Poor guy can't catch a break and always ends up getting the short end of the horror stick. In this movie, he loses his wife, but her spirit refuses to leave and let him get on with his life. Rude. I've never seen this movie, so I'm excited to check it out today.

So as I said, Vincent Price plays a grieving widower in this movie. His wife has died, and from the sound of it, she ran every aspect of his life, so he's lost without her. He keeps seeing visions of her in his dark, creepy castle, and a black cat shows up and follows him around, and he begins to think it's the spirit of his dead wife Ligea. As time passes, he meets another woman and they fall in love and get married (a bit too soon, methinks) but when his new wife moves into the castle, she can't sleep, because she's haunted by strange happenings. Her husband tries hypnosis to get her to calm down, but she is overtaken by the spirit of Ligea, who tells him she will always be his wife and will never leave him (dude, give it a rest, you're dead! Go away!) Can he find a way to get his dead wife to move on so he can live in peace? Probably not, given his track record in movies like this, but he can try.

The castle itself is dark and spooky and brooding. I'd almost be terrified just living in that place even if there were no evil spirit there. Sadness and death seems to lurk around every corner. And I feel for Vincent Price's character, under the control of his overbearing wife that he can't escape even from beyond the grave. We see him slowly turning more and more crazy as the movie goes on, and the ending, where it all comes together, is pretty epic. I won't give it away, but that's a spectacular sequence, and the final shot of the movie is mean-spirited but fitting, I guess. Ligea finally gets what she wants. Remind me to never get married.