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(Vincent Price) MADHOUSE (1974) Turns Vincent Price into Horror’s Final Girl

By. Katelyn Nelson

Vincent Price is one of film’s most recognizable figures. He graced stage and screen for nearly 60 years, largely—though not exclusively—in the realm of horror. His iconic voice has even spanned across narration and music as well as film, and his imposingly debonair figure made him one of genre’s most recognizable villains. This week marks his 115^th birthday, and what better way to celebrate than to dig into his filmography.

                It took some time to decide on which film to choose. There are, of course, the Roger Corman Poe adaptations for which he is so well known and whose legacy will likely outlive the heat death of the universe. There is Edward Scissorhands, his final and perhaps most tender role. There are even the originals for House of Wax, House on Haunted Hill, and The Fly. Vincent Price is in the very DNA of the horror genre, a virtually inescapable monolith with marks in some of the genre’s most fundamental offerings. Yet I found the one I couldn’t stop thinking of seems to be recognized as one of the most narratively disjointed.

Written by Ken Levinson and Greg Morrison and directed by Jim Clark, 1974’s Madhouse reads most like an homage to Price’s career at the time than anything else. Joined by Peter Cushing and featuring moments of archival footage of Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, the film effectively brings the big four of the era into a single work, though it is far from the only time the four would have intersected in their careers. It follows Paul Toombes (Vincent Price), a successful actor in the horror sphere who, upon the film’s opening, is throwing a screening party to celebrate the release of the fifth film featuring his iconic character, the skull-faced serial killer Dr. Death. Also present are his friend/screenwriter of the Dr. Death series, Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing), actress—and Paul’s betrothed—Ellen Mason (Julie Crosthwait), and Ellen’s former employer, adult film producer Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry).

Following a brief but bitter spat between Paul and Ellen upon the reveal of her previous career as an adult entertainer, Paul goes up to Ellen’s bedroom to apologize for his venomous words, only to find her murdered in the style of his own Dr. Death character. Naturally, he goes insane and is sent away for a 12-year stint in a mental institution. Upon his release, we find Paul Toombes is once again stepping into the role of Dr. Death, this time for a television series headed up and produced by none other than Oliver Quayle himself, who has since left the adult film world—though not the dedication to adding a thrill of sex appeal—for the world of broadcast television. As if tensions could not get any higher, a series of murders mimicking those committed in the Dr. Death films begins almost as soon as Paul steps back into character, effectively aiming to implicate him. Soon enough, Paul himself can barely trust whether he’s as innocent as he claims, or if he’s being driven mad and committing the murders with no awareness of his actions while in costume.

Madhouse seems far from the list of most beloved of Price’s works, seeming more often to be hailed as something that barely holds itself together despite the joy of having Price and Cushing together. Still, for all that it is an effective nod to his career up to that point, featuring several interstitials of his previous work in The Raven, Tales of Terror, and the like. It also works as a sort of mirror to his much more successful and beloved Theater of Blood from the previous year. In Theater, we find Price embodying a Shakespearean stage actor going for his pound of flesh against berating critics. A sort of poetic Saw predecessor in which he exhibits both full control and awareness of his actions, with full intent to draw blood in the name of vengeance for his losses. Madhouse, meanwhile, is all about loss of control.

Even outside of films like MADHOUSE, Vincent Price spent decades shaping horror culture in unexpected places. Check out our look at some of Price’s strangest side hustles across television, music, and pop culture.

Paul is in the unfamiliar landscape of the television world (“I thought television was a family medium”, he says after encountering Quayle as his producer for the show), thrust into situations he has little control over—such as the inclusion of a female sidekick for Dr. Death, inserted by Quayle in the name of giving the series a little more sex appeal than it had previously been known for. He’s clearly lost a bit of control and creative agency over the realm of his most beloved character, instead forced to watch it be remolded by someone who clearly has little to no respect for the material he’s worked so hard to bring to life. Add on to that Paul’s increasingly unstable psyche, fracturing with every new body, and you have a man on the edge of madness who can barely tell the difference between reality and a narrative he’s being fed—one where he is culpable for every death. As the film progresses we see Paul genuinely struggling to hold onto whether or not he is committing these murders unawares.

Following the latest murder, which mirrors the death of his beloved Ellen, Paul decides to stage a plan to discover the truth. He sets up a camera and stages a scene in which he declares that the only way to get the murders to stop is to end Dr. Death himself. Sure enough, believing Toombes to be dead, Herbert Flay sits back, watching the final tape and reveling in the fact that now, with Toombes gone he will finally be able to live out his lifelong dream of taking the role of Dr. Death for himself. It is not to be, of course, as Paul appears, seemingly walking out of the screen itself, burned but alive and demanding answers from one of the only people he ever trusted completely. The final showdown is a wonderful battle between Cushing and Price, catnip for fans of both no matter how they felt about the rest of the film, and it leads to a rather fascinating penultimate.

Paul reclaims his agency, both of his character and his sanity, but not without help. Periodically throughout the film—notably following Paul’s return from the mental institution—we are introduced to Herbert Flay’s wife, Faye Carstairs (Adrienne Corri). A one-time co-star of Paul’s in a previous Dr. Death film, the once beautiful Faye is slightly disfigured and driven mad following a car accident that effectively ended her career. She spends her days hidden away from public eye in the spider-infested basement. Her hair is a fiery red streaked with white, her makeup the most vivid we’ve seen, her movements the more unnatural. She is the antithesis of the Hitchcock-blond-esque women we have met up to this point—and who have met their ends—and without her Paul might not have survived his final encounter with Flay. In fact, it is Faye who gets the last laugh—and the last word—in a film we get the impression would have us think her a monster.

But monster she is not. Much life Paul’s character, Faye is clearly traumatized by the accident which led to the demise of her career, cowering at moments and keeping to her spiders rather than interacting with the public. Her face is marred in a way that mirror’s Paul’s own burned visage, though she either does little to cover it or it is not so easy to hide as his. She is also, it rather seems, perhaps the only other person in the film aside from Paul’s would-be bride who, while appreciative of the boost being his co-star gave her career at the time, is not outright seeking to prey on Paul or his success. A happy end, then, to a wildly grisly journey. The socially outcasted freaks, it seems, inherit the earth after all. And Vincent Price gets a turn as a Final Girl.