May 27

Vincent Price, Man of Mystery

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He never dreamed he’d become a leading man—or, for that matter, the leading man who’d haunt everyone else’s dreams…

Vincent Leonard Price Jr.—born this day 1911, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest child of a candy company president and the great-grandson of the man who invented baking powder—went to Yale, studied art history, crossed the Atlantic to pursue a master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute in London, and then did what no sensible art historian does: he announced he wanted to become an actor.

By the time he died on October 25, 1993, Price had appeared in more than a hundred films, narrated Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” voiced a villain in a Disney animated feature, written cookbooks (and one biography of his beloved dog), lectured on fine art at universities across America, donated thousands of works to an East Los Angeles college art museum that still bears his name, and inspired—whether directly or through the sheer gravitational force of his persona—one of the strangest characters in comic book history.

The baking powder fortune, it turned out, was the least interesting thing about Vincent Price.

The Scholar Behind the Voice

What is, perhaps, most remembered about Vincent Price tends to be the most satirized: his voice. That magnificent, unhurried, and slightly too-amused baritone, that could bring chills to anyone within range—followed by his legendary laugh. But Price’s voice was the instrument—honed through years in the theatre—was only one facet that made his one of the most sought-after “spooky” leads in film history. And the man was considerably more surprising than the instrument suggests:

Like his contemporary, Christopher Lee, Price was a genuine intellectual of the first order. His Yale degree was in English with a minor in art history; his time at the Courtauld, interrupted by his youthful ambition to become a great actor, left him with a connoisseur’s eye and a scholar’s knowledge that only added to his mystique. Later in life, he lectured extensively on art, wrote several books on the subject, and built a priceless (no pun intended!) art collection of real distinction—eventually donating it to East Los Angeles College, specifically to share with the working-class Angeleno community. (“The Vincent Price Art Museum”—which still serves the college today—was his most deliberate legacy, and the one he claimed was the important.) But he was also a serious gourmet—his cookbook A Treasury of Great Recipes (1965, co-written with his wife, Mary) was one of the most sophisticated American cookbooks of its era, drawing on meals he and Mary had eaten at great restaurants around the world. He was a man of genuine cultural breadth who happened, by a combination of circumstance and distinctive physical gifts, to become the face of American Gothic horror.

So, how did a Yale-educated art historian with Courtauld credentials end up as the de facto voice of cinematic chills and thrills? Well, it turns out, partly by accident, largely by his sheer professionalism, and—most importantly—because the horror genre was one his personal favorites. To nearly every director or fellow actor who worked beside Price, it was apparent that the towering, yet secretly genteel leading man, uniquely understood what great horror stories were actually about. And no one could interpret Edgar Allen Poe quite like him.

The Corman Renaissance

While Price ultimately worked with, perhaps, a hundred directors of different mediums (ending, quite fittingly, with his collaboration with a young Tim Burton), the collaborative partnership that truly defined Price’s legacy was his series of eight Poe adaptations with director Roger Corman, produced between 1960 and 1964. Films such as House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death weren’t simply horror entertainments; true, shoe-string budgets, campy dialogue, and rapid turnaround time were all the staples of Corman work—and yet, in Price and Corman’s shared vision, the tales became something considerably more ambitious: explorations of the psychological and occult dimensions that had made Poe’s work genuinely timeless and otherworldly. And Price inhabited this material with an uncommon seriousness it (and the horror genre itself) deserved.

In The Masque of the Red Death (1964)—perhaps the finest of the Corman-Poe collaborations, shot by the great cinematographer Nicolas Roeg—he played Prince Prospero as a genuine Satanist, a worshipper of the Red Death who has made a theological compact with destruction and genuinely believes he’s winning. Quite unlike other American genre flicks, Red Death engages medieval plague theology, the demonic pact tradition, and the mystical concept of death as initiatory passage with a philosophical seriousness.

And then there was the January 1963 release of The Raven—a horror-comedy in which Price played “Dr. Erasmus Craven,” a sorcerer with the power to cast vivid bolts of magical energy from, his fingers and construct mystical shields against his enemies. It was last-minute role that would inspire generations of comic book fans…

Stephen “Vincent” Strange

In July 1963—five months after The Raven appeared in cinemas—Marvel Comics published Strange Tales #110, containing a five-page backup strip conceived by artist Steve Ditko and scripted by Stan Lee. The character was a neurosurgeon who had damaged his hands in a car accident, traveled to Tibet in search of healing, encountered a mysterious guru known only as “the Ancient One,” and became the master of “the mystic arts”—the Sorcerer Supreme, the primary protector of the Earth dimension against occult powers. As unique and psychedelic as Ditko’s artwork was, it was the character’s physical appearance that rang bells in the minds of readers: swept-back dark hair, a distinctive thin mustache, and long cloak worn around his private esoteric library. His full name was Stephen Vincent Strange.

Of course, the middle name is far from accidental. According to multiple sources, Steve Ditko had seen The Raven in theaters and immediately decided that what the new roster of Marvel heroes needed wasn’t another scientist who’d become a superhero following a laboratory accident but, rather, an average man who taught himself superhuman powers linked to ancient knowledge and sorcery. (Watching the film’s climax in which Price and his archnemesis—a fellow sorcerer played by none other than Boris Karloff—shoot lightning bolts at each other from across the room sealed the deal. In fact, Doctor Strange’s own arch enemy, Baron Mordo, is also directly linked to The Raven, having been inspired by Karloff’s portrayal as the wicked “Dr. Scarabus.” For his part, Price was entirely aware of the resemblance, and even playfully later voiced a Scooby-Doo character called “Vincent Van Ghoul” who looked, down to the swept-back silver-templed hair, exactly like Ditko and Lee’s Sorcerer Supreme.)

Ditko’s Doctor Strange stories are still considered some of the most visually extraordinary works in the history of the medium—hallucinogenic landscapes, impossible geometries, dimensions that fold and recurve like the architecture of a fever dream. Bradford W. Wright, in his history of American comics, described them as “surrealistic work” with “a disorienting, hallucinogenic quality” that “remarkably predicted the youth counterculture’s fascination with Eastern mysticism and psychedelia.” To many readers, this was exactly what Price and Roger Corman had also set out to accomplish in their cinematic Poe collaborations.

And then … Thriller

Already a film legend by that point, Price walked into a recording studio in Los Angeles on July 2, 1982, and recorded a spoken-word “rap” monologue that producer Quincy Jones had commissioned to close a new track by Michael Jackson. Since the song itself was a love letter to horror movies, Jones only had one voice in mind for the job—Price himself. The resulting narration—forty-five seconds of escalating menace over a John Landis-directed short film that would become the most expensive music video ever made—was heard by an estimated one billion people. Price reportedly completed it in two takes and charged a flat fee of $20,000.

Quite predictably, he spent the money on art.

But “Thriller” brought Price to an entirely new generations of fans. Where once teenagers seeking movie thrills would visit a theater to watch Vincent Price weave his spooky charm, thanks to Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson, all they had to do now was flip on the radio or switch on a recently-debuted television network called MTV.

His final film was Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), in which he memorably portrayed the inventor who created Edward—a gentle, brief, deeply “fatherly” performance that stripped away every trace of menace and revealed what had always been underneath: a man of genuine warmth, genuine erudition, and genuine love for the strange and the beautiful. (Burton had been a fan of Price’s work since childhood and had even made a stop-motion animated film in 1982 entitled Vincent as an homage to the actor.)

Price died three years later at the age of eighty-two, leaving behind an art museum, a shelf of bestselling cookbooks, over a hundred films, the voice on the most-watched music video in history, and a Marvel Comics character whose full name encodes, in its quiet middle syllable, the shape of everything he represented: an art historian who became the face of the American occult imagination, and who made sorcery look like scholarship and scholarship look like sorcery.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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