Vincent Price Reads… Tales of Poe

About Vincent Price (1911-1993)

Vincent Price (1911-1993) was horror’s most sophisticated leading man, a Yale-educated art history graduate and world-class gourmet cook who brought intelligence, wit, and theatrical grandeur to over 100 horror films spanning five decades. His partnership with Roger Corman on the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations—including The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Masque of the Red Death—elevated B-movie horror to an art form, with Price’s cultured villainy providing the perfect vessel for Poe’s Gothic sensibilities. Price was also a genuine art collector whose personal collection was exhibited at the Sears Roebuck company stores to make fine art accessible to working-class Americans, and he authored several acclaimed cookbooks including A Treasury of Great Recipes. His final significant role was as the inventor in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), a performance that serves as a beautiful farewell from a man who spent his career humanizing monsters and monstifying humans with equal grace.