Goulash, grisly ghouls and the funk of 40,000 years: Vincent Price in the 1970s, 80s and 90s
From fronting his own cookery show to rapping on the lead single from the biggest album of all time, the late career of horror legend Vincent Price took many unexpected directions.
Vincent Price remains best remembered for his string of horror film appearances in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, in films like Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe derived classics for American International Pictures and his macabre British duo Witchfinder General (1968) and Theatre of Blood (1973). But he was a man of many passions and interests beyond both horror and cinema in general.
Art was a particular obsession, but cooking seemed to be his real love. Price was quite the gourmand, and in the early 70s, British television viewers were treated to that distinguished voice waxing lyrical about Moroccan tagine, the American Ice Box Cake and Fish Fillets NoordZee in the six-part series Cooking Price-Wise, broadcast on ITV in April and May 1971.
Those who knew Price would hardly have been surprised by this turn of events. He’d already published three cookbooks with his wife Mary – A Treasury of Great Recipes (1965), Mary and Vincent Price present a National Treasury of Cookery (1967) and Mary and Vincent Price’s Come into the Kitchen Cook Book: A Collector’s Treasury of America’s Great Recipes (1969) – and he was well known among friends for his dinner parties. You suspect he particularly enjoyed the scene in Theatre of Blood where he disguised himself as a cordon bleu chef to serve critic and foodie Meredith Merridew his beloved toy poodles in a pie.
Price continued to make horror films in the 70s and 80s. There were the Dr Phibes films and Madhouse (1974), then later the comedy anthology film The Monster Club (1981), the all-star House of the Long Shadows (1983), in which he was teamed with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Sheila Keith and John Carradine, and the woeful Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984) alongside Kenny Everett. But Cooking Price-Wise was part of a move away from the genre. With the release of The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), horror cinema was moving away from the kinds of film that Price was associated with, and he wisely sought to spread his wings elsewhere.
It wasn’t a complete success by all means. The British sex comedy, which was in its ascendance just as the British horror film was struggling, came calling with a role in the sequel Percy’s Progress in 1974. As a foretaste of things to come, he also lent his talents to a brace of rock music films, playing the voice of The Curator in the Alice Cooper concert film Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) and narrating The Butterfly Ball (1977), based on the album by former Deep Purple bass player Roger Glover. He appeared on screen opposite third wife Coral Browne in the ill-fated fantasy television series Time Express in 1979, which was unceremoniously cancelled after just four underwhelming episodes.
His voice made him a natural for animation and voiceover work, which led him to voicing the villainous Professor Ratigan in Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective (1986) and the equally nefarious Vincent VanGhoul in TV’s The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo (1985). By this point his classic horror films were in near constant rotation on American television, which had etched the Price persona into the subconscious of many younger artists and filmmakers. One of them was Tim Burton who, at the very dawn of his career, called on Price to voice his short animation Vincent in 1982. It was the start of a fruitful partnership that found actor and director working together again on made-for-TV puppet animation Hansel and Gretel (1983) and most notably playing the inventor in the fantasy Edward Scissorhands (1990), Price’s last big-screen appearance – a small part, but a charming and moving one.
Meanwhile, in 1983 Price scored the biggest hit of his late career. For so long he’d been the voice of horror, so when music producer Quincy Jones was looking for the right tones to help him out on his latest project, it was fortuitous that his wife and Price were friends. He called in the then 71-year-old actor to perform a rap on the title track of Michael Jackson’s follow-up to his hit 1979 record Off the Wall.
Thriller – the single, the album and the music video directed by John Landis – would bring Price’s voice to a whole new generation of fans as he rapped his way through a creepy monologue in his inimitable fashion. It brought Price back to familiar territory but in a whole new medium, and it helped bring about something of a late renaissance, during which he made The Whales of August (1987), which earned him his only major award nomination, an Independent Spirit Award for best supporting male.
And all of this without mentioning his many audio recordings and books, to say nothing of his stage work. It was a late flowering of diverse creativity from horror’s renaissance man.
Cooking Price-Wise is out on BFI Blu-ray from 25 November.