Vincent Price and Big Wilson go great together.

My fondest memories from my tween years are of “Pip” and I watching Night Owl Theatre with Big Wilson while eating a plate of Sociables™ with turkey, deli mustard, and Swiss in my parents’ giant sunken living room, with its complete set of green leather-bound Harvard UP’s Classics of Western Thought, and weird sculptures, and a big TV by the ceiling.

The shit I watched? That stupid movie with Dolly Parton and Rocky. One great discovery was Doctor Detroit, starring Devo and Dan Aykroyd. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, where I feel in love so hard with Jodie Foster that I prayed to her, to one day taste and probe her sexy depths, and to get there I would honor her by not coming to my fantasy of her in order to worship her unsurpassable sexy holiness, as if my fantasizing was

She was only two years younger than me at the time, but acted 20 years older—which is the point of the film. But the sexy-evil ending, her stoic confidence and deep power, and her gorgeous and hyper-intelligent and all-knowing face. She was too much—beyond jack-material.

Movies from AIP included —

and—most importantly for me personally—The Screaming Skull (1958)

others from the 50s and 60s

House of Usher (1960)

The first of the Cycle. From it you learn to expect that the rest in the series will also have (almost) nothing to do with the Poe story named by the title. Usher has a few elements in common—the house and its tenants are decaying. Human decay—a real thing that Poe, following Plato, schematized as a familiar, large scale, multipart structure—a house (rather than a society).

Besides that, there’s … nothing.

The sub-plot is the developing romance between the