Theatre of Blood (1973)

"Vincent Price has reserved a seat for you in the Theatre of Blood!"

Plot

A hammy Shakespearean actor takes horrific revenge on the critics who savaged his plays and denied him the chance to win Best Actor of the Year award by killing them in parodies of deaths from Shakespeare's plays.

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Review

There is this very specific kind of nightmare that every creative person has, me included as I now write this review! It doesn’t matter if you're a painter, a writer, or even just someone who made a really elaborate lasagna for a dinner party. You work for years, you put your absolute heart and soul into something, and then someone comes along and just destroys you. They take one look at it and write that staving review, the one-star rating, the totally dismissive comment. And usually we just sit there and take it. I mean, we might rant to our friends or write a tweet we never actually send, but imagine just for a second that you didn't just take it. It sounds like a dangerous thought experiment but imagine you had the resources, the theatrical flair, and the absolute lack of moral compass to exact the ultimate revenge. Not in real life (obviously but don’t criticize my reviews just to be on the safe side!), but on screen. This is essentially the dark, twisted fantasy of every artist who has ever been told they just aren't good enough and forms the basis for the 1973 horror classic, Theatre of Blood. It is a remarkably camp but graceful affair; a horror film, a satire, a tragedy and a comedy all rolled up into one package to make the perfect contradiction and one which the film manages to walk across a tightrope at every opportunity.

Theatre of Blood puts the audience into early 70s London, following a character named Edward Lionheart, a name that just demands to be up on a marquee somewhere. He’s a Shakespearean actor, but he's not just any actor. He basically lives and breathes the Bard. But there’s a glaring problem in that he’s a bit too hammy. He’s incredibly melodramatic and lacks subtlety, not just chewing scenes when he performs but swallowing them whole. Now, despite this, Lionheart truly, genuinely believes that he deserves the prestigious Critics Circle Award for Best Actor. He thinks he's the absolute greatest talent of his generation, but the critics disagree strongly. They don't just deny him the award, they mock him. They savage his performances in the press. They essentially laugh him right off the stage. He doesn’t take this rejection in stereotypical stiff-upper lipped British fashion with a polite nod and thank you. Following this super humiliating public scene where he confronts them and then commits suicide, he is presumed dead. But of course, he isn't! And he decides to systematically eliminate the critics who ruined his career. But because he is this obsessive Shakespearean actor, he doesn't just shoot them or poison their tea. That would be way too boring. He kills them off, one by one, by reenacting the exact death scenes from the Shakespeare plays they criticized him for. You really must admire the thematic consistency. Didn’t like my Julius Caesar? Fine, you can experience it firsthand. It is a brilliant study in Grand Guignol style, named after the legendary venue famous for specialized, graphic horror performances that mixed extreme, naturalist violence (such as eye-gouging, flaying, and acid attacks) with comedy. It's very dramatic, highly graphic, theatrical horror. But here is the crucial thing you must understand about Theatre of Blood. You can have the best premise in the world, but this film works for one reason and one reason only.

Vincent Price. It is his film. From the very first frame to the last. He knows it, the director knows it, the scriptwriter knew it, even the lighting cameraman knew it. It's funny because when you watch him in this, he is playing a bad actor. He's playing a total ham, but he's doing it so perfectly well. That is the real brilliance of the meta performance here. He is playing Edward Lionheart, a man who is ego-driven, weird, and totally mad. But Lionheart is also deeply, passionately devoted to Shakespeare. He is a classically educated madman, giving him a sort of weird dignity. Price brings his entire toolkit to this role. You get that energetic manic delivery when he's ranting, but then he switches to those famous velvet vocals of his when he's actually reciting the verse in his smooth, sinister tone. He uses that trademark dark persona to create a villain who is perfectly grandiose. But here is where it gets quite poignant - Price himself was often criticized for being just a genre actor and not always taken seriously by the highbrow critics of his day. So in a way, Price is essentially playing out his own real-life frustration, albeit without the murdering! If Price hadn't been so heavily typecast in the horror genre, he honestly would have made a fantastic, legitimate Shakespearean actor and you see genuine glimpses of that here. When Lionheart rattles off these recitals of Shakespeare passages right before or after he commits a gruesome murder, he does it with immense passion. It's not a joke to the character. To him, it's high art. And it raises this interesting tension for the audience. Lionheart is supposed to be a bad actor, but Vincent Price is giving a brilliant performance playing him - Shakespeare himself probably would have been proud to create such a multi-level character.

So we have this incredible performance anchoring the whole film, but this wasn’t created in a vacuum and seems so out of place for 1973. American International Pictures, or AIP, were the absolute kings of low-budget, high-concept horror in the 60s and 70s. It was the Roger Corman-era. Now, just a couple of years before this, AIP had a massive hit with The Abominable Dr. Phibes, starring Vincent Price playing an organist who kills the doctors who he blames for his wife’s death using the ten plagues of Egypt. Sound familiar and see a pattern? Then they made a sequel. Dr. Phibes Rises Again, with the same exact template. When Theatre of Blood appeared in 1973, it was basically a strategic move by the studio - they must have thought that audiences liked seeing Vincent Price kill a list of people in creative ways. Let's do it again but swap the Bible for Shakespeare. Essentially this is Dr Phibes 3 in everything but name. It follows the exact same formula. You have a wronged genius, a list of victims, a beautiful female accomplice, and a series of highly elaborate set piece murders – the classic if it ain't broke, don't fix it motto. Especially if you have Vincent Price on the payroll. But I feel like Theatre of Blood has a very different vibe than Phibes. Phibes felt very mechanical, very clockwork. This feels much messier, more human and that really comes down to the tone I mentioned earlier. The camp, but graceful description. It's an oddity because it's trying to be two entirely different things at once. It has this high culture, Shakespearean gloss, the language, the costumes, the old theatres, but it's built on a low culture exploitation horror plot.

Speaking of that gloss, I have to talk about the other people in this film. Because it's not just Vincent Price running around in tights by himself, the supporting cast is surprisingly stacked. The late Diana Rigg, just coming off The Avengers TV show and being a Bond girl, plays Lionheart's daughter, Edwina, and honestly, she seems to be having just as much fun as Price is, which is really saying something because Price is clearly having the time of his life. She spends most of the film hiding beneath layers of fancy dress, heavy makeup, and wigs. She's essentially his accomplice, actively helping him trick the critics into position so he can execute them. That is a very strange father-daughter bonding activity. It certainly beats the family board game night. And then you look at the victims, the critics themselves. These actors were massive household names in the UK. You have Jack Hawkins, a true legend of British cinema. And then, perhaps the most jarring one for a British audience, Arthur Lowe. For newer audiences who might not know, Dad's Army was a massive BBC sitcom about the Home Guard in World War II. Arthur Lowe played Captain Mainwaring, this very pompous but lovable authority figure. Seeing him in a gruesome horror film getting murdered by Vincent Price creates this incredible cognitive dissonance, like seeing your kindly uncle suddenly trapped in a slasher movie.

There are reenactments of Shakespeare deaths and Theatre of Blood gets incredibly creative and frankly, nasty. The film is famous for its kills and it’s just a guy running around with a knife. There is one that is universally cited as the absolute showstopper, based on Titus Andronicus (basically Shakespeare’s own splatter film). In the play, Titus feeds the Empress her own sons baked into a pie. In Theatre of Blood, Lionheart targets a very pompous, gluttonous critic named Meredith Merridew. He tricks him into appearing on a cooking show. Merridew is known for absolutely loving his poodles. He literally calls them his babies. You won’t like where this is going if you like dogs. Lionheart serves him a premium meat pie. The critic eats it, savours it, compliments the chef and then you can imagine the shock when Lionheart reveals exactly what is inside the pastry. Then he grotesquely force-feeds him the rest until he chokes to death. It’s vile but the way Price plays it with this sadistic chef persona and the way the critic is so snooty right up before the reveal, you find yourself laughing and kind of siding with Price. It's a very dark, dark comedy. There's also fantastic recreation of the duel from Romeo and Juliet, but it's not on a stage. It's in a fencing gym. Lionheart engages a critic in a sword fight, leaping over benches, reciting the lines and being fully committed - it's incredibly kinetic and sounds exhausting. And then there's the Richard III death, involving wine drowning. The sheer variety keeps you watching but knowing your Shakespeare helps – as an English teacher it was only to my delight and relish to see the Bard being manipulated in such a horrific way. It adds this layer of intellectual satisfaction to the gore. You feel smart for understanding the reference while you're watching someone get decapitated. For 1973, the film is quite graphic and there are gallons of blood spilled. But it’s not scary in the slightest and this is the key to the tone. Though some of the kill scenes would have Jigsaw chuckling at them, everything is done in an amusing fashion rather than with any truly nasty intent. It's not The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which came out a year later and feels gritty and terrifyingly real. This feels like a pantomime. It's bright red and pink. It's highly theatrical, gruesome fun meant to entertain, rather than traumatise.

However, not everything in the garden is rosy. I have been crazing the performance and the kills, but the film itself has some flaws, specifically some major structural issues. Theatre of Blood sadly lacks a decent narrative to keep it going, though I guess when your plot is essentially just a kill list, it can get a bit repetitive. It is virtually a collection of Shakespearean death scenes, the story simply moving from death A to death B to death C without any real deviation or surprises in the plot itself. The police are always one step behind, the critics are always completely oblivious, and Lionheart always wins until the very end. The film gets too predictable because we know that nothing else is going to happen right up until the finale. If you aren't enjoying the specific creativity of the deaths, the story offers nothing else to hold on to. You could easily argue the film follows the classic slasher formula to the letter. The story in a slasher is just a clothesline to hang the death scenes on. Theatre of Blood does the exact same thing, just with much better costumes. It strips away as much of the story as possible to keep things simple and completely focused on the spectacle. We usually think of slashers as a very 80s thing, but this is the exact same structure, just British, and much more verbose. Price did something similar with Madhouse a year later in 1974, featuring a washed-up horror actor and a string of murders. It creates a very specific rhythm and flow to the film but there is also a disjointed combination with the tone. Lionheart himself, the character, fits between being camp and tongue-in-cheek. He knows he's being ridiculous. But the world around him, such as the police investigation and the rising panic of the surviving critics, is often played completely straight. The friction between the grim reality of a police procedural and the sheer absurdity of a man dressed as a French chef feeding a critic his dogs can be extremely jarring. Some people love that clash, but others find it very disjointed.

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Final Verdict

Theatre of Blood is a truly unique beast. It's a mix of high culture being Shakespeare, critics and awards, and low culture being graphic horror slasher elements and total camp. It has a flimsy story, but it completely overcomes that with sheer charisma and buckets of fake blood. Above all, it stands as a real testament to Vincent Price. It's a great reminder to all of us film watchers that sometimes the best performance isn't in the most serious, prestigious drama. Sometimes it's in a weird horror movie where a guy recites poetry right before drowning a man in a bud of Malmsey wine. Price plays a hammy actor, a technically bad actor, and yet he gives a genuinely brilliant performance doing so. It is complete paradox, isn't it? It does make you wonder about the incredibly thin line between bad acting and genius performance. We so often criticize actors for being too much or way over the top – look at the likes of William Shatner and Nicholas Cage who have been lambasted for this in the past - but when the genre allows for camp and when the movie actually embraces the absurdity, isn't overacting actually the most honest, effective way to perform? If you played Edward Lionheart subtly with quiet introspection, the the film would completely fail. The bad acting is the required acting. Maybe we're just too hard on the hams of the world. Maybe, like Edward Lionheart, they just need the right stage and the right weapons to flourish.

It really was the perfect vehicle for him. It's almost like a love letter to his own career contradictions and it’s incredibly rare to see an actor and a role match up so perfectly that they completely elevate a film that on paper might just be a generic slasher. He elevates the material just by being there. Perhaps the most compelling reason to watch Theatre of Blood is from the man himself and how he felt about the film. Price, the man with well over one hundred film credits considered Theatre of Blood to be his absolute best film. That is huge. The man was in everything. House of Wax, The Fly, the Roger Corman Poe cycle. He worked with legendary directors, both past and present, and he picked this weird campy proto-slasher as his favourite.  This role allowed him to do everything he was actually good at. He got to be scary. He got to be funny. And he got to perform the Shakespeare he clearly loved, even if it was through a very twisted lens.

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Theatre of Blood Director(s): Douglas Hickox Writer(s): Anthony Greville-Bell (screenplay), Stanley Mann (idea), John Kohn (idea) Actor(s): Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Harry Andrews, Coral Browne, Robert Coote, Jack Hawkins Duration: 104 mins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-I6T_9KuzY