Vincent Price made a career out of fighting haunted houses, cursed paintings, and Poe-inspired madmen. In Diary of a Madman, he fights… air. More specifically, he fights the Horla—an invisible, malevolent force that whispers evil things in your ear and occasionally knocks over a lamp. For 96 minutes.
The result is a movie that promises cosmic horror and delivers Vincent Price staring at empty rooms like a man waiting for the waiter to bring his soup.
The Plot: Ghosted by the Horla
The film begins after the death of magistrate Simon Cordier (Vincent Price), whose diary is read aloud by his priest friend to a roomful of gloomy faces. Inside those pages is the tale of Simon’s downfall.
Simon first encounters the Horla while interrogating a prisoner who insists he’s being controlled by an invisible entity. Moments later, the Horla makes the prisoner attack Simon, and Simon kills the man in self-defense. Bad luck: the Horla transfers its lease to Simon and moves in.
The Horla is like a gaslighting roommate. It whispers insults, insists your friends are liars, and pressures you into making terrible life decisions. When Simon falls for model Odette (Nancy Kovack)—a married woman angling for money—the Horla shouts in his ear until he stabs her. Her headless body is found floating in the river, her husband blamed. The Horla, meanwhile, smugly hangs out like a toxic influencer.
By the end, Simon decides to fight back. He sets his own mansion on fire, sacrificing himself to destroy the Horla. Or maybe he just went mad and torched the place while arguing with the curtains. The film coyly leaves it “ambiguous,” though by then the audience is too checked out to care.
Vincent Price: Wasted Majesty
Price is the only reason this movie isn’t unwatchable. His voice, his posture, his perpetual air of melancholy—he brings more class to the material than it deserves. Watching him wrestle with invisible demons is unintentionally funny, but he never phones it in. He stares at the void as though the void has insulted his wine cellar.
But even Price can’t save a script that forces him to monologue endlessly to nobody, shout “NO, I WILL NOT OBEY YOU!” into the air, and murder Nancy Kovack in a fit of invisible peer pressure. His performance is like watching a Shakespearean actor trapped in a third-rate TV pilot.
The Horla: Bad Vibes with a Voiceover
Horror lives or dies by its monster. The Horla is not a monster. It’s a disembodied voice (Joseph Ruskin) that hisses like a radio announcer trapped in a wind tunnel. It can push over a chair, maybe slam a door, but mostly it just nags Simon into being miserable.
Imagine The Exorcist if instead of vomiting pea soup, the demon just whispered, “Hey, your girlfriend’s cheating on you.” That’s the Horla: a supernatural annoyance, like evil Wi-Fi.
Nancy Kovack: Femme Fatale on Fast Forward
Nancy Kovack, as Odette, injects a little life. She’s a schemer, playing Simon for his wealth while two-timing her husband. Unfortunately, her character is thinly written. She’s less a femme fatale than a gold-digger straight out of a cautionary PSA. Her death is supposed to shock. Instead, it feels like the movie finally decided it needed a body count.
Style: Fireplace Horror
Director Reginald Le Borg shoots the film with the same flatness as a daytime soap. There’s no atmosphere, no tension, just lots of Vincent Price wandering through rooms muttering to himself. The sets look like leftover courtroom dramas, the lighting is perfunctory, and the “special effects” are limited to curtains blowing when no one’s around.
The big climax—Simon setting fire to his mansion—should be terrifying. Instead, it feels like the house just got tired of participating and set itself ablaze out of boredom.
Dark Humor: Vincent Price Argues with Nothing
As unscary as the film is, it does provide unintentional laughs. Watching Vincent Price glare furiously at empty space while insisting an invisible creature is taunting him is absurdly entertaining. You half expect him to shout, “Quiet, Horla, I’m trying to have dinner!”
When he kills Odette, he screams and waves the knife around like he’s fighting off bees. When he finally sets his house on fire, he doesn’t look like a man triumphing over evil—he looks like someone who lost a bet and decided to end it all with panache.
The diary framing device adds its own comedy. Every time the priest reads another passage, you realize this is just Vincent Price’s personal blog, written in longhand, filled with rants about invisible roommates.
Reception: Quickly Forgotten
Released in 1963, Diary of a Madman was one of many low-budget horror vehicles trying to cash in on Price’s star power. Unlike his Roger Corman Poe films, it had neither style nor menace. Critics mostly ignored it, audiences shrugged, and today it’s remembered only by Vincent Price completists and horror trivia buffs who like saying the word “Horla” out loud.
Why It Fails: Horror Without Horror
The biggest sin of Diary of a Madman isn’t that it’s bad—it’s that it’s boring. Horror requires tension, atmosphere, or at least a villain worth fearing. Here we get Vincent Price mumbling at invisible air currents for ninety minutes. The Horla never convinces as a cosmic terror; it’s just an off-screen narrator bullying our hero into self-destruction.
What should have been a descent into madness is just a descent into tedium.
Final Verdict: Vincent Price Deserved Better
Diary of a Madman wastes Vincent Price, wastes a classic Maupassant story, and wastes 96 minutes of your life. It wants to be cosmic horror about forces beyond human comprehension. Instead, it’s Vincent Price yelling at drapes until his house catches fire.
Rating: 1.5 out of 4 stars. The diary of a madman? More like the diary of an audience slowly going insane with boredom.
