Anthologies are supposed to be lean. Quick shocks, sharp twists, one story bleeding into the next like shots of whiskey down a bar. But Twice-Told Tales (1963) is more like a long afternoon at the DMV: slow, airless, and padded with Vincent Price wandering through Nathaniel Hawthorne stories that deserved better.
It promises horror. It delivers yawns.
Vincent Price, Shackled to Mediocrity
Price plays three roles across three segments, and he’s the only reason the film isn’t completely forgotten. But even he looks bored half the time, straining to inject menace into scripts that barely crawl. In Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, he’s reduced to playing the “other man” in a love triangle that reanimates itself out of boredom. In Rappaccini’s Daughter, he stalks around a papier‑mâché garden while his “poisonous” daughter pouts and sighs. And in The House of the Seven Gables, he hisses and preens through creaky dialogue about family curses like a soap‑opera ghoul.
Price was a master of camp and menace. Here, he’s an actor in search of a pulse.
Dr. Heidegger’s Snoozefest
The first tale sets the tone: two old men discover a magic fountain of youth dripping into a coffin. They drink, they rejuvenate, they fight over a woman, and then — surprise — it all wears off. Sylvia crumbles into dust, the men backslide into old age, and Price skulks off looking for more magic water that isn’t there.
It’s less horror than a morality play you’d stage in front of a high‑school English class. Even the skeleton reveal feels perfunctory, like the prop guy forgot to dust it.
Rappaccini’s Daughter: Poison Without Bite
This one should’ve been tragic, beautiful, deadly. Instead, it’s lifeless. The idea of a young woman so poisonous she can’t be touched should drip with erotic menace. But Joyce Taylor plays Beatrice like a sad cheerleader, while Brett Halsey as Giovanni is the blandest suitor ever cursed by celluloid.
And Price? He’s stuck glowering in the background, more gardener than villain, while rubber plants wave in the breeze. When the “antidote” kills everyone, you don’t feel tragedy — you feel relief that it’s over.
The House of the Seven Gables: More Dust Than Haunt
By the time we get to the third act, the film has run out of tricks. Price’s Gerald Pyncheon skulks around the family house, muttering about inheritances, vaults, and curses that everyone else has already explained twice. The film builds to the discovery of a vault guarded by a skeletal hand, and sure enough, it smacks him dead.
It’s supposed to be climactic, but the special effect looks like it was borrowed from a Halloween store clearance rack. And the final collapse of the house plays like stock footage stapled to a melodrama that already overstayed its welcome.
Hawthorne by Way of a Hammer Knockoff
Robert E. Kent’s adaptations bleed the marrow out of Hawthorne’s gothic imagination. What’s left are half‑formed parables stretched to feature length, directed without urgency by Sidney Salkow. The pacing drags, the atmosphere is thin, and the “twists” are visible from the opening credits.
Where Hawthorne wrote with ambiguity and moral dread, this film stages it with rubber props and over‑lit sets. Gothic horror should suffocate you. Twice-Told Tales pats you on the head and hands you a pillow.
Final Thoughts
Twice-Told Tales isn’t frightening, thrilling, or even particularly entertaining. It’s three lukewarm TV dramas stitched together, stuffed with Vincent Price in roles that waste his talent. It wants to be a Poe‑style anthology, but without Roger Corman’s flair, it’s just Hawthorne drained of all his darkness.
The title should’ve been Once Is More Than Enough.
