The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Director-Producer Roger Corman may have been a master of churning out cheap yet profitable flicks, but the cycle of eight Edgar Allen Poe films that he unleashed in the '60s are nothing short of remarkable.  While my personal favourite has always been "The Masque of the Red Death", this -- his last -- is considered by many to be the best of the bunch.  As always the film benefits by having the ever-watchable Vincent Price in the lead, but the less well-known actors taking the remaining roles are uniformly fine, especially Elizabeth Shepherd in the dual role of his late wife Ligeia and his new wife Rowena.  As the Poe quote at the end of the film would have it: "The boundaries that divide life and death are at best shadowy and vague.  Who shall say where one ends and the other begins".  Perhaps Ligeia is not really dead or perhaps she is embodied in the castle's vicious black cat (or perhaps it is just a nasty cat) or perhaps her spirit is taking over the new wife.  The screenwriter Robert Towne -- later a prizewinner for his "Chinatown" script -- leaves the "facts" of reality to the viewer's imagination, while immersing one in the contrasts between the green English countryside surrounding the ruined abbey (some brilliant location scouting) and the eerie images within.