General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Comedy of Terrors

The Comedy of Terrors is a 1963 American horror-comedy film directed by Jacques Tourneur, written by Richard Matheson, and starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone. Produced by American International Pictures (AIP) as a follow-up to Roger Corman's hit The Raven (1963), it was released in the United States on 22 January 1964¹^•². The story follows Waldo Trumbull (Price), a lazy, drunken New England undertaker in the 1890s who, facing debt and eviction, murders wealthy townspeople with the assistance of his blackmailed assistant Felix Gillie (Lorre) to create customers¹^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Jacques Tourneur; screenplay by Richard Matheson¹
Principal cast	Vincent Price (Waldo Trumbull), Peter Lorre (Felix Gillie), Boris Karloff (Amos Hinchley), Basil Rathbone (John F. Black), Joyce Jameson (Amaryllis Trumbull), Joe E. Brown (cemetery keeper)¹
Production	Alta Vista Productions, distributed by American International Pictures; cinematography by Floyd Crosby, music by Les Baxter¹
Shooting	Principal photography began 4 September 1963 at Producers Studio (later Raleigh Studios), Hollywood¹
Release	Detroit premiere 25 December 1963; Los Angeles opening 22 January 1964; rereleased March 1965 as The Graveside Story¹
Opening-week gross	$133,000 at twenty-four Los Angeles locations¹
Reception	100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 9 critics; 70% audience score from 500+ ratings³

Spoilers

Plot and tone

The film is set in 1890s New England, where the funeral business of Hinchley and Trumbull is failing because of Trumbull's laziness and drunkenness. Trumbull married Amaryllis, daughter of the 92-year-old owner Amos Hinchley (Karloff), to gain control of the firm, and keeps a bottle of poison that the senile old man believes is his medicine. When business dries up, Trumbull blackmails the tone-deaf, sympathetic Felix Gillie into helping him "create" new customers by killing people¹. Their chief target is John F. Black (Rathbone), the landlord to whom they owe back rent, who proves difficult to kill because he keeps recovering each time they do him in³.

The film opens at a funeral that appears solemn, with slow camera movement and mournful music, before Trumbull and Gillie dump the body from the casket, bury it, and carry the empty coffin back to the parlor for reuse, establishing the black-humor tone⁴. Reviewers describe the result as broad slapstick rather than genuine horror: the Wee Review notes that despite Tourneur's direction there are no real frights, while the cast's hamming and Rathbone's physical comedy as the indestructible victim carry the film⁵. Time Out calls it a self-conscious horror spoof with an unusual concentration of scene-stealers, notably Karloff as the senile sleeping partner and Rathbone as a would-be Shakespearean actor with cataleptic tendencies⁶.

Production

AIP announced the project in October 1962, stating that Price, Karloff, and Lorre would move to it after completing The Raven¹. In February 1963 Lorre signed a four-year, eight-film contract with AIP. The AFI Catalog describes it as an exclusive pact barring him from similar productions at other studios; a Cinema Retro account, citing the same announcement, says the contract was not exclusive in general but stipulated that Lorre could not accept roles of "the horror, science-fiction, macabre type" outside AIP, and not in any competing Poe adaptation¹^•⁷.

The film was one of twenty-four productions financed by AIP's 1963 budget of $24 million¹. Principal photography began on 4 September 1963 at Producers Studio in Hollywood¹. Among the production's expenses, a special coffin equipped with a hydraulic lift was built at a cost of $9,300¹. The film marked Basil Rathbone's first screen appearance since 1946; he told the Los Angeles Times that several colleagues, despite his thriving career, had assumed he was dead¹.

Tourneur, whose earlier credits include the Val Lewton psychological horror films Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), brought the atmospheric style of those films to the comedy, and Film at Lincoln Center credits his "smoothly atmospheric style" as the canvas for the cast's screwball interplay⁴^•². Matheson had written most of AIP's Poe adaptations, including The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, and The Raven; The Comedy of Terrors was the last story he completed for AIP⁸^•⁹.

Release and reception

The film premiered in Detroit on 25 December 1963 and opened in Los Angeles on 22 January 1964¹. Critical notices were mixed, but public response was positive: the picture earned $133,000 in its opening week at twenty-four Los Angeles locations¹. It was rereleased in March 1965 under the title The Graveside Story¹.

Later assessments have been more favorable. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer score from 9 reviews and a 70% audience score³. Critics have praised the comic interplay among the four leads while noting the film's thin material; one review calls it "an 84-minute film spun from 42 minutes worth of material"³. Runtime listings vary across sources: the AFI Catalog records 88 minutes with a copyright length of 83 minutes, while streaming listings commonly give 84 minutes¹^•¹⁰.

Place in the AIP Poe cycle

The film belongs to the cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations AIP produced with Roger Corman between 1960 and 1964, in which tongue-in-cheek humor increasingly inflected the gothic melodramas¹¹. Tales of Terror (1962) and The Comedy of Terrors were both directed by Tourneur and co-starred Karloff, Lorre, and Rathbone, and the same team had appeared in The Raven the year before¹¹^•⁴. One scholarly account describes The Comedy of Terrors as the culmination of this drift, a parody of the series in which the Corman-Price films' gradual turn from straight horror to camp and farce came to a head¹². Plans to reunite the team for another film ended with Lorre's death in 1964⁵.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026