General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Raven (1963 film)

The Raven is a 1963 American comedy-horror film directed and produced by Roger Corman, loosely adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 poem "The Raven" and starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff as rival sorcerers. It was the fifth of Corman's eight Poe-inspired films for American International Pictures (AIP) and was the series' first full-length comedy, although Tales of Terror (1962) introduced comedy in its "The Black Cat" segment, with a screenplay by Richard Matheson.¹^•²^•¹³

Key fact	Detail
Release	25 January 1963 (New York City); Los Angeles openings at 23 theaters on 30 January 1963¹
Running time / format	86 minutes; 35mm color, 2.35:1¹^•³
Principal cast	Vincent Price (Dr. Erasmus Craven), Peter Lorre (Dr. Adolphus Bedlo), Boris Karloff (Dr. Scarabus), Hazel Court (Lenore Craven), Olive Sturgess (Estelle Craven), Jack Nicholson (Rexford Bedlo)¹
Key crew	Screenplay Richard Matheson; cinematography Floyd Crosby; editing Ronald Sinclair; art direction Daniel Haller; music Les Baxter¹
Companies	Produced by Alta Vista Productions, distributed by American International Pictures¹
First-week gross	$206,000, per Daily Variety (5 Feb 1963)¹
Place in Poe cycle	Fifth of Roger Corman's eight Poe-inspired films; the series' first full-length comedy²^•⁴^•¹³

Spoilers

Plot

Dr. Erasmus Craven (Vincent Price), a fifteenth-century magician in retirement, is still mourning his wife Lenore (Hazel Court) two years after her death. One night he is visited by a talking raven who is actually Dr. Adolphus Bedlo (Peter Lorre), a fellow magician transformed into a bird after losing a duel to the master sorcerer Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff). Craven returns Bedlo to human form, and Bedlo tells him he has seen a woman resembling Lenore at Scarabus's castle. Traveling there with Craven's daughter Estelle (Olive Sturgess) and Bedlo's son Rexford (Jack Nicholson), the group learns that Lenore and Scarabus are partners in treachery, and the story builds to a duel of magic between Craven and Scarabus.²^•⁵

The film keeps its tongue in its cheek throughout. Contemporary and later critics read it as an intentional burlesque: Variety called it "a corn-pop of considerable comedic dimensions" and deemed the screenplay "a skillful, imaginative narrative," while David Pirie of Time Out Film Guide later described it as "one of the few fantasy comedies that hangs together as happily as a fairytale," with a "suitably splendid duel of marvels between Karloff and Price."²

Production

The production was prompted by the success of Tales of Terror (1962), AIP's previous Poe release.¹ By June 1962, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre had been contracted to the company for five years and three years respectively.¹ Principal photography began on 21 September 1962 at Producers Studio (later Raleigh Studios) in Los Angeles, and filming was completed in seventeen days.¹ The Associated Press obituary of Corman describes the film as directed on a rare three-week schedule, and notes that the horror spoof won good reviews, a rarity for his films.⁶

Casting notes. For Peter Lorre, The Raven was his second horror film and the first in which he co-starred with Boris Karloff.¹ It marked the motion picture debut of actress Olive Sturgess, who said the veteran actors frequently made her the object of their pranks during production.¹ Jack Nicholson, then very young, played Bedlo's son; the International Film Festival Rotterdam program notes that Corman gave him a supporting role in which he could already exploit his famous grin.⁴ William "Tiny Tim" Baskin, a 6-foot-8, 300-pound clown from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, appeared in his second feature film.¹

Corman reused the technical team from the earlier Poe pictures: composer Les Baxter, editor Ronald Sinclair, art director Daniel Haller, and cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who had won an Academy Award for his cinematography on F.W. Murnau's Tabu (1931).²

The Terror. The film directly spawned another picture. Corman recounted that with one week left on The Raven's shoot, rain canceled his Sunday tennis, and he devised The Terror (1963) with writer Leo Gordon: he hired a crew for two days to use The Raven sets before they were struck, had 25 to 26 pages of script written over the weekend, and began shooting on the Monday.⁷

Release and reception

The Raven opened in New York City on 25 January 1963, followed by openings at twenty-three Los Angeles theaters on 30 January. It earned $206,000 in its first week according to Daily Variety, and shared a bill with the Italian production Warriors Five (1962).¹ The film carried a G rating.⁵

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 88% Tomatometer from 17 reviews and a 64% audience score from more than 2,500 ratings.⁵ Later critics have been broadly warm but not uniform: a Sight & Sound review found "too much slack, due perhaps to an imbalance between the comedy, which runs riot, and the horror," while others called it "a fun monster mash with three horror icons, and Jack Nicholson besides."⁵ A scholarly study of Vincent Price's cult performance describes the comic elements as increasingly self-indulgent compared with the earlier Poe films.⁸

Nearly a year after release, AIP tried to recapture the formula by re-teaming Price, Karloff, and Lorre in the horror parody The Comedy of Terrors (1963), again scripted by Matheson and directed by Jacques Tourneur.²

Home video and later circulation

Kino Lorber released the film on Blu-ray on August 31, 2021; estimated Blu-ray sales total $31,490.⁹ The film has remained in circulation on streaming services and in repertory screenings, including a 35mm showing at the Harvard Film Archive in 2004 as part of a Peter Lorre centennial program.¹⁰

Relation to Poe

The film takes little more than its title and a raven from Poe's poem, which was first published in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845.¹ Commentators describe the adaptation as loose: Corman's version transforms the poem into a horror comedy about sixteenth-century sorcerers, and one Spanish-language study calls it Corman's most eccentric film with regard to Poe.¹¹ Within the Poe cycle, the film is remembered as the point where Corman and Matheson, given a free hand with a source too short for a conventional feature, chose to play the material entirely for comedy.¹²

References

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