No one did revenge quite like Vincent Price. Driven to attempt suicide by merciless critics in Theatre of Blood (1973), his actor protagonist resurfaces and murders them by recreating elaborate death sequences from the very Shakespearean plays they’d panned his performances in. Left scarred in the aftermath of a museum fire set by an unscrupulous investor hoping to collect on the insurance money in House of Wax (1953), his character, a sculptor, kills the man and entombs his corpse within a new wax figure. The merciless quest for vengeance was taken to particularly vicious yet inventive ends in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), released 55 years ago today, in which Price’s grief-stricken concert organist is determined to seek out and eliminate his late wife’s doctors, believing their incompetence to have caused her death.
With the Dr. in Dr. Phibes coming from his Theology PhD, he uses his vast Biblical knowledge to base each killing on one of the 10 Plagues of Egypt, interpreted here with great creative flair. Human ingenuity and inspired inventions become stand-ins for divine punishment: while God sent a devastating hailstorm to destroy Egypt’s crops, Phibes sees potential in horrors wrought by solid ice, and freezes one of his targets to death. God turned all the water in Egypt into blood, and Phibes drains another doctor of all his. The harrowing sequence cuts from the target’s blood being drawn out to large bottles on Phibes’ mantlepiece to a close-up of Phibes’ eyes as he tracks each new addition. This goes on until there are eight blood-filled bottles, and the victim’s face has gone from flushed red to a ghastly white.
