Gideon Locke ‘s wife Morella (Eggert) has been practicing black magick in the hopes of achieving immortality. From some forbidden magickal text she has learned spells that demand human sacrifices, and now the servants in her husband’s household have been disappearing. Gideon Locke (McCallum) returns early from business one night to find the body of a servant girl who has been bled to death so that Morella could bathe in her blood (shades of Elizabeth Bathory) as preparation for an abominable ceremony. Gideon also discovers that his and Morella’s infant daughter Lenora is missing. The desperate Gideon organizes a search party of the local townsfolk and they find Morella conducting a sinister magickal ritual in the cemetery, where she appears to be about to sacrifice her own baby daughter.
As the film opens, Morella has been tried and condemned for “witchcraft, blasphemy and murder” by a “tribunal” which, though led by a clergyman named Reverend Ward (R.J. Robertson, who also wrote the screenplay), seems to be little more than a lynch mob. On the orders of Reverend Ward, Morella is crucified (How Christian!) in the graveyard on an X-shaped cross - nails driven through the palms of her hands into the beams - and her eyes are burned out with hot irons. The town physician, Doctor Gault (Farwell), pleads in vain for a more humane sentence, reminding Ward that no execution for witchcraft has been carried out in the county for over forty years. (The time is mid-eighteenth century, the place probably somewhere in New England.) Before her death, Morella menacingly commands Gideon to care for their little daughter Lenora because she, Morella, will return one day to live on within her. Gideon later builds a huge mausoleum to house Morella’s remains on the exact spot in the graveyard where she died.
Seventeen years later, Lenora (also Nicole Eggert) has become a young woman and is about to come into her inheritance. The handsome young solicitor from town, Guy Chapman (Halsted), has visited the decaying Locke estate in order to have Lenora sign the necessary legal papers. But Gideon Locke, now sickly and totally blind, will not allow his daughter to see any man to whom she might be attracted. Yet through the machinations of Miss Coel Devereux (Clarkson), Lenora’s governess, Guy and Lenora are able to meet in secret and begin a love affair.
Coel Devereux is the former magickal disciple and Sapphic lover of Morella, she has become Lenora’s governess in order to enter the Locke household and gain control of Lenora. Coel’s agenda is to restore life to Morella, her lost lover and magickal guide, by whatever means necessary. Her first plan is to enable Morella to take possession of Lenora’s body. To accomplish this, Coel contrives to take Lenora to the mausoleum where Morella’s corpse is interred in order to make the process of metempsychosis (transmigration of souls) easier. But Lenora’s will is stronger than either Coel or Morella had anticipated, and Morella can only control Lenora’s body long enough to use it to seduce Guy Chapman, the young lawyer.
Coel’s second plan is to magickally resurrect Morella’s body by ritually sacrificing the servants of the Locke household and baptizing Morella’s decayed corpse in their blood until flesh begins to creep back onto the bones. Both Quintin (O’Leary), the Locke family butler, and Guy Chapman try to interfere with Miss Devereux’s plans. Quintin is murdered by the ruthless Coel and Chapman nearly meets the same fate. Only a timely bullet from Doctor Gault’s pistol kills Coel soon enough to save Guy.
Ultimately Coel’s second plan is successful and the old Morella is fully resurrected in youth and beauty. At the mausoleum, the transformed Morella confronts Lenora and offers to let her share in the supernatural immortality she has found. Lenora refuses and reminds Morella that she tried to kill her when she was a baby. Morella protests that she never intended to kill Lenora, that what Gideon and the townsfolk mistook for a sacrifice was only an initiation. Morella needs only one more feeding, which she intends to get from her erstwhile husband Gideon, who has followed Lenora to the graveyard. But Gideon Locke has anticipated this fatal reunion with his sorceress wife and douses both her and himself with burning oil from a broken lantern. Together they die in a flaming embrace as a bolt of lightning explodes the blasphemous temple of death that was Morella’s tomb.
In the last scene we are shown that Lenora is pregnant from the sexual encounter she had with Chapman while Morella possessed her body. The baby she carries will undoubtedly be possessed by Morella. The film ends with the words, “I STILL LIVE.”
Though Roger Corman’s credit for this film is the nebulous title of “producer,” I suspect that his participation was rather more active. As with any Corman-controlled project, the story-line is heavily and gratuitously sexualized and good taste is the first casualty in this bacchanal of mayhem. After I had watched the feature for the first time, I realized that all five of the female cast members were beautiful and that all of them had at least one nude scene. Of the four sex scenes, one was between two women (which ended in murder), and one was between a man and a dead woman. Yet it was no less a genius than Pablo Picasso who once said that good taste is a hindrance to the creation of original art. Corman, like Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol and John Waters, ( not to mention Joe Bob Briggs) has always intuitively known that “good taste” - like its postmodern counterpart, “political correctness” - is an artificial pseudo-religious construct, a petit bourgeois conceit with no more currency in reality than belief in the tooth fairy. Ultimately, the exercise of “good taste” in the real world - or even in a fantasy world - is as futile as counting calories at a Roman feast. Corman’s natural rebellion against the middle class fascism of ascetic aesthetics is a sensuous riot of hedonistic kitsch. Corman would have felt at home among the French Decadents.
This film is based directly on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Morella”(1836). Minus the nudity and on-screen sex, The Haunting of Morella seems like a throwback to the series of eight Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman between 1960 and 1965, beginning with The House of Usher and ending with The Tomb of Ligeia. But one of those “Poe” films, The Haunted Palace (1963), was actually a Lovecraft story, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," with a Poe title. If The Haunted Palace was a Poe-like treatment of a Lovecraft tale (and it definitely was), then The Haunting of Morella seems more like a Lovecraftian treatment of a Poe story. The screenplay is full of Mythos allusions. For example, the minister who sentences Morella to death is one “Reverend Ward” - too similar for coincidence to the Reverend Ward Phillips from “The Lurker at the Threshold”. In several ways The Haunting of Morella is like a feminized analogue to The Haunted Palace, with the female sorcerer Morella returning to possess her own daughter, as Joseph Curwen possessed his descendant Charles Dexter Ward. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Morella” was indeed about metempsychosis between mother and daughter in which not only the mother’s consciousness, but also her material essence, were completely transferred into her daughter. Poe’s Morella could have easily been the literary ancestor of Lovecraft’s Joseph Curwen as well as that of Ephraim and Asenath Waite.
And let’s not forget that the sinister lore by which Morella acquired her occult powers came from books; “mystical writings” which “were her favourite and constant study.” Poe’s narrator found himself swept along by her unholy researches:
Just as Poe’s Morella could have been a precursor of Lovecraft’s fictional sorcerers, her "forbidden pages" and "mystical writings" could have been have been one of the literary ancestors of the Necronomicon, as were several of Poe’s and Bierce’s fictional references to arcane, often imaginary, books.
The obscure books consulted by the Morella of Wynorski’s and Corman’s film are not merely the vague "mystical writings" mentioned by Poe, but full-fledged grimoires full of definite menace. The filmic Morella’s husband describes her researches not as mere readings, but as “occult studies.” He tells us that from one of these books she “deciphered a ritual” granting immortality and providing her with instructions for performing human sacrifice as preparation “to invoke the powers of darkness.” In one flashback sequence we see Nicole Eggert as Morella in a room hung with crimson drapes and lit with flickering candles; she is turning the woodcut illustrated pages of a antiquated folio-sized book. Alas, we can only guess as to the title of that book. And we can only lament that this is one of the few things about Morella which Roger Corman, Jim Wynorski and R. J. Robertson have left to our imaginations.
1998 © John Wisdom Gonce III. All rights reserved.