55 Years Ago, Vincent Price Starred In The Wildest Revenge Thriller Ever

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.

As brutal as the murders are, moments of dark humor are speckled throughout. “I’m a psychiatrist… a head shrinker,” chuckles one doctor at a masquerade party, inadvertently foreshadowing the manner of his own demise. Moments later, Phibes evokes the Plague of Frogs, costuming the man with a mechanical frog headpiece that gradually tightens around his skull.

Amplifying the horror, director Robert Fuest drops us into the victim’s suffocating POV as his view of the other masked partygoers becomes increasingly blurred, before a red mist descends as his vision is obscured by all the dripping blood. Each of these deaths is ceremonial — they’re often interspersed with sequences of Phibes and his young assistant (Virginia North) waltzing around his secret lair as a band of robot musicians plays, interludes that add to the film’s atmosphere of unreality.

Grounding The Abominable Dr. Phibes’ more outlandish swings is Price’s astonishing physical performance. Having been disfigured in a car accident in which he also lost the ability to speak, Phibes’ barely restrained fury is visible through the furious movements of his throat. A machine does all the talking for him, but the sadness in his eyes is apparent even under layers of prosthetics. As he watches another doctor’s plane nosedive — having filled its cockpit with rats — he can’t quite twist his features into a smile, but the slight movement of his shoulders conveys a sense of supreme satisfaction all the same.

Campy where Seven (1995) is grim, and wildly colorful where Seven is rain-soaked, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is notable in how it envisioned a series of Biblical-themed murders more than two decades before David Fincher’s crime thriller did. Its plethora of gnarly torture traps and murder devices also position it as a precursor to the horror franchise Saw; by the end, Phibes has cornered a surgeon into operating on his own unconscious son. If he fails to extract a key inserted close to the boy’s heart, slow-dripping acid will burn through his face.

It’s a nightmarish scenario that recurs in the first Saw movie, in which a former addict (Shawnee Smith) has 60 seconds to carve out a key from her sedated cellmate’s stomach and free herself, or else a trap attached to her head will rip her jaws apart. Price would go on to reprise his role in the sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972), but even as the embittered Phibes meticulously set up crime scenes and evaded detection, the actor playing him was elegantly leaving his fingerprints all over modern horror.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is available on the Internet Archive.