Vincent Price may well be Poe's greatest reader. Baudelaire might have elevated Poe to the role of philosopher and placed him alongside European giants such as Diderot, Goethe and Balzac; Marie Bonaparte recognised the unhappy depths of the Freudian mind in his work. Price, however, gets the joke, and his performances, particularly in Roger Corman's cycle of Poe films (1960–4) have shared his understanding of Poe with a huge popular audience. Price highlights a weird kind of comedy in Poe, and signals his understanding with the way he laughs, or nearly laughs, when he plays the villain. He watches the blade descend on John Kerr in The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) with considerable glee. When he's Prince Prospero in The Masque of the Red Death (1964) he lectures Francesca about how the world is governed by war, famine, pestilence, and says that there is ‘Very little hope, I assure you.’ He eats grapes and smiles, just short of a laugh. The laugh itself is probably most famously rendered at the end of the video for Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller’ (1982). The laugh does not stop. It is not a joyful laugh, or if there is joy there, it is joy in the misfortune of others or self. It goes on too long; the Gothic is, after all, a tradition of excess. It is too much.

This chapter casts Gothic laughter as a Poevian phenomenon. It discusses Poe's carnivalesque approach to the Gothic across a number of his stories, including ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846), ‘Hop-Frog’ (1849), ‘King Pest’ (1835) and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Poe uses comic techniques for ends that are, in many ways, more horrifying than humor¬ous, particularly when it comes to his use of pranking and slapstick.