The Time Vincent Price Almost Accidentally Appeared in an Adult Film

Gabrielle Moss August 20, 2:31 pm

HOUSE OF 1000 DOLLS, Vincent Price, Martha Hyer, 1967 — Everett Collection

Over the course of his long career, master of the macabre Vincent Price appeared in over 100 movies, which ran the gamut from bonafide classics like House of Wax and The Pit and the Pendulum, to absolute non-classics like Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. But out of all those movies, there is only one that caused Vincent Price to accidentally wander onto the set of an adult film.

That movie was 1967’s House of 1,000 Dolls. Filmed after his decade of success making horror films with the likes of Roger Corman and William Castle, but before his comeback in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, House of 1,000 Dolls was directed by Jeremy Summers — a British television director whose best-known feature film might be the Gerry and the Pacemakers movie Ferry Cross the Mersey.

HOUSE OF 1000 DOLLS, US poster art, 1967

Everett Collection

House of 1,000 Dolls had a fairly standard exploitation film premise: Price’s evil nightclub magician, Felix Manderville, uses his abilities to hypnotize hapless young women, kidnapping them and putting them to work in a brothel. Martha Hyer, an actress best known for appearing in the 1958 Rat Pack film Some Came Running, played Price’s equally evil assistant. Or, as the film’s tagline put it: “Here is the shocking story of how and why each year thousands of young girls ‘disappear’ forever!” The film’s trailer depicts beautiful women milling around in nighties, beautiful women mud-wrestling, and beautiful women being attacked by kidnappers in such a way that all of their clothes immediately fall off. You know, normal stuff.

If the story ended there, House of 1,000 Dolls would not be very different from the many exploitation films produced in the ’60s and ’70s whose plots were trumped-up excuses to film actresses in their skivvies.

However, as Price explained in a 1984 interview on the British interview program Aspel & Co., there was something much more unusual going on on this set. He and Hyer were given a day off — a situation that was surprising to both, since according to the script, they were in every scene. Curious, the pair went to set to visit and see what was being filmed in their absence. Once they arrived, they “found that they were remaking all of the scenes we’d been in, but a pornographic version of it,” Price said. “They didn’t make us strip, but they made everyone else in the picture strip.” Third billed in the film was B-movie and television actor George Nader; Price remained mum about whether he was one of the cast members who went au naturel. “I don’t know where they showed it,” Price quipped of the pornographic House of 1,000 Dolls. “Tijuana, maybe?”

House of 1,000 Dolls, which was described by the Chicago Tribune as “not even bad enough to be good,” is available to stream online. But the pornographic adaptation appears to be lost to the sands of time. So we can all share in Price’s primary complaint about the adult version of his movie: “I never got to see it!”