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Theatre of Blood

by Lauren James on February 18, 2026

Theater people doing theater people things.

Theatre of Blood stars Vincent Price as actor Edward Lionheart. His enemies: critics such as Peregrine Devlin, Meredith Merridew, Solomon Psaltery, Oliver Larding, Horace Sprout, and Hector Snipe.

You can tell a lot about a movie from its character names. There’s no more effective way to indicate the desired level of reality: are we diligently choosing common handles out of baby name books and historical registers, accounting for any exceptions as stage names or offshoots of unusual parents? Or are we channeling Dickens and Dahl, saddling everyone with names that truly embody them in sound and plain meaning?

It’s obvious to see what route Theatre of Blood goes down. The artificiality technically sacrifices a bit of realism, but you know what? This is a film about a hammy actor who survives his own suicide attempt to commit elaborate themed murders on the critics who failed to reward his season of Shakespearean posturing. No one here is going for realism. The names offer the same handcrafted pleasure as a painted backdrop, a puppet, and red corn syrup.

Theatre of Blood is technically classed as a horror comedy, but its truest genre is camp. Genre is partly a confession of priorities, and at any point, if this has to choose between the scariest choice, the funniest choice, or the campiest choice, it will choose the latter. Vincent Price, clearly having the time of his life here, wouldn’t have it any other way; by 1973, when this was released, he had spent decades bringing this kind of enlivening exaggeration to the screen. Here, the script is fully cooperating with him. Have all the costumes: chef, hair stylist, masseur, fencer. (The one failing here is that we do not get Price in drag, but to compensate, Lionheart’s loyal daughter, Edwina (Diana Rigg), spends a huge chunk of the film as a not-all-that-convincing drag king.) Have wigs and fake facial hair. Drown a man in a vat of wine and bake two poodles into a pie. Life is short, and camp refuses to care. It will go out defiantly partying and rigging hair dryers into electrical chairs.

It doesn’t matter that none of this is plausible and that the plot is mostly an excuse to propel us from one bizarre murder tableau to the next. In a way, the weird disconnects—would Lionheart really have continued to have a major career on the Shakespearean stage if every major critic routinely dismissed or slammed him? Weren’t they right to dismiss and slam him, since what we see of his acting is almost uniformly terrible?—make it better, because they prove the film has little interest in adopting a moral stance that could only interfere with its actual aesthetic purpose. This isn’t about convincing you the critics deserve it or don’t, it’s about “uh-oh, Titus Andronicus is next on the docket.”

When morality—the result of narrative, not style—does come into play, it does so, unsurprisingly, in the film’s two strongest instances of actual plotting, a neat bit of story construction that shows how fundamentally good writer Anthony Greville-Bell and director Douglas Hickox’s instincts really are.

Part of it is Peregrine Devlin (Ian Hendry), the head of the circle that unanimously denied Price the capstone of his career. He’s Lionheart’s ultimate antagonist, so he has to embody what Lionheart cannot—a sober, consistent perspective—but with Lionheart’s own passions and field of references. We hardly ever the other critics mention the theater, but Devlin truly cares about it. To an extent, he even cared about Lionheart as part of it: one of his early defining scenes is telling Edwina, with all apparent honesty, that he criticized her father partly because he felt Lionheart’s decision to stick only with Shakespeare shortchanged Lionheart’s own talent and development. He awarded another actor over Lionheart because he remains committed that the other actor is better and more promising. Of course Lionheart can’t let go of this more substantiated disapproval, so he tries repeatedly to bully Devlin over to his side, fencing him at the movie’s midpoint in a nonfatal duel and finally offering to spare him Gloucester’s fate in exchange for a private, “corrected” award show. Devlin can’t, because if he succumbs to save his own skin, he becomes—however understandable—faintly silly, ceding his ground. He can’t survive on Lionheart’s territory. All he can do is hold his own, even with red-hot daggers aimed at his eyes, and hope for the best.

If Lionheart thinks too much of his critics, however, what really gets him—and what is the cherry on top of the film’s surprisingly strong late-game plotting—is that he doesn’t think enough of his audience and co-stars. He kept on getting cast as a headliner even after all the pans, so the audience must have loved him, but he found no solace there; in reconstructing his life after his suicide attempt, he finds little solace in his ongoing audience, either. A crowd of smudge-faced unhoused characters save him from death and offer him their help, and Lionheart uses them relentlessly, condescending to them and enlisting them in his war against his critics. When they first deliver him from the river, saving him from drowning, he has his Tempest moment—for a split second, he’s Miranda discovering a brave new world—but it doesn’t take long for him to lose that sense of ingenue wonder and declare himself king of this refuge. He’ll be Prospero, and they’ll all be his Calibans. He uses them without mercy or regard, and Edwina, reflecting his wishes and enforcing them, calls him their “master” and punishes them when their attention wanders during his monologues. These people are part of his plan and part of his performance, but he has no regard for them, and in the end, he pays for it.

Maybe you can’t win an award if you have no one to thank.

Theatre of Blood is streaming on Tubi.

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