Drew Pisarra
Drew Pisarra is the author of two sonnet collections (Periodic Boyfriends and Infinity Standing Up), two short story collections (Publick Spanking and You’re Pretty Gay), and two radio plays (Price in Purgatory and The Strange Case of Nick M.). Clearly, he likes to do things in two. You can follow him on Instagram or Bluesky via @mistermysterio.
Anushka Bidani: Why Price?
Drew Pisarra: About a decade ago, I grew a mustache after my friend Gisburg asked me to play Nietzsche in her song cycle inspired by Michel Foucault’s The History of Madness. Yet the person I most resembled once I’d grown that facial hair wasn’t our bleakly existential philosopher. It was the bon vivant actor Vincent Price. People said this a lot. And I could see why. So much so that I got to wondering: Who was my dead doppelganger? Not just on the big screen but in life. What followed was a rabbit hole shaped like the grave of Price. Inside his bottomless casket, I found not only the expected VHS tapes and DVDs but also a celebrity cookbook, a slew of black-and-white headshots, tattered newspaper clippings, and personal correspondence via Yale’s research libraries, endless talkshow appearances and TV guest spots via YouTube, a lifelong devotion to art collecting that resulted in a namesake museum in East Los Angeles, a decent Broadway resume, a forgotten script of his internationally acclaimed one-man-show Diversions & Delights, and a Co-Star vinyl record which allowed me to read aloud scenes from The Importance of Being Earnest and An Enemy of the People while his inimitable voice delivered rejoining lines. Devoting an entire book to this incredible man seemed inescapable as a result.
AB: The book sharply oscillates between the dream-like world of the purgatory and earth-bound film reviews; the holy and the human, the divine and the mundane. Could you speak to that choice?
DP: Reality demands that we dream. Dreams—and what are movies if not projected dreams?— encourage us to extrapolate real-world meaning. And so, the cycle begins. In Price in Purgatory when Vincent Price’s spirit guide tells God, “You know that movies aren’t real, right?,” God’s retort is “Real enough.” What does it mean to live in a world in which a movie can make a memory as impactful and long-lasting as something that we’ve experienced firsthand? Because that’s the world we’re living in.
AB: What influenced your conception of the afterlife?
DP: My fascination with the metaphysical dates back to that moment when I asked my mother, “Is there a god” and she replied, “Honey, does it really matter?” Whether her answer was rooted in having grown weary of a child’s endless questions or whether it was a serious response with intentionally deeper implications, I’ll never know. What I recognize now is that her pragmatism has acted as a guiding force ever since. Sometimes, the big questions matter. Sometimes, they don’t. When envisioning the afterlife depicted in Price in Purgatory, I figured the big questions mattered big time. What else is there to do when confronted by eternity than to ponder and reflect, to confront the past and take stock of shortcomings. The first phase of the afterlife is likely a transitional zone in which we must shed our human skin before we head to wherever and whatever comes next. Purgatory is our last chance to be human as we know it. At least it was for Vincent Price. And I imagine it will be for me, too.
AB: You’ve described Price as “a horror icon, a camp icon, and a queer icon”: How do you see these three iconicities intersect and play out on-screen and in Price’s celebrity-image?
DP: Susan Sontag—and Christopher Isherwood before her and Charles Ludlam after—posited that camp is a worldview shaped by queer consciousness, an anti-populist POV that isn’t afraid to laugh at what’s revered and vice versa. Price brought that sensibility to horror, especially in fright flicks like The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Theatre of Blood and genre-related gigs like his narrator role in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and his hosting duties for the PBS anthology series Mystery! Although his bisexuality wasn’t common knowledge during his lifetime, Price set off my gaydar majorly when I was a teen. The entire enterprise of Diabolically Good was fuelled in part by a desire to let the world know that my gaydar in this case was right. Watch his deliciously entertaining turns as the “cruisy” doctor in The Tingler and the hammy actor in His Kind of Woman to see what I mean.
AB: Why did the chemistry between Price and Edgar Allan Poe’s texts work so well?
DP: Neither is afraid of extremes. Or affectation. Or obsession. Neither shies away from being different. Or gothic. Or grotesque. Both can give you the shivers — shivers of fear and shivers of delight.
AB: You seem to be driving at a conception of the actor as a vehicle for multiple selves, derived from both their personal lives and filmic oeuvre. I’m keen to know: what do you make of an actor?
DP: In his all-but-forgotten novel Shoot!, the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello writes, “We may easily fail to recognize ourselves in what we do, but what we do, my dear fellow, remains done: an action which circumscribes you…gives you a form of sorts and imprisons you in it.” And so, as a result, who are we if not the actions we take? And if the action we take is playing other people (as actors do), who are we but a conglomerate of all those various personalities we once performed? An actor who plays a mad doctor doesn’t become a mad doctor but hasn’t the mad doctor somehow gotten under his skin? Does all this shapeshifting make the actor more empathic or more narcissistic? Is an actor more fully alive when in front of the camera and if so, does it not go to follow that not being filmed means not really living? With the advent of social platform memoir-making and surveillance culture and Meta’s AI glasses is the whole idea of a personal life becoming obsolete? Are we all actors? With Diabolically Good, I did come to believe that we are all Vincent Price. Which is my way of saying, I’m afraid so.
Anushka Bidani is an Indian writer, editor, & cultural researcher.