Thanks to his daughter, Victoria, late legendary actor Vincent Price is very much alive online as the focus of a new official website.
Victoria Price in December launched VincentPrice.com to give fans of the horror film great a personal look at "The Elegant Side of Evil." In a recent phone interview, Price told me what fans are getting now is just the start of what promises to be a comprehensive look at her father's life and career.
To date the site has a blog that Price authors, along with video, fan resources, and assorted news regarding her father, including an initiative to get Vincent Price on a U.S. Postage stamp. There's also a new section on the 50th anniversary edition of A Treasury of Great Recipes, which Vincent and his wife, Mary authored in 1965. The commemorative edition will be released in 2015, Victoria Price says.
Price – a designer, art consultant, author and public speaker who runs Victoria Price Design for Living in Santa Fe, N.M. – says that she doesn't anticipate VincentPrice.com being the definitive resource of her dad's films and life, but an extension of what's already out there.
"There are so many people who have fantastic sites. Rick Squires and Peter Fuller are two people that immediately come to mind and they've done such an amazing job of preserving my dad's legacy online," Price tells me. "Yes, maybe I have some inside scoop on things that perhaps they don't know about, so in a way I'm just sort of working with them to keep preserving my dad's legacy."
The interesting thing about Price is, while she's a big fan of her dad – she's not necessarily big on his horror films. That's not say she thinks they're bad movies. She's simply just not a fan of the genre.
"As I say to people when I do speaking engagements, 'I'm not a horror fan, but I'm a fan of horror fans,'" Price says with a laugh. "It's the horror fans who have kept my dad's legacy alive. I'm really glad that they've put the energy into it."
Price says she hopes to have a lot of fan interaction on the site because it's just the sort of thing he would have wanted. She's also making an effort to have a larger presence at horror conventions.
"Interacting with the fans is something my dad did really well," Price says. "I'm much more of a quiet, private person, but I really enjoy talking to fans. I'm trying to push through my own natural shyness to get out there and do more of that. I've been trying to make time to go to the horror conventions. When I go to those events, I give them my undivided attention. The fans are always wonderful."
Price says one of the main reasons she never liked watching her dad's films was because she loved him as a dad first and it bothered her to see him in dire situations, even though they were fictitious.
"I never liked watching my dad get killed or killing someone," Price recalled with a laugh. "People say, 'Oh, my God, you had Vincent Price as your dad, don't you want to sit and watch all of his movies?' And I say, 'No, because they scare me.'"
Nonetheless, some horror is mixed in among her favorite films of her dad's.
"My favorite of his is Laura, but of his horror movies, I'd have to say my favorite is Theatre of Blood," Price says. "I'm a big fan of Shakespeare and my dad was such an incredible verse speaker. Besides, who doesn't want to see the critics get killed, right?"
Of course, Theatre of Blood was one of the many films that showed Vincent Price's great acting range, something that Victoria was just reminded of the other day.
"Just recently I re-read a piece where somebody was quoting the People magazine article when he died that called him 'The Gable of Gothic,'" Price says. "That was such a great phrase and it really captured who he was. I really loved that."
Tim Lammers is the author of the new ebook "Direct Conversations: The Animated Films of Tim Burton," which includes a foreword by Burton.