Are you too old for curiosity?
Soon after he starred in Roger Corman's Tales of Terror, based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Price top-lined 1963's Twice-Told Tales, a horror anthology comprised of a trio of hair-raising stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the first, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," Price plays the best friend of the title character (Sebastian Cabot), an aged physician who is still pining for his long-lost love, Sylvia, who died on the eve of their wedding 38 years prior. On the night of his 79th birthday, though, they find the door to her crypt ajar and Sylvia (Mari Blanchard) perfectly preserved inside it. Positing that this is due to the unnaturally pure water that has been dripping on her coffin all these years, Cabot and Price try it for themselves and find that it restores their youth and can even bring Blanchard back from the dead, but all that does is redraw a decades-old love triangle that spells doom for all three of them.
The middle story, "Rappaccini's Daughter," is about a scientist (Price) who keeps his beautiful daughter (Joyce Taylor) locked away from the world, which piques the curiosity of a university student (Brett Halsey) who becomes smitten with her. Eventually Halsey learns of her symbiotic relationship with a mysterious, poisonous plant that Price keeps in his garden, but this knowledge comes too late to save either of them. Finally, "The House of the Seven Gables" casts Price as the last male of the Pyncheon line, who braves the curse his family has been living under for 150 years to search for a secret vault that is the key to great wealth. The luminous Beverly Garland co-stars as his wife, who becomes possessed by the spirit of the blacksmith who cursed Price's family in the first place, with Richard Denning as his grudge-holding descendant and Jacqueline deWit as Price's sister, who's eager to share in his good fortune should he find it. Even if the ending gets away from director Sidney Salkow a little, that doesn't take away from the air of dread that all three tales are amply suffused with.