Twice-Told Tales -- Sidney Salkow
Twice-Told Tales was on the other side of the DVD featuring Tales of Terror and why not? It's the exact same structure and each story features Vincent Price but substitutes Nathaniel Hawthorne for Edgar Allen Poe. I want to say that Tales of Terror is the better film because I've read more Poe, like Roger Corman better, and the cast is more impressive, but the films are about on par. The only appreciable difference is that Twice-Told Tales is a half hour longer and probably doesn't need to be that way.
The best and creepiest of the tales is the finale, The House of Seven Gables. There's some good haunting, bleeding paintings and walls, and the finale really brings the house down. Price plays a great selfish asshole looking for a vault filled with money. His demise is charmingly hokey, but only people who don't appreciate this kind of movie will hold it against the film. Even the weakest of the shorts, Rappaccini's Daughter, builds to a fun ending. Maybe I'm sour on that segment because it features that terrible trope of older movies where people fall in "love" after only one encounter.
Having watched Tales of Terror and Twice-Told Tales, I've learned that I'm a big fan of the format and I wish filmmakers and studios would adapt short stories as short stories instead of trying to stretch them into features. It's rare that the resulting film doesn't feel padded out. Maybe modern audiences wouldn't go for that sort of thing, but I'd like it and that's all I care about.
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