Theatre of Blood

• Vincent Price met his future wife, actress Coral Browne, on the set of this film — she played doomed critic Chloe Moon. Diana Rigg is credited with noticing the spark between them, and Price and Browne married in 1974, staying together until his death in 1993.
• Price was about 60 during the summer 1972 shoot. He'd trained in stage fencing as a young actor and was eager to use it in the film's swordfight, but was reportedly disappointed to find a stunt double handled most of the sequence.
• Diana Rigg, who called Theatre of Blood her favorite of her own films, took the role of Lionheart's daughter Edwina in part to shake off typecasting as Emma Peel from her Avengers years.
• Lionheart's crumbling hideout, the fictional 'Burbage Theatre,' was shot at the real derelict Putney Hippodrome in London — the venue had sat empty for over a decade and was demolished in 1975, not long after filming wrapped.
• Robert Morley's critic, flamboyant gourmand Meredith Merridew, is force-fed a pie baked from his own pet poodles — a gruesome restaging of Queen Tamora's fate in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Lionheart never actually survived the initial dive into the Thames; the entire revenge spree is a purgatorial performance where he acts out his greatest hits before facing final judgment, explaining the almost supernatural resilience he displays throughout.

Edwina is not merely an accomplice but the true director of the carnage, manipulating her father's madness to settle her own scores with the critical establishment that ignored her acting ambitions.

The critics represent specific facets of Lionheart's fractured psyche, with each murder symbolizing the death of a part of his ego that relied on their validation, making the killings a twisted form of self-lobotomy.

Snubbed Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart fakes his own death with a dive into the Thames after the London critics' guild denies him their top award. Rescued by a gang of riverside vagrants, he resurfaces two years later to settle the score, picking off the critics one by one in re-staged versions of Shakespeare's bloodiest deaths — stabbed like Caesar, impaled and dragged like Hector, decapitated in his sleep like Cymbeline's Cloten, drowned in a barrel of wine like the Duke of Clarence, even force-fed a pie baked from his own poodles. His devoted daughter Edwina runs the con alongside him, luring critics in and covering the tracks. It all comes apart when the last critic standing refuses to hand over the award: the theater goes up in flames, Edwina is killed in the chaos, and Lionheart carries her body to the roof, reciting King Lear's final lines as the fire brings the whole stage down around him.