Tales of Terror is a 1962 American International Pictures Gothic horror anthology film in colour and Panavision, produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff, James H. Nicholson, and Roger Corman, who also directed. The screenplay was written by Richard Matheson, and the film stars Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone. It is the fourth in the so-called Corman-Poe cycle of eight films, largely featuring adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories and directed by Corman for AIP. The film was released in 1962 as a double feature with Panic in Year Zero!.

Three short sequences, based on the following Poe tales, are told: "Morella", "The Black Cat" (which is combined with another Poe tale, "The Cask of Amontillado"), and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar". Each sequence is introduced via voiceover narration by Vincent Price, who also appears in all three narratives.

When Lenora Locke travels from Boston to be reunited with her father in his decrepit and cobwebbed mansion, she finds him drunk, disordered, and depressed. He refuses her company, insisting that she killed her mother Morella in childbirth. Lenora then discovers her mother's body decomposing on a bed in the house.

Lenora cannot return to Boston and remains in the house to care for her father. His feelings soften towards her when he learns she has a terminal illness. One night Morella's spirit rises, and kills Lenora in revenge for her childbed death. Morella's body is then resurrected, becoming as whole and as beautiful as she was in life. This is in exchange for Lenora's body, which is now decomposing where Morella lay.

Morella strangles her horrified husband as a fire breaks out in the house. Then Morella and Lenora return to their original bodies, Lenora smiling as she lies on her dead father, the rotten Morella cackling as the flames consume the house and all three bodies of the Lockes.

Montresor Herringbone hates his wife Annabelle and her black cat. One night on a ramble about town, he happens upon a wine tasting event and challenges the world's foremost wine taster, Fortunato Luchresi, to a contest. Herringbone successfully identifies each wine, but becomes drunk. Luchresi escorts him home and meets his wife.

Time passes, and Annabelle and Luchresi become intimate. The cuckolded Herringbone then entombs them alive in an alcove in the basement. However he cannot escape "seeing" and "hearing" both the black cat and the murdered couple taunting him. The authorities become suspicious and two policemen visit the house to investigate. Hearing screeching behind a basement wall, they knock the wall down to discover the dead lovers — and Annabelle's black cat. The sequence ends with Poe's words in red on screen: "I had walled the black monster up within the tomb!".

Dying from a painful disease, M. Ernest Valdemar employs a hypnotist, Mr. Carmichael, to alleviate his suffering by putting him under various trances. He then remains between the worlds of the living and the dead. In a trance, Valdemar begs Carmichael to release his soul so he can die, but Carmichael cruelly refuses.