House of Usher, a.k.a. The Fall of the House of Usher (Alta Vista Productions, American International Pictures, 1960)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 27) I put on Turner Classic Movies for a film I’ve been curious about for ages: House of Usher, a 1960 production from Roger Corman’s Alta Vista Pictures, released through American International and Corman’s first of seven films more or less based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Actually Poe’s original title was “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and though most reference sources (including imdb.com) list the title simply as House of Usher, TCM’s print gave the full title of Poe’s story: The Fall of the House of Usher. I was able to look up and read the Poe story online through archive.org before the film began and thereby had a good inkling of just how close the film, directed by Corman from a script by science-fiction writer Richard Matheson, came to the source. Unusually closely, as things turned out; though most films ostensibly based on Poe have used little more than his titles and bits and pieces of his story, House of Usher is a generally faithful adaptation despite a few compromises made to steer the story closer to the standard Hollywood clichés. It was also, I believe, Corman’s first film in color – the process American International used was Pathécolor, which was particularly strong in blues and reds, the colors American International most needed: blue for the skies and waves of their beach-party movies and red for their horror films. In Poe’s original story, a young, unnamed narrator comes to the titular house of Usher (Poe’s punning title refers both to the crumbling old mansion where the Ushers live and the impending extinction of their family, since at the time the story takes place we’re down to just two Ushers, they’re brother and sister and there’s no hint of any romantic or sexual interests that might keep the Usher line going – a plot point Matheson makes considerably more of than Poe did). He’s an old college friend of Roderick Usher and he comes to visit his former buddy – only he finds Roderick very much the worse for wear, looking far older than he remembered him from his college days. Roderick lives in the Usher mansion alone except for his fraternal twin sister Madeline, who’s prone to cataleptic fits that make her appear dead. A doctor comes to the Usher home to treat her, only in the end Madeline has one of her fits. Roderick orders her buried, thinking she’s dead, but she isn’t; she escapes from her tomb and scares the hell out of both Roderick and the readers before the house of Usher literally crumbles around both survivors of the family, while our narrator escapes just in time.

For the movie, Matheson made Madeline (Myrna Fahey) considerably younger-looking than Roderick (Vincent Price, surprisingly without his trademark moustache) and gave her a backstory: at one time she lived in Boston and attracted the attentions of a young man named Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon). Philip proposed to her and she accepted, only before they could actually get married she fled back to the Usher home and hid out there. The film opens with Philip, like Poe’s unnamed narrator, arriving at the Usher manse and at first being refused admittance by the Ushers’ supercilious and hostile butler, Bristol (Harry Ellerbe). Bristol orders Philip not only to take off his overcoat but to remove his boots and put on slippers instead. Then he reluctantly takes him to see Roderick, who couldn’t be less hospitable. Roderick does everything he can short of pulling a gun on Philip to tell him he’s not welcome. Roderick is also acutely sensitive to noises of all kinds – that’s why Bristol told Philip to take off his boots – in a condition that actually exists: it’s called hyperacusis and for 2 ½ years I dated a man who had it and went into excruciating pain every time he heard a noise, particularly one with a very high frequency. Roderick is also worried that the Ushers suffer from genetic insanity, which is why he doesn’t want Philip to marry Madeline: Roderick fears that they might have children who would inherit the Ushers’ madness and keep the family’s curse going through more generations. Instead Roderick wants to make sure he and Madeline are the last of the Ushers. When Madeline goes into a cataleptic fit, Roderick immediately orders her body placed in a casket and put in the family’s on-site tomb. Philip wonders what’s the point of the rush and why Roderick insists on burying Madeline immediately instead of reporting her death to the authorities and having a doctor pronounce her really most sincerely dead. We learn Madeline isn’t dead when her fingers start moving while her body is lying in an open casket – which Roderick almost immediately orders closed so the D.I.Y. funeral can proceed as planned even though the “corpse” isn’t a corpse. Then Philip hears Bristol make a chance remark that Madeline suffered from catalepsy and immediately he puts it all together; he demands both Roderick and Bristol tell him where Madeline is – since her body is no longer in the elaborate coffin it was placed in when she “died” – and he’s still hoping he can get her out of the Usher castle and to a place where they can be married. Only Madeline has turned into a monster and attacks Philip, whereupon the crumbling old house finally catches fire and is destroyed, with Roderick and Madeline both meeting their deaths in the flames before the surrounding lake rises, puts out the fire and the house sinks into it. The final credit is a quote from the last lines of Poe’s story: “[A]nd the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.”

House of Usher is actually a pretty well-made movie, though it suffers from a relatively weak cast: while Vincent Price is authoritative as usual in the sort of role he got “typed” in (and didn’t resort to the campy affectations he got into later when he was saddled with really stupid scripts), and Harry Ellerbe is quite good as the overall factotum, Myrna Fahey can’t act at all and Mark Damon isn’t much better. Just as I had a decade ago when my husband Charles and I watched the immediate follow-up, Pit and the Pendulum, I found myself wondering why Corman hadn’t cast the young Jack Nicholson (then under contract to American International) as Philip; even that early, Nicholson had a manic intensity that would have given the character some dimension instead of making him just one more boring romantic lead. Where the film scores is in the behind-the-camera talent Corman recruited for it: besides Matheson as screenwriter, the film featured Floyd Crosby as cinematographer (he’d won an Academy Award in 1931 for the F. W. Murnau-Robert Flaherty collaboration Tabu and was the father of the late rock star David Crosby), Daniel Haller as production designer (and his sets for the house of Usher are covered in so much webbing I found myself thinking, “Cobwebs ‘R Us”) and, above all, Les Baxter as composer. Baxter is probably one of the most underrated musicians of the 20th century; he’s mostly remembered as a middle-of-the-road lounge music guy, but get him away from that style and give him a more challenging assignment (like Voice of the Xtabay with Yma Sumac, The Passions with Bas Sheva, or his subsequent scores for Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum and the U.S. release of Mario Bava’s Black Friday) and he could rise to the occasion. Baxter’s House of Usher music is full of radical harmonies and polytonalities that at times make it sound like Stravinsky descended from his personal Mount Olympus in L.A. and decided to write music for a horror film. Corman sensibly kept his team together for Pit and the Pendulum, though after that film Baxter left and his replacement, Ronald Stein, just churned out standard horror-music clichés with barely a trace of Baxter’s imagination. Still, House of Usher is a quite welcome film and a good, if hardly great, work of imaginative Gothic terror on screen before the “horror” genre sank into the cesspool it’s in today, in which directors go for the cheap scares the modern-day audiences want and get their effects by splashing blood all over the screen.