In this Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, the first character that we see approaches a decrepit old house across a foggy, desolate moor. Upon arrival, they are greeted by a servant who tells them that, although they have come to see their betrothed, they are forbidden from entering the house based on the orders of said betrothed’s protective sibling. They insist upon being allowed entry and, once inside, they are reunited with their love, in spite of the sibling’s interference. From there, they learn that all members of the family who dwell in the house suffer a particular hereditary malady, which includes a tendency toward catalepsy. Beneath the house lies the family crypt, and the newcomer learns about the family’s sordid history. A character has an oversaturated dream and awakes in a start, and the betrothed is buried alive, before rising from their premature grave to wreak havoc on those who have betrayed them. 

Wait, that’s Premature Burial. Except that it’s also a plot description of House of Usher. The unnamed narrator of the original short story is here deemed Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), and he crosses a boggy tarn amid machined fog to approach the cobwebbed and dilapidated home of Roderick Usher (Vincent Price), who is the next to last surviving member of the Usher dynasty, alongside his sister, Madeline (Myrna Fahey). He is greeted by the sole remaining servant, Bristol (Harry Ellerbe), who at first attempts to refuse him entrance but who is entreatied enough to allow Winthrop to speak with Roderick. The titular house of Usher is a spooky place, bedecked almost entirely in red furnishings—candles, drapes, upholstery, everything—and Winthrop is asked to remove his boots and wear slippers which are provided for him. As the master of the house explains once Winthrop enters his chambers, he is afflicted with an intense sensitivity to all sensory input, keeping the sun out through heavy curtains and insisting that he can hear rats scraping within the stone walls, and the sound of heavy footfall causes him great pain. Winthrop wishes to take Madeline away from this place and back to Boston with him so that the two can get married; Roderick forbids this, telling Winthrop that Madeline has the same maladies as he and that it is his solemn duty to ensure that the Usher bloodline ends with the two of them. Madeline finds them in the middle of this conversation, and she seems delighted to see Winthrop and willing to elope with him, and Roderick thus begrudgingly allows Winthrop to stay.

Damon makes for a very pretty protagonist here, but he’s sorely lacking in screen presence, especially in comparison to Price, who acts circles around the younger man. Likewise, Madeline herself is virtually a non-entity, with Fahey given little to do other than put on pretty dresses and faint. That lack of character depth is particularly unfortunate in a film with only four characters (other than the spectral Ushers of yore who appear in a nightmare sequence), but I did rather like Ellerbe’s nonplussed resignation to the inevitability of the collapse of both the Usher bloodline and home. When giving an extemporaneous interview in one of the extra features on a different MGM Corman/Poe DVD, the director mentioned that his modus operandi when working on these adaptations was to take the story he was “adapting” and treat it as the final act of a standard three act screenplay, and then fill in the first two acts with whatever his writing team could come up with. In this case, that screenwriter was Richard Matheson, for whom I have a lot of fondness as he wrote several great Twilight Zone episodes, the novel I Am Legend, the short story on which The Box was based, and the script for The Night Stalker. There’s nothing wrong with this script, but it’s very clear that, even at a scant eighty minutes, Corman was working to pad out the run time. Thus long walks through hallways run just a little too long to be atmospheric and instead become dull, and this isn’t helped whenever the demands of the story mean that Winthrop and Madeline have the occasional romantic scene that’s so characterless and devoid of any kind of magnetism that the mind wanders. 

That means that much of what there is to enjoy here depends on Price’s performance, which is fortunately rock solid, and that he comes to occupy more and more of the screen time as the film goes on is to its benefit. For the first half or so of the film, his scenes are split up by the aforementioned interminable scenes in which Winthrop confesses his love and Madeline equivocates about running away with him. The best scene the two share is when she leads her beau down into the crypts beneath the house and shows him the coffins of her ancestors, as well as the one awaiting her and which is already inscribed with her name, and even that one ends with the arrival of Roderick to stir things up. Price, meanwhile, delivers his verbose monologues with his usual languid cadence, and does so while looking as pale as a ghost and slightly off as a result of lacking his normal glorious mustache. I particularly loved his recitation of the sins and crimes of Ushers past as he gives a little tour of his macabre portraits of his predecessors, which are garish and strikingly modern, and his gentle reminiscence of the days before his time when the land around the manor was fertile and verdant rather than desolate and barren. Price is also very funny at multiple points in this, especially in places in which the film deviates from the text. In the story, Roderick is a fairly gifted guitar player and the narrator even records the lyrics of one of his impromptu songs in the text, while Price’s Roderick strums aimlessly and tunelessly at a lute, which always sounds awful. I also laughed pretty hard at the moment in which Roderick sees Madeline’s hand twitching within her coffin and he rushes to close it before Winthrop can catch on that Madeline is not truly dead. This too is a change, as Poe’s Roderick truly believed that his sister had passed and only became aware of his error when his sensitive ear heard her screaming in the crypts below to be let out. 

Overall, after now having watched three of these (including Masque of the Red Death), there’s an emerging, discernable formula in what manages to make it into these adaptations. All three films have opening scenes in which a matte painting of a house (or castle) is approached across an in-studio “outdoors.” The lead character then explains their neuroses (or their anti-faith) to the recently arrived naive character, often in a dungeon or a crypt, a character has a trippy color-saturated nightmare, and then we wrap things up with the arrival of mortal or spiritual vengeance. Usher easily outperforms Premature Burial in every one of these individual areas, but it rarely does anything that Masque later imitates better than its successor does. That is to say, despite both of them coming after Usher, Premature Burial is derivative in a way that is detrimental to it, while Masque improves on the already pretty-good Usher, by most metrics. (One place that this outshines it, however, is in Winthrop’s dream sequence, which effectively manages to be both spooky and creepy, and which also manages to capture that feeling we have in dreams where we feel sluggish and ineffectual.) Roderick and Masque’s Prospero are very different characters, as the former is characterized largely by his neurotic behavior and shrinking, withering body language while the latter is a self-assured and assertive man. Nevertheless, one can’t help but see the trial run for later Corman/Price/Poe adaptations to come here, as Price shows his chops by fully committing to every line, delivering each of Roderick’s hypochondriacal and self-pitying remarks with utter conviction, which elevates the whole piece. 

If you are interested, you can read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in its entirety online here. This is a pretty good place to try it out, as I remember barely understanding this particular story when I was in my eighth grade Poe phase. There’s an entire paragraph about all of the literature, art, and religious writings that the narrator and Roderick pore over as their discussions about Roderick’s terrified belief that the house is alive and malevolent, and without the handy footnotes in the version linked above, it’s all but impenetrable. (That’s not to say that the choices of what vocab words to highlight and define in the rest of the text make a lot of sense, as they felt the need to provide meanings for “trepidation” and “pallid” but not “prolixity.”) I rather like it now, especially in its subtleties. The story, like the film, ends with the literal collapse of the Usher’s estate, but before it gets there it incorporates two texts-within-the-text in the forms of Roderick’s song and the fictional chivalric romance Mad Trist, which the narrator reads aloud to Roderick in an attempt to calm the latter’s nerves. That the sounds of a door being kicked down and a large shield falling to the floor which the narrator recites are accompanied by similar sounds elsewhere in the Usher house as Madeline rises from her premature burial (ahem) is a strikingly modern literary device, and the reader gets a real sense of the “irredeemable gloom [hanging] over and [pervading] all.” All that it’s missing is Vincent Price.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond