House of Usher

Vincent Price brings to life (death?) the classical role of Roderick Usher, the white-haired neurasthenic avant-garde guitar plucker from Poe's infamous paean to death-eroticism, "The Fall of the House of Usher." This is a classic adaptation from Roger “Rubber Monsters” Corman, who switched paces in his career from tormenting beach-going teens to replicating, in his own inimitable fashion, the high-camp gothic of that Poe, Poe man.

There would seem to be a paltry amount to say, as the film closely echoes every curdled strain from the sonata of Poe's sordid soul. Winthrop, the “Unnamed Narrator” in this tale who will always himself remain as much of a cypher as Mr. and Mrs. Roderick and Madeline, comes riding on his eternal errand, as if in a recurring dream, across the “Tarn,” our blasted heath (as Poe devotee HPL called it in “The Color Out of Space”) and gives nodding recognition to the whole dark and soundless day, in the bleak December no doubt, wherein the dreary clouds and chilling vapors cradle and pay loving tribute to the cold, desiccated, stark and barren countryside—nothing will grow. Death wraps its loving arms, or better yet, sends its cloud of bleak and ugly unlife across the width and breadth of the Usherite countryside. But there is more.

Coming to the manse, the cracked wall gleaming like the vulva of some dead stone goddess sealed inside a barren box, Winthrop encounters Usher/Price, finding him to be in the grip of a mania, his nerves trebled and quadrupled until his palate can stand only the blandest dishes, his ears only the faintest sounds; every touch of fiber on his being is an agony to him. “I can hear the rats chewing in the walls,” he exclaims, the screenwriter alluding to HPL, whose works reflected Poe's utter desolate nihilism and existential despair in a cosmic framework of indifference. And Lovecraft, like Poe his inspiration, was inordinately interested in familial degeneration, the abstruse shadow of unearthed sin, the cosmic DNA of long despair and suffering that overwhelms, consumes, annihilates, and finally is meaningless. Usher can withstand no strong stimuli; it reminds him, of course, that he is alive. And like all other living things is perched over Poe's Great Abyss, staring down into an infinitude of nothing that is the common fate of all living men.

Sister Madeline, his revenant common-law “wife,” a pale, hungry specter that in the tale of Poe is portrayed as a living ghost until she is finally shuffled into shadow at the sepulchral climax of that tale—here she is, sadly, not so memorable until the very end. It seems Roderick has murdered his sister—or, at the least, stands accused of doing so by the besotted Winthrop, who fancies himself in love with the connubial vampiress.

Mercy

In old Exeter, Rhode Island, perhaps in 1892, perhaps in the icy cold grip of the dark, clouded skies of January, Edmund Brown, along with a few confederates, stole into the local cemetery with a rather shocking object in mind: to unearth the graves of his mother and sister, all of whom had died of a mysterious, wasting illness. Edwin now bore every mark of having that illness, and wished not to join his mother and sisters in the mouldering crypt.

Mother Mary and sister Mary Oliver were resurrected forthwith and posthaste—and all seemed to be right by their state of physical putrescence. Entering the crypt, though, where young sister Mercy, only 19 when she passed, was interred, waiting for the burial ground to unthaw, the assembled vampire hunters discovered that young Mercy's flesh was flush with the hue of living blood, uncorrupted seemingly by death, and hence, it was thought that her undead form was battening upon the remaining siblings, draining them of their life, vitality, and living blood.

Her heart and liver were extracted, burned, and given to Edwin to DRINK THE ASHES.

Salud.

Blood Moon Rising

Madeline and Roderick, as Roderick tours Winthrop around the castle explaining, are the last of their line of scoundrels, miscreants, deviants, and cutthroats. A long line of transgression and sin; the “Curse of the Fathers,” or generational curse, is visited upon the two long-suffering melancholics. Madeline, chained in her casket, bears some resemblance to this. But has the cataleptic been interred alive?

Roderick and Winthrop can hear her shift in her tomb. Perhaps she is chewing, like those rats in the walls.

The fiery ending bleeds red suspense across the screen, as the rumbling earth, the displeasure of buried chthonic forces that have rumbled within the earth, demanding release to wreak vengeance and belch noxious flames from Hades, bring the melancholy House of Usher to its inexorable and deserved ending.

Blood moon, or lack thereof rather, notwithstanding.

Written by Richard Matheson, who gave us Hell House, I Am Legend, and many classic episodes of shows such as "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits," as well as other Corman/Poe adaptations such as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Comedy of Terrors. Starring Vincent Price in one of the smoothest and most well-manicured performances of his incomparable career, as well as Mark Damon as Winthrop and Myrna Fahey as Madeline. Directed and produced by King Corman, RIP.

House of Usher (1960) Full Movie. Vincent Price.

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My book: Silent Scream!: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. CAligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels.

“Silent Scream” plunges into the nightmares of early horror cinema, where shadows spoke louder than screams and monsters first took shape. Within these pages, you’ll find chilling new adaptations of Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Metropolis — stories that defined horror before Hollywood ever gave us Dracula or Frankenstein. These silent terrors return with all their eerie atmosphere intact: crooked streets, haunted castles, vampiric fiends, and madmen who bend reality itself. For fans of classic horror, this is a resurrection of the genre’s roots — when every flicker of film could conjure a nightmare, and silence itself was screaming.”

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