As in the original story, much of The Fall of the House of Usher is open to interpretation: an unspeakable relationship between the Usher siblings is strongly implied - perhaps the “curse” that Roderick speaks of - while the house itself can be seen as a living entity that shares the same soul and same moral rot as the inhabitants festering within.
#THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER MOVIE UPDATE#
What Corman and Matheson did with the Poe story was not so much update its setting or characters, but retain the psychological complexity and underlying metaphors inherent in the author’s writing. Creature features and more contemporary terrors like the atomic bomb had replaced old dark houses and cobwebbed crypts, while quickies such as I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and The Blob replaced the courtly protagonists of old with younger faces. The era of the Universal monster movies was long gone, with its star players like Dracula and Frankenstein getting fresh, blood-red coats of paint from England’s Hammer Films. When Madeline falls into a cataleptic trance, Roderick convinces Winthrop that his sister has died and buries her - still alive - in the family crypt, determined to end the Usher bloodline once and for all.īest Horror Movies on Hulu By Alec Bojalad and 1 otherīy the time Corman filmed The Fall of the House of Usher, the American horror film itself was about to undergo a kind of generational shift. Roderick says that the curse must end with him and his sister, the last two members of the Usher family, whose overly acute senses provide them nothing but discomfort. Winthrop finds the house and surrounding countryside in disrepair and decay, with Madeline’s brother Roderick telling him that the family’s cursed bloodline has driven previous generations of the family to madness, even poisoning the house and the land around it. Matheson’s script is largely faithful to the decrepit, morbid atmosphere and main narrative beats of Poe’s story, although the nameless narrator of Poe’s tale is changed to Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), a young gentleman who has come to visit his fiancée, Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey). The incestuous sexual/horror relationship between them, it was just a fascinating situation.”Ĭorman had in fact pitched the Usher mansion as the movie’s monster when AIP questioned making a horror picture without a monster in it. “Surrounded by fog, deserted…and then within the house, the relationship between Roderick Usher and his sister. “What drew me to Fall of the House of Usher was first the macabre setting, the house itself,” Corman later told PBS’ American Masters. He pitched AIP an adaptation of the Poe story and the studio said yes.
#THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER MOVIE MOVIE#
Tired with that kind of quick moviemaking, he instead proposed one movie for $200,000, shot in color on a 15-day schedule. His fast style of shooting (sometimes filming two completely different movies back to back on the same sets), uncanny eye for talent (providing future stars like Charles Bronson and Jack Nicholson with some of their earliest roles), and ability to churn out economically made genre crowd pleasers had made Corman one of the busiest filmmakers in Hollywood.īut when AIP approached him about shooting two black and white horror movies for less than $100,000 each on a 10-day shooting schedule, Corman balked. “I felt audiences would enjoy seeing them on the screen.”Ĭorman, who had produced his first film, The Monster from the Ocean Floor, in 1954 and had begun directing for AIP (then known as American Releasing Company) in 1955, had already helmed a slew of pictures in a number of different genres, including Apache Woman, Day the World Ended, It Conquered the World and many others, some for AIP and some for other companies or under his own banner. “This film was a gamble for all of us and yet I was prepared to take a gamble because I believed in the works of Edgar Allan Poe,” Price told film historian David Del Valle (in the liner notes for the Shout Factory Blu-ray set The Vincent Price Collection). It was 60 years ago this month that American International Pictures (AIP) released The Fall of the House of Usher (also known as just House of Usher), a film based on the classic 1839 short story by Edgar Allan Poe, produced and directed by a low-budget B-movie specialist named Roger Corman.Ĭorman recruited horror and sci-fi writer Richard Matheson ( I Am Legend) to adapt the Poe tale, while also hiring Vincent Price - already established as a horror star in films like The Fly and House on Haunted Hill - for the lead role (just one of four in the film) as the tormented, doomed Roderick Usher.
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