Burning Down The House

According to his autobiography and many many interviews over the years, Roger Corman made the first of the Poe films, House of Usher (1960), out of a sense of exhaustion. He had been making three and five day wonders like Little Shop of Horrors, The Creature from the Haunted Sea, and Bucket of Blood for a couple of years at that point and he was tired of the go go go nature of that kind of filmmaking. He wanted to slow down. More, he wanted to make something that was aesthetically a cut above the films he was making. Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson, Corman's nominal bosses at AIP were amenable. The kinds of films Corman had been making were starting to play out to diminishing box office and they were keen on the next big thing for the drive-in theaters that were their primary market. To hear Corman tell it, they weren't keen on Poe, but Corman was persuasive. They gave him a shooting budget of $200,000--a fortune compared to their usual budgets, but modest compared to the industry--and let him have his head. That's the official story, anyway. I think what actually happened was somewhat different. I think Corman, Arkoff, and Nicholson looked covetously at the box office returns of Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula and decided that the Gothic horror movie on the Hammer model was the next wave and acted accordingly. They weren't alone in this, either. Filmmakers in Europe and America were already eyeing a Gothic revival and Gothics came to dominate the horror marketplace during the first half of the 1960s. Don't think Corman wasn't aware of this. He was quick to poach Barbara Steele for his second Poe movie. Whatever the actual origins of the Poe movies, Corman started work on House of Usher in late 1959. It took him fifteen days to shoot it in January of the next year for a summer release. It was a huge hit.

House of Usher opens on the desolate landscape around the ancestral home of the Ushers and follows one Philip Winthrop as he seeks to gain entree into the mansion to see his fiance, Madeline Usher. Standing in his way is her brother, Roderick, who tells Winthrop that the engagement was a mistake. The Ushers, it seems, are in decline, and Madeline is in confinement for an undisclosed illness. Roderick Usher, for his part, suffers from a heightened sense of hearing such that loud noises and raised voices cause him excruciating pain. Madeline is happy to see Winthrop, but has conceded that she should stay with her brother through her final illness. She was always destined to die young, she says. Winthrop insists on staying, then. When night falls, Winthrop wanders through the house chasing odd sounds, until he finds Madeline out and about. She sleepwalks, the Usher's manservant, Bristol, tells him. Eventualy Madeline takes Winthrop into the family crypt, where she shows Winthrop the casket where she will eventually lie. This hardens Winthrop's resolve to remove Madeline from the house that very day. Roderick takes a hand and gives Winthrop a tour of the family history, and the evil that has been done in the Usher name. It infests the house, he says, and their blood. There is no escaping it. Indeed, the house it self suffers tremors and can be seen attempting to do Winthrop harm. When Madeline agrees to leave with Winthrop, she has a huge argument with Roderick, culminating in her collapse into apparent death. Roderick, Bristol, and Winthrop place Madeline in her intended casket, but during the funeral, Roderick notices Madeline twitch her fingers. He shuts up the casket to hide this from Winthrop and they take her to the crypt. Bristol lets slip to Winthrop that the Ushers are prone to catelepsy, spurring Winthrop to charge down into the crypt to see Madeline's body for himself, but he's too late. She still haunts the house of Usher, but she is now quite insane...

The core elements of the Corman Poe films are in place from the outset. Vincent Price is on hand, and delivers a performance as Roderick Usher that would resurface again and again as the 1960s went on. He's an effete, neurasthenic madman in this film, and would only depart from this model occasionally over the course of the Poe films. Screenwriter Richard Matheson would write several of the Poe films, and he brought the economy of his own work to adapting Poe, distilling the core of the story to something that could be filmed while taking liberties with the material to make it commercial and to pad the length--Poe wrote short stories almost exclusively. Corman had his eye on the box office, always, and if he couldn't make the Poe films commercial, there was no point. It was an ideal pairing of director and screenwriter. Also on hand is production designer Daniel Haller, who had a gift for making the resources at his disposal look vastly more expensive. It helped that House of Usher was a chamber piece featuring only four speaking parts. What Corman saved in salary, he poured into the production itself. The score by Les Baxter is less ideal. It has a tendency to highlight moments that aren't there on screen. But then, he composed the score in a hurry and recorded it in a single day, so one makes allowances. Some of the matte paintings created for the film were by the great Albert Whitlock, though he worked on Usher unbilled, presumably because he was under contract to Disney. While the technical limitations of budget and era are fully in force in this film, it manages the tricky feat of translating the end of Poe's story into a visual that is almost poetic.

House of Usher gave Corman the opportunity to demonstrate his chops as a director and separate himself from low-budget grifters like Ron Ormond or Bert I. Gordon. This is most apparent in the way Corman composes some of his scenes in depth, in particular the scene between Winthrop and Madeline in the crypt and Madeline's funeral. In the former, Corman runs up against some of the limitations of shooting in depth and cameraman Floyd Crosby occasionally loses the image's focus, probably because the set was underlit. Madeline's funeral looks to have been shot with a split diopter or possibly as a matted double exposure, with Madeline in clear focus in the foreground and Winthrop and Roderick in equally clear focus in the background. Corman got better at these kinds of compositions as the Poe movies went on and the last ones are especially attractive.

Corman's urge to experiment is in force with the dream sequence late in the film, in a style that would later be called "psychedelic." Corman loved his dream sequences, and the Poe films were a proving ground for the effects he would employ in films like The Trip at the end of the 1960s. Usher also shows off Corman as an opportunist. The footage of Winthrop riding through a blasted landscape at the start of the film was shot in the aftermath of a wildfire, while the climax of the film is a barn Corman was allowed to burn. He liked the burning barn footage so much that he used it for several of the other Poe films and later lamented that if he had known that people would be able to watch them all so close together, he would have thought twice about his frugality. These kinds of improvisations are something that the filmmakers who worked for Corman in the 1960s would refashion into a key element of the American New Wave films of the 1970s. Corman's use of "found" images wasn't above outright thievery, either. The scene that conveys the true horror of Madeline's entombment is stolen wholesale from Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.

House of Usher is a full-dress Gothic, complete with blasted landscape, crumbling manor, blowing curtains (literally), family secrets, even a dungeon. As a narrative, it follows the high Gothic technique of slow reveal rather than diving into the horrors. Corman is keen on Freudian interpretations of Gothic horror--his interviews and disc commentaries are explicit on this point--and he structures the film a bit like slow intercourse, building to an ecstatic climax. But House of Usher invites scrutiny from a feminist point of view over and above Corman's stated intent. At the level of its basic construction, it's about two men in conflict over the agency of a woman. Roderick goes even further than that: he sees Madeline herself as a threat to his position as family patriarch and his willingness to continue with her entombment even after he knows she is alive is indicative of a man who will break a woman unto death if she defies him. It doesn't take a lot of mental calculus to suspect that Madeline's ailments are the result of systematic gaslighting on the part of her brother, though the film is ambiguous on this point given her demonstrated capacity for catalepsy. Winthrop is no less a patriarch even if the film chooses to view him as a white knight. The film is a cautionary tale about the danger of the monstrous feminine, with its madwoman in the crypt rather than in the attic.

I don't think anyone involved with House of Usher expected it to be as successful as it turned out to be. It was the fifth-highest grossing film of 1960, almost all of it pure profit. The returns on House of Usher funded all of the subsequent Poe movies and more besides for years afterwards. It concluded the process of transforming Vincent Price into America's favorite boogeyman--ongoing since House of Wax--making his name synonymous with horror movies until the end of his days. And because Corman was first to market with his take on Poe, he got the franchise. His name--and Vincent Price's name, too--was to be linked with Edgar Allan Poe's forevermore.

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As an aside, House of Usher is the basis for one of my favorite Famous Monsters of Filmland covers, painted by the great Basil Gogos. This is it:

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