My contribution to Cinefantastique Online‘s 50th anniversary reviews and retrospectives from films of 1960 is now available as I look at House of Usher (alternatively The Fall of the House of Usher). This film was a pleasure to revisit as one of my favorites growing up. Roger Corman excelled with a series of horror films based upon the works of Edgar Allen Poe. All but one of them starred Vincent Price, who turns in a wonderful performance in this atmospheric film. From my review:
HOUSE OF USHER, and the other series of Poe films directed by Corman, have the distinction of being part of the brief revival of American gothic horror that had been fueled by television broadcasts of the Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the fresh interpretations of these classics by Britain’s Hammer Films. While this classification has some merit, HOUSE OF USHER may also be understood as a hybrid in keeping with another trend in horror from the period. HOUSE OF USHER is in a sense Gothic, in that it takes place against the backdrop of a mansion that appears at first glance to be a haunted house; however, it is not haunted in typical supernatural fashion by ghosts or poltergeists. Instead, the haunting of the Usher House takes place through the troubled psyches of the homeowners who wrestle with their family legacy. In this sense it is similar to another classic of 1960 cinema, PSYCHO, which signaled a shift from supernatural horror in the 1930s and 1940s, and the science-fiction-horror of the 1950s, to an internalization of horror (horror is not the supernatural other; it is us) that would later take a quantum leap forward with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
House of Usher can be purchased through the TheoFantastique Store at this link, or it can be viewed online via Amazon’s Video on Demand.
