House of Usher

Name: House of Usher
Genre: Drama, Horror
Released: June 18, 1960
Duration: 79 min
Rating: 75
Cast: Bill Borzage, David Andar, Eleanor LeFaber, Harry Ellerbe, Mario Bellini

1960

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Generally favorable reviews based on 8 Critic Reviews

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Generally favorable reviews based on 8 Ratings

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7.1	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 8 Ratings

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The Fall Of The House Of Usher

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Movie Details & Credits

American International Pictures (AIP) | Release Date: June 18, 1960 | Approved

Starring: Bill Borzage, David Andar, Eleanor LeFaber, Harry Ellerbe, Mario Bellini, Mark Damon, Myrna Fahey, Nadajan, Ruth Oklander, Vincent Price

Summary: Upon entering his fiancée's family mansion, a man discovers a savage family curse and fears that his future brother-in-law has entombed his bride-to-be prematurely.

Director: Roger Corman

Genre(s): Drama, Horror

Rating: Approved

Runtime: 79 min

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Metascore

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Critic Reviews

100

Marc Savlov

Corman's legendary parsimony has rarely been so inobvious; House of Usher has the look and feel of a film made for far more than its tiny $200K budget (and on a tight, 15-day shooting schedule). Its authentically creepy dream-sequence – all grasping hands and hazy blue-gelled fog swirls – is a minor surrealist masterpiece by its own right. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The first of Corman's eight-film Poe cycle, and one of his most faithful adaptations. Price is his usual impressive self as the almost certainly incestuously inclined Roderick Usher who, having buried his sister alive when she falls into a cataleptic trance, becomes the victim of her ghostly revenge; but it is Corman's overall direction that lends the film its intelligence and power. Read full review

Keith Phipps

Working from a script by Richard Matheson that spins Poe’s story to feature length, Corman, cinematographer Floyd Crosby (father of David), and composer and exotica icon Les Baxter create a hallucinatory swirl of a movie that has the feel of an especially sharp nightmare. Read full review

TV Guide Magazine Staff (Not Credited)

Price is wonderful as the spooky owner, but the other three players are merely adequate. But still a superlative Corman/AIP effort and a great beginning to a varying but always interesting series of horror films. Read full review

Dave Kehr

Corman's filmmaking runs on unchanneled energy and apocalyptic emotions; his is an art without craft. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

In patronizingly romanticizing Poe's venerable prose, scenarist Richard Matheson has managed to preserve enough of the original's haunting flavor and spirit. The elaborations change the personalities of the three central characters, but not recklessly so. Read full review

Eugene Archer

Under the low-budget circumstances, Vincent Price and Myrna Fahey should not be blamed for portraying the decadent Ushers with arch affectation, nor Mark Damon held to account for the traces of Brooklynese that creep into his stiffly costumed impersonation of the mystified interloper. Read full review

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FilipeNeto

Nov 1, 2021

A very interesting film, with good suspense premises and a Victorian environment that knows how to involve us.

This film is, very basically, a very light and uncompromising adaptation of the Edgar Alan Poe short story of the same name. It's not an extraordinary film: it's full of the usualA very interesting film, with good suspense premises and a Victorian environment that knows how to involve us.

This film is, very basically, a very light and uncompromising adaptation of the Edgar Alan Poe short story of the same name. It's not an extraordinary film: it's full of the usual cinema clichés of its time (we need to understand this well) and sometimes it looks a lot like a play in the way the actors act, which also seems to me to be fits reasonably into the cinematographic style of that time. Still, it's an enjoyable film, has a good cast, good sets and costumes, a pleasantly dense, Victorian atmosphere, and a story that has coherence and elegance.

I won't go into the script too much, I think the skeleton of the tale is very present even though there is a good deal of invention mixed up. As the house is a character in the tale and a symbol of decay, moral and mental, of the family that inhabits it, it played a very important role in the plot, although it is evident throughout the film that its inhabitants are the real villains.

Vincent Price is a good actor and brings us here another excellent work, where he embodies a crazy villain, but very dignified and chivalrous, with ademands of old aristocracy. I liked his work, but as I mentioned, I felt the actor was, at times, overly theatrical. It's an option that I understand, however, and it seems to me to be coherent with the style of the film, as a whole. Mark Damon is decent for the role of “knight in shining armor” the script reserves for him, and does a satisfying job. Myrna Fahey is also a good choice to play the “damsel in distress”, with the right to fainting and occasional hysteria.

On a technical level, it seems to me to be a contained film, perhaps because of a limited budget and a conscious commitment to creating an interesting story, based on the work of the cast. The cinematography is not particularly remarkable, but it has good colors and light, a good filming job, and the editing was also well done, with the film dragging in places, but without this making us really tired. The house, an additional character to the story, is very elegant and suitably dreary, with settings denoting elegance. I liked the detail that the family portraits are basically modernist works where the face is distorted. With an excellent work of environment, the film works very well for fans of gothic suspense.… Expand

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