HOUSE OF USHER (1960)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are almost never adapted accurately by the cinema, and for good reason. Many of them, including THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, are strong on mood but weak on the sort of narrative drive that commercial movies require. Thus it’s no surprise that when director Roger Corman and screenwriter Richard Matheson attempted to do a tony rendition of Poe’s “sort-of-haunted-house” story, they changed many aspects of the original tale. Given Corman’s reputation for having never met a dollar he didn’t like, it’s surprising that from the standpoint of production values, the Corman USHER looks extremely good. Even more startling, the script shows a great deal of care regarding what Matheson kept from Poe and what he replaced with material more accessible to movie audiences.

One concession to such expectations was that when most moviegoers went to see a haunted house film, they expected to see one or most potential victims constantly harried by unseen, often deadly forces. In the Poe story the forbidding appearance of the house symbolizes the decayed nature of its occupants, but the house itself doesn’t do anything to anyone. One sizeable change is that throughout Matheson’s screenplay, the house seems to menace viewpoint character Philip Winthrop. To Matheson’s credit, he never explicitly attributes the Usher house’s poltergeist-like activity to ghosts as such, even though Winthrop is given some reason to suspect the existence of ancestral specters.

Winthrop himself usurps the place of the nameless viewpoint character of the Poe story. The narrator is a nearly disinterested observer, whereas Winthrop follows in the tradition of the earnest young man seeking to win a young woman from a tyrannical family. Further, Matheson inverts the narrator’s relationship to the two main characters. In the prose tale, the narrator knows nothing of Roderick’s sister Madeleine, but was acquainted long ago with Roderick when the two men went to school together. In the movie, Winthrop comes to Usher House knowing nothing of Roderick, having met Madeline when she, for unspecified reasons, lived for a time in Boston. Whereas Nameless Narrator arrives at Usher with no foreknowledge of Roderick’s current ailment, Winthrop shows up with no inkling that Madeline or her brother suffers from assorted congenital problems.

In the prose tale, the emphasis focuses on Roderick’s amplified senses, which are linked to his nature as a cultured aesthete, rich in literary and musical knowledge. The narrator barely sees Madeline at first, almost as if she were Roderick’s shadow, and indeed the two are said to be twins. Matheson’s Madeline makes more of a show of independence, implying that she may've sought to avoid the death of the Usher line by finding an exogamous mate in Boston. Yet the script never gives an outright reason for her return to her brother’s side. Roderick comes closest to explaining the discontinuity when he tells Winthrop that neither he nor his sister dare marry, precisely because they possess so many degenerative illnesses.

Poe never attributes the frailties of the Usher line to that usual suspect, inbreeding, though it’s impossible not to read some subconscious incest-vibe in the relationship of the siblings. Poe, given his love of rarified aesthetics, might well have accepted inbreeding as the necessary consequence of keeping the line pure. Poe would have had even less interest in the notion of the Usher family being degenerate due to “the sins of the fathers,” and it seems likely that Matheson borrowed this “sins of the fathers” trope from another famous quasi-haunted manse, Hawthorne’s HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. Matheson’s Roderick ties in the degeneracy of his ancestors to the prevalent illnesses of his family, and though Winthrop intellectually rejects this notion, it’s he who dreams of the ancestors rising up to prevent him from rescuing Madeline.

But one can forgive all the digressions from the original, given that Matheson ably captures the essence of the interdependence of Roderick and Madeline with regard to that favorite Poe-trope, the fear of being buried alive. The prose tale and the movie have this much in common: that Roderick entombs Madeline because he perversely wants to see the Usher line perish with the two of them. Matheson was perceptive enough to keep Roderick’s perversity more intellectual than sexual, eschewing the Freudianisms that later crop up in PIT AND THE PENDULUM. And the film’s big climax also involves making Madeline more overtly vengeful for her burial. In the Poe story, though she somehow claws her way back to the living world, the author is circumspect about the way that she kills Roderick, almost as if they perish in a mutual paroxysm. Matheson is careful to mention early on that the mad Usher line can sometimes manifest fantastic strength, leaving no doubt as to the forces unleashed when the petite Myrna Fahey falls upon and strangles towering Vincent Price.

Putting aside one spear-carrier figure, the film is essentially a drama between the three principals. Mark Damon and Myrna Fahey are decent in their roles, but Price is clearly the centerpiece of the story. The actor may have foreseen the challenge of Roderick, for Price’s performance is at once mannered and restrained. Though a purer version of the Poe story is certainly conceivable, the Corman HOUSE OF USHER is unlikely to be overshadowed any time in the near future.