In preparation for filming “The Landlord”, I’ve been bingeing on horror movies from Dark Star Video, Chicago’s finest boutique video shop (the only one I’ve bothered keeping a membership for, post-Netflix). Anyhow, just for the sake of posting something new to the public section of this website, I thought I’d type a few words about my recent rentals, starting with…
HOUSE OF USHER
Let me tell you, if there’s anyone in Hollywood who knows how to turn chicken shit into chicken pot pie, it’s Roger Corman. The cost-conscious director/producer milked the public domain works of Edgar Allen Poe for all they were worth, cranking out seven films based on Poe’s stories between 1960 and 1964, most of them starring Vincent Price, none of them costing more than $300,000 ($2 million in today’s dollars). While not the best of the series (that would be Masque of the Red Death, Price’s favorite and my own), House of Usher was the first and most profitable, ranking among the top 5 grossing films of 1960.
Judged as a Poe adaptation, House of Usher takes a lot of liberties that, while necessary to stretch the short story to a feature length film, don’t flatter the original. Judged by its own merits, however, it’s pretty solid 60s horror. The sensibilities are strictly 18/19th-century gothic: creaking doors, falling chandeliers, bubbling cauldrons, sleepwalking maidens, moldy crypts, freaky paintings, skeletons, etc. Until the final confrontation, not much happens. Mostly, it’s just the locals telling the hero that bad things will happen if he hangs around, and the hero refusing to listen to them. What little violence there is is mostly implicit - somebody screams off-camera, and the hero rushes to the scene to find an empty room with an open window. The exterior sets are all shrouded in three feet of smoke and mist, sometimes colored with eerie green light. The interior sets are full of blood-red paraphenalia - from the carpets to the drapes to the candles to Vincent Price’s pimpin’ 19th-century suit… there’s even an obligatory scene at a banquet table with the villain serving the hero red wine in a blood-red glass.
What sets the film apart is Vincent Price’s decision to play the villain not as a menacing monster, but as an effete, soft-spoken wuss. His Roderick Usher is a physical weakling who can’t even handle loud noises or itchy clothes, with no stomach for arguments and no real capacity for violence. Yet it’s this very passivity that makes the character unsettling. He tells the hero that something awful is going to happen, and makes it clear that he won’t intervene when it does. It raises the question of which is scarier - the thing that pulls you under the water, or the person on the shore who stands idly by, indifferent to your screams, watching you drown. I heard a story once about how more than 50 commuters sat and watched a man beat a woman to death alongside a Los Angeles highway in the midst of a traffic jam - to this day, I find the reaction of the drivers more disturbing than the action of the murderer.
On the commentary, Corman mentions that the studio insisted he film the movie in Cinemascope, the hot new technology of the time, simply because they had the camera and wanted to put “in Cinemascope” on the posters. Never mind that Cinemascope is intended to make sweeping outdoor panoramas look even more panoramic (think Sound of Music or the deserts in Lawrence of Arabia) while House of Usher mostly takes place in - well - a house. And while the Cinemascope camera did help make the slightly cramped set for the titular house’s main hall look imposing, most of the time it either had no appreciable effect or just made the frames feel strangely empty. Definitely something to think about when considering using some snazzy new technology just because one can…
