Let’s get one thing straight: House of Usher is the cinematic equivalent of a haunted doily—fragile, dusty, and aggressively dull. Touted as the birth of the Corman-Poe cycle and hailed by fans of “atmospheric horror” who apparently consider fog machines to be compelling characters, this 1960 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is less “gothic terror” and more “gothic NyQuil.” If you like your horror slow, talky, and wrapped in velvet curtains of self-importance, congratulations—your crypt is ready.
For the rest of us, it’s an agonizingly slow descent into the boggy swamp of cinematic somnambulism, where Vincent Price whispers pseudo-poetic drivel for 79 minutes while the world crumbles around him, both literally and figuratively. Spoiler alert: by the time the house collapses into the murky tarn, you’ll be praying your couch does the same so you never have to get up and turn off the TV.
📚 PLOT: A Funeral March With Dialogue
Let’s recap the “plot” (and I use the term generously): Handsome dullard Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon, who has all the screen presence of wet wallpaper) journeys to a gloomy mansion to rescue his betrothed, Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey), from her creepy brother Roderick (Vincent Price), who suffers from acute photophobia, melodrama, and an unchecked belief in inherited madness. Roderick insists the Usher bloodline is cursed and that any attempt at marrying his sister will spell doom, gloom, and more monologuing than anyone should endure in one lifetime.
Then—gasp!—Madeline collapses in the middle of an argument, suffering from catalepsy (the 19th-century version of “plot-convenient coma”). Roderick, doing his best impression of a gaslighting Victorian mortician, convinces everyone she’s dead and shoves her into the family crypt. Philip, who couldn’t detect red flags if they were smacking him in the face, accepts this without protest… until a chatty butler lets it slip that, oops, catalepsy is a thing.
Madeline awakens in her coffin (which, of course, does not come with a panic button), goes mad, strangles her brother, and sets the house on fire in the process. Philip escapes. The house collapses. The film ends. You, the viewer, remain dead inside.
🕵️ CHARACTERS: STIFFS BEFORE THEY’RE BURIED
Let’s talk about the cast. Vincent Price, in his first true Poe outing, leans into his role with the enthusiasm of a man reading funeral rites at a séance. He’s pale, fragile, and haunted—but instead of sinister, he’s just… sleepy. The man delivers his lines like a ghost forced to do community theater. His Roderick Usher is less tormented aristocrat, more socially anxious librarian with a flair for organ music and doomscrolling ancient family trees.
Mark Damon’s Philip is a textbook case of Gothic protagonist syndrome: brave, stupid, and relentlessly boring. He wanders the estate with all the curiosity of a man looking for the bathroom at a funeral. His only real talent is delivering exposition while looking mildly inconvenienced.
Myrna Fahey, as the tragically entombed Madeline, is little more than a human plot device. Her job is to faint, disappear, and eventually lurch around like a department store mannequin in a negligee, snarling revenge. It’s hard to feel anything for her fate when she spends most of the film as either furniture or an audio cue.
🏚️ ATMOSPHERE: FAKE FOG AND PAPER MANSIONS
Corman is often praised for achieving atmosphere on a shoestring budget. And to his credit, he did manage to stretch $300,000 across drapery, funeral-grade candles, and several pounds of dry ice. But atmosphere isn’t the same as tension, and just because everything looks like it smells like mildew doesn’t make it scary.
The mansion itself, while impressively morose, feels more like a theme park haunted house than a decaying relic of Gothic horror. The misshapen trees? Burned leftovers from a Hollywood Hills fire. The creepy crypt? Redressed sets from Universal’s clearance aisle. The fire that consumes the house? Footage of a barn burning in Orange County. And you can feel that bargain bin energy in every recycled frame.
Sure, the color scheme pops—Eastmancolor bleeds beautifully—but the mood is as dead as the family lineage. There’s no escalation, no dread, just endless monologues about bloodlines and the slow, dusty inevitability of fate. The house doesn’t fall—it slouches.
🎻 SCORE: MUSICAL ECTOPLASM
Les Baxter’s musical score is so overwrought it could be diagnosed with a Victorian nervous condition. Strings swell. Organs groan. Flutes flutter like bats on Xanax. And none of it matches the action onscreen, because there is no action onscreen. It’s like watching a tax seminar with a full orchestral accompaniment.
Rather than heightening suspense, the score acts like a spooked narrator screaming “SOMETHING IS HAPPENING” while the camera pans over a moldy bookshelf.
📼 LEGACY: CULT STATUS OR CULT-LIKE DEVOTION?
Now, let’s be fair. House of Usher is considered a classic by many—hell, the Library of Congress even preserved it in the National Film Registry. But then again, they also preserved Gigi, and no one’s calling that a horror masterpiece. Yes, this movie paved the way for a wave of Corman/Poe features. Yes, it helped resurrect gothic horror for drive-in crowds. But being first doesn’t make you best—it makes you expendable test footage.
Reverence for this film often stems from nostalgia or academic respect, not from genuine fear or thrills. Watch it with fresh eyes, and what you get is a tedious drawing-room drama in Halloween drag, mumbling about generational trauma while you wait for someone—anyone—to do something interesting.
🔥 FINAL WORDS: ENTOMB THIS CLASSIC WITH CAUTION
In House of Usher, Roger Corman set out to adapt Poe’s masterpiece and instead embalmed it in stagey theatrics and borrowed cobwebs. It’s not a horror film—it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you replace fear with florid monologues and action with architecture.
Vincent Price tries his best, the sets look decent for their budget, and the production history is mildly interesting. But none of that excuses the fact that this movie is boring, bloviating, and bloated with its own self-importance.
★ Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Cataleptic Corpses
Watch it only if you’re trapped in your own decaying mansion and can’t find the remote. Otherwise, give this house a wide berth and let the tarn claim it once and for all. 🕯️🔥
