House of Usher (

1960

) ½

Roger Corman spent the first five years of his career, steadily churning out more than 20 black and white low-budget films in a variety of genres. By 1960, he was desperate to direct a movie with a halfway decent budget, one that would allow him to shoot in color. According to Corman's autobiography, How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime, the director asked the AIP studio bosses for the budgets they had planned to use to finance his next two pictures all at once to make one really lavish (by AIP standards anyway) film. The studio heads at AIP, in an uncharacteristically risky move, decided to take a shot on it and acceded to Corman's request. Given how hard it was to get the money to shoot in color, and how long Corman had waited for this chance, it's unsurprising that he uses color the same way a man who just wandered through the desert would use an oasis. The main character, Philip Winthrop, rather than sporting the usual drab colors one expects of men's formal attire from the last couple of centuries, is decked out in a bright blue suit. Winthrop looks downright normal when compared to the floor-length scarlet robes worn by the sinister Roderick Usher. The colors are so unnaturally vibrant that it reminds me more of early Technicolor films like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) than of the more muted (and realistic) palette employed in contemporary movies like Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and the Guns of Navarone (1961). Hell, even contemporary fantasy stories like Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and The Mysterious Island (1961) looks downright plain alongside House of Usher. Visually, this film is ravishing, and I have no doubt that it, and its successors, played a role in the origin of the neon-lit nightmares of Italian filmmakers like Mario Bava and Dario Argento.

The story follows Philip Winthrop, a dandy from Boston, who goes looking for his lover, Madeline Usher after she disappears suddenly from the state capital. Philip isn't going to be dissuaded so easily, so he tracks Madeline down to her ancestral home, in one of the more desolate corners of rural New England. The house itself is so decrepit that it looks like it wouldn't be able to stand up to a stiff breeze, let alone the annual snowfall it was sure to endure, and the land around the house is so blighted that you might mistake this gothic romance for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie at first glance. Philip's welcome in this dreary environment is anything but warm. Both Madeline's brother Roderick and his manservant Bristol try to turn Winthrope away at the door. They only agree to let him in because The Ushers are 19th-century aristocrats if nothing else, and while they've heard of the concept of rudeness they haven't fully internalized it yet.

The house has a serious case of The Old Dark House (1932) syndrome, with it falling into ruin at about the same speed with which its inhabitants descend into madness. For now, Madeline seems normal enough but her brother Roderick Usher is certifiable and even their manservant Bristol seems more than a little bit cracked. Roderick says that all the Usher's eventually become afflicted with a morbid acuteness of the senses, meaning every sound above a whisper or light brighter than a dim candle is all but unbearable for them. At least light and sound can be controlled and accounted for, what worries me is the smell. I can think of few things worse than a morbid acuteness of the olfactory sense in a pre-modern age where bathing was something reserved for special occasions. According to Roderick, the Usher curse goes far beyond an unfortunate sensitivity of smell, because anyone carrying the Usher bloodline eventually turns completely and irredeemably evil. Consequently, Roderick refuses to let Madeline and Philip get married, because any children they have would also carry the same cursed blood of their mother and continue to blight the earth with their very existence.

While it sounds crazy, Roderick does have some evidence to back up his theory. The Usher family has produced more than its fair share of murderers, criminals, madmen, and deviants. Roderick gives us a detailed summary of the family lore as he shows off the family portraits to Philip is an attempt to convince him that the bloodline really is cursed. The portraits are anachronistic as all hell, by the way, looking more like something from a Francis Bacon exhibit than anything you'd be likely to find in 19th century America. This style of these portraits just didn't exist at this point in history, that kind of grotesque art would need a world war or two before it really entered into the Western imagination. That said, they fit perfectly in the world of the film capturing a grotesque, gothic horror that makes sense inside the decaying Usher manor. It's a textbook case of verisimilitude vs realism and shows why it's perfectly acceptable to sacrifice the later to further the former.

Despite the constant warnings and the outright demands that he leave, Philip is not going to be dissuaded. He's convinced that there's no such thing as a familial curse and that Roderick is just some nutter whose delusions are keeping his sister a prisoner. If Madeline is going a little crazy herself, it's perfectly understandable given the situation she's stuck in, moving her back to a normal living condition away from her brother will fix that quick enough. So, he plans to make off with Madeline at the earliest possible opportunity and she, albeit reluctantly, seems amenable to the plan. Too bad she dies suddenly that night, or at least appears to at any rate. Roderick quickly arranges for Madeline to be entombed in the family crypt underneath the foundations of the manor (which is again, totally unrealistic they live in a colonial mansion, not a medieval castle, but perfectly fitting the tone and style). Philip is heartbroken until he realizes that Roderick and Bristol are trying to bamboozle him and that Madeline was buried alive. But even if Roderick was lying about Madeline's death, he might have been telling the truth about the family curse.

There is a central absurdity that I was troubled by as I watched House of Usher: How in the hell did Madeline get to Boston in the first place? She's all but a prisoner in the family estate, and Roderick hardly seems like the sort to let her out for something as trivial as an education. Why waste time and money on a finishing school when you believe the whole lineage is a blight on the earth that should be wiped out at all costs? If Madeline was able to escape this environment once, then how the hell did she get drawn back in? Maybe Roderick wasn't always so convinced of the inevitability of the family curse, maybe this is a position he's only come to recently. But if that is the case, then how the hell did he manage to get Madeline to agree with him so quickly? Surely, if she's spent anytime at all outside of the family house she can see how loony this all is. No matter which way you look at it, the backstory to this film doesn't hold up.

This is just a bit of troublesome fridge logic though compared to the film's main flaw: The love story between Madeline and Philip just isn't convincing. Normally, this wouldn't be such a serious mark against a horror movie, as normally the love story is just a tacked-on space filler. But the romance here is much more than just a product of an inept screenwriter (Richard Matherson, author of I am Legend and the screenwriter for Duel (1971) is many things, but certainly not inept), its the main motivation for the central character and the crux on which the whole plot stands. So the fact that neither of these two people seems particularly in love strikes me as a rather serious problem. The actors themselves lack much in the way of chemistry, and they aren't helped much by Matherson's script (Matherson is much better at depicting people falling out of love than those still lost in its heady embrace). I suspect that having Corman in the director's chair was also something of a liability, as despite dating many beautiful women (almost all actresses, Corman was a workaholic and consequently didn't meet many women who weren't actresses) the director was still years away from finding real love himself in the form of his future spouse Julie Corman. It's hard to give good direction about romance when your own experience has been so tepid.

Still, it would be wrong to completely condemn such a passionate exciting movie for failing to get one of the most complicated and nuanced human emotions right. House of Usher is on much firmer ground when dealing with more conventional horror topics, particularly when exploring the boundary between reality and madness. Is Roderick crazy or does he really have a point about the curse of the Usher family? Is Madeline truly dead or is it all another delusion? The whole setting is intentionally dreamlike, which puts us on edge from the moment we step into the titular household until it is consumed by flames in the stunning climax. Visually the movie is gorgeous, from the light to the costumes. The sets, in particular, capture a tarnished splendor of a once opulent house flawlessly. Seldom has there been a film where a higher percentage of the budget wound up onscreen. Corman was obviously well served by his half-decade making films on a miserly budget, because here (and in his superior follow-ups) he demonstrates an unparalleled economy of film-making.