I am recovering from my second bad cold of the year, and have spent much time over the past few days watching television just like I did during my summer sickness. At that time, I made the dreadful mistake of watching Netflix’s The Last Czars (with dawning and intensifying horror) but this time I went for classic horror and watched a succession of Poe adaptations, perfect for this time of year. I really fell for the The Fall of the House of Usher and streamed every version I could access: the Vincent Price/ Roger Corman version from 1960, the 1950 British film directed (and produced, and shot) by Ivan Burnett, and two very avant-garde silent versions from 1928, a short film produced by James Sibley Watson Jr. and Melville Webber in the US, and a longer French version directed by Jean Epstein entitled La Chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher). Then I read the short story again, read critiques of both the films and the story, and chased down all of the illustrations of the HOUSE that I could find: I assure you I seldom do this much preparation for a blog post but I was in a full sick-bed-induced Usher fever!
1931 Cheshire House edition with illustrations by Abner Epstein; 1950 British film version.
I can understand why this story has resonance with readers, filmmakers and illustrators; it’s enthralling on different levels, both in terms of its relationships and its setting. The central characters, Roderick and Madeline Usher (siblings in the original story and most film adaptations; spouses in Epstein’s film) are a very odd pair indeed and one could dwell on them for a while, but I agree with the appraisal of the narrator of the 1950 British film, who tells us that it all centers on the house. The Fall of the House of Usher has a double meaning: it’s the end of the line and the end of the house and we readers and/or watchers witness the destruction of both, mirroring each other. I’m so fixated on houses that I often think of them as sentient, so it’s almost reassuring to see one depicted that way.
The house exterior in the 1928 American film, the 1950 British Film, and the 1960 Roger Corman film; Jean Epstein’s 1928 film prefers to focus on its baronial interior.
As you can see, these are all Gothic/Victorian structures, characteristic of the haunted-house trope but not the decrepit old relics of Poe’s day: The Fall of the House of Usher was first published in 1839. When looking around for a spooky house, Poe, like Hawthorne, would probably have fixated on a seventeenth-century house, sometimes also called “medieval” here in America but never in Britain. There seems to be some consensus that the house which might have inspired Poe was the Hezekiah Usher House in Boston, built on Tremont Street in the 1680s by the namesake son of British America’s first bookseller. Hezekiah Jr. was also accused of witchcraft during the 1692 trials (of course–because there is always a Salem connection) but was apparently connected enough to avoid formal proceedings. When the Usher house was torn down around 1800, two skeletons were found in the basement, and that story might have caught Poe’s attention even though he never saw the house. And thus the haunted house trope is connected to another (or sub?) trope, someone/something is buried in the basement, in the story of The Fall of the House of Usher. It seems like a pretty straight line from Usher to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw to Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House to Sarah Waters’ Little Stranger (with many more titles in between) though I suppose the Castle of Otranto might have started the thread.
The House: illustrations by Robert Swain Gifford (1884); Daniel Walper (1922), Albert Dubout (1948), Arthur Rackham (1935) and Gris Grimly (2004).
Confronting a GEORGIAN haunted house: The Little Stranger (2018). Talk about a house-centered story! In both the film and the book, the house is a MAJOR character, even more so than in Usher. The juxtaposition of the airy (though decayed) Georgian and the “presence” heightens the tension, and you realize that possession has multiple meanings.
October 24th, 2019 at 8:26 am
Hi Donna,
Hope that you are feeling better. Regarding “Usher,” I agree that “In both the film and the book, the house is a MAJOR character, even more so than in Usher.”
In several of Poe’s other short stories, the setting is an enclosed space.To wit, the dark room in “The Tell Tale Heart,” the “vaults” in “The Cask of Amontillado,” the quarantined ballroom in “The Masque of Red Death.” Poe was master at describing these claustrophobic spaces where these weird and scary events occurred.
So appropriate to celebrate Poe’s legacy at Halloween …
October 24th, 2019 at 12:11 pm
I’ve never been a horror fan or even watcher. I’m scared way to easily, but your post has me curious. Which film version of the Fall of the House of Usher do you like best? I might steel myself to watch it with a friend for company and comfort.
Do hope you’ve recovered.
October 24th, 2019 at 12:47 pm
Feeling better, thanks! Well the short US version from 1928 is pretty wild! And short. But I think the English version from 1950 is my favorite.
October 26th, 2019 at 6:56 pm
I’ve done a bit of bingeing on horror myself over the summer, without your excuse of a cold. I happen to notice that “Night Gallery,” Rod Serling’s horror anthology TV series circa 1970, was about 50% based on existing stories adapted to TV. Some of the writers were masters in the field, others I’d never heard of. So I read all the stories, in chronological order of creation/publication, and watched all the adapted episodes. It was an interesting exercise.
Oldest story? Nothing as old as Poe. 1887 was the year, and the author was a former English academic who went on to write musical comedies for the stage, Adrian Ross.
Oldest story written by an American? 1903, from New England’s own Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, who later gloriously sabotaged William Dean Howells’ round-robin novel, “The Whole Family,” by introducing what we would now call a “cougar.”
Most definitely New England story? An adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model.”
October 26th, 2019 at 7:43 pm
Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman–she sounds familiar to me; but your whole study sounds ery interesting. I think we always thing horror is very current, but not so much.
October 26th, 2019 at 8:35 pm
I’ll probably run a series on the “Night Gallery” project when I get back to writing on my own blog. The biggest discovery was just how good a screenwriter Rod Serling was. His adaptations were generally superior to those of other adapters because he focused on the human element in the horror.
I’ve made a practice for several years to dig up a “moldy oldie” horror/supernatural story to read around Halloween. This “Night Gallery” project actually gave me this year’s read: beside having the oldest story adapted for “Night Gallery,” Adrian Ross wrote a horror novel in 1914 called “The Hole of the Pit,” set in England during the English Civil War, not long after Naseby.