Matheson’s script is largely faithful to the decrepit, morbid atmosphere and main narrative beats of Poe’s story, although the nameless narrator of Poe’s tale is changed to Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), a young gentleman who has come to visit his fiancée, Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey). The incestuous sexual/horror relationship between them, it was just a fascinating situation.”Ĭorman had in fact pitched the Usher mansion as the movie’s monster when AIP questioned making a horror picture without a monster in it. ![]() ![]() “Surrounded by fog, deserted…and then within the house, the relationship between Roderick Usher and his sister. “What drew me to Fall of the House of Usher was first the macabre setting, the house itself,” Corman later told PBS’ American Masters. He pitched AIP an adaptation of the Poe story and the studio said yes. Tired with that kind of quick moviemaking, he instead proposed one movie for $200,000, shot in color on a 15-day schedule. His fast style of shooting (sometimes filming two completely different movies back to back on the same sets), uncanny eye for talent (providing future stars like Charles Bronson and Jack Nicholson with some of their earliest roles), and ability to churn out economically made genre crowd pleasers had made Corman one of the busiest filmmakers in Hollywood.īut when AIP approached him about shooting two black and white horror movies for less than $100,000 each on a 10-day shooting schedule, Corman balked. “I felt audiences would enjoy seeing them on the screen.”Ĭorman, who had produced his first film, The Monster from the Ocean Floor, in 1954 and had begun directing for AIP (then known as American Releasing Company) in 1955, had already helmed a slew of pictures in a number of different genres, including Apache Woman, Day the World Ended, It Conquered the World and many others, some for AIP and some for other companies or under his own banner. “This film was a gamble for all of us and yet I was prepared to take a gamble because I believed in the works of Edgar Allan Poe,” Price told film historian David Del Valle (in the liner notes for the Shout Factory Blu-ray set The Vincent Price Collection). ![]() It was 60 years ago this month that American International Pictures (AIP) released The Fall of the House of Usher (also known as just House of Usher), a film based on the classic 1839 short story by Edgar Allan Poe, produced and directed by a low-budget B-movie specialist named Roger Corman.Ĭorman recruited horror and sci-fi writer Richard Matheson ( I Am Legend) to adapt the Poe tale, while also hiring Vincent Price - already established as a horror star in films like The Fly and House on Haunted Hill - for the lead role (just one of four in the film) as the tormented, doomed Roderick Usher.
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