House of Usher

With a clang from a leaden door knocker, the first of Roger Corman’s eight Edgar Allan Poe treatments creaks open unpromisingly, wreathed in sickly mists and puffing cobwebs, a gothic horror with a suspected case of terminal anaemia. But as love-snagged caller Phillip Winthrope (Mark Damon) enters the Usher abode, a furnace of hyper-sensation ignites.

A mansion interior is rendered oil-painting-vivid in graphic reds and burning blues that claw at the screen, while decadence shrieks from ornate chests and wizened furniture. Resplendent in crimson velvet, Roderick (Vincent Price) slithers forth to deliver his sister, Madeleine (Myrna Fahey), from her insipid suitor with mesmeric prognostications of doom and lute-plucking, while uncanny events waltz in cycles of dread and consequence. It guards thrills like a miser for the first hour, but through mannered performances and feverish atmosphere House of Usher is a deliciously dated plunge into horror-film heritage.