![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Coupled with Corman’s whip-smart direction and quick turnaround (the film was shot in 15 days), a rousing Les Baxter score and Price’s star quality, the style established here would be carried over in seven more Poe films, ending with The Tomb of Ligeia in 1964. Richard Matheson’s intelligent script is enhanced by Floyd Crosby’s atmospheric widescreen cinematography, whose psychedelic scenes tapped into the counter-culture movement of the day, while Daniel Haller makes the hired-in Universal sets look even more sumptuous. It was a performance that would solidify Price’s new status as the crown prince of horror – that had kicked in while he was working on William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler – and which makes this film so chillingly memorable over half a century on. Price gives an intentionally concentrated, eerie and sad turn here and lends the film a mellifluous quality that brings to life Corman’s Freudian take on Poes themes of inner corruption. The result was this minor masterpiece, which stays faithful to Poe as it tells the story of Roderick Usher (played by Price as a white haired, ashen faced aesthete, decked in a blood red robe) who longs for an end to his family’s curse which has impregnated the very walls of his crumbling mansion and has distorted his psyche and that of his sister – which is chillingly echoed in the line: ‘The slightest touch and we may shatter’. Indie maverick Roger Corman quickly followed suit, combining America’s answer to the gothic, Edgar Allen Poe, CinemaScope and his trump card, Vincent Price. But he is unaware that Roderick has buried his catatonic sister alive…Īt the end of the 1950s, rubber suit monsters were the mainstay of American horror films, while over the pond Hammer was packing cinemas with their full-blooded restaging of the Frankenstein and Dracula characters. When Madeleine suddenly dies, Philip goes into mourning and his intended bride is quickly interred in the family crypt. In this striking 1960 elaboration on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) arrives at the crumbling New England mansion of the Usher family to seek out his fiancée Madeleine (Myrna Fahey) and is promptly warned by her brother Roderick (Vincent Price) against marriage because the family is cursed with ‘a history of savage degradations’ which sends them mad. ![]()
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