Let’s go a path opposite of Branagh for a minute. Roger Corman, King of Cult movies, is famous for a fair amount of pioneering cinema history, opening the doors to dozens of great actors and directors, but also–for our purposes–creating movies on surprisingly low budgets. Branagh’s vast effects plazas dominate most films, but Corman knew how to make the most of a camera angle or silent moment. For every bombast by Branagh, a balancing silent raising of an eyebrow in Corman’s House of Usher.

Of course the films are decades apart. Just a few years before Branagh, Corman had already dined on Shelley’s story with Frankenstein: Unbound (1990), though I doubt John Hurt, Raul Julia, and Bridget Fonda spoke much about it afterwards. But in 1960, Corman was beginning what was to become his “Poe Cycle,” seven films which nearly all starred Vincent Price. 

Adapting a book to film, of course, is always challenging, and so much of the Poe story is lengthy setting and narrative description, the first question we’d have to ask is How do you turn mood into compelling visual action? Part of Corman’s answer was to hire Price who could, as we would now describe it, “ham up” any scene to exaggerate the drama, dialogue or no. Corman also–for the first time for him–chose to make a horror film in color. But finally, and for me most important, was the hiring of Richard Matheson.

Matheson himself is a fairly brilliant writer (I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, A Stir of Echoes, several original Twilight Zones), and it was clear the film needed to be expanded from its original 11,000 word story. For this, Matheson and Corman made the sister Madeline a much larger character: rather than have her virtually a silent specter about the house (Poe), Matheson has her the object of conflict between the two men (Roderick/Price wants to “protect” his sister, and Philip/Mark Damon/narrator is there to bring his fiancé back to the city). What follows is a kind of duel between the two men over Madeline’s fate.

Slow, Slow

Now I won’t go further into the similarities and differences between the two versions: there are plenty of changes, creepy rooms, intense promises, and slow bizarre scenes of lute playing. In their own way, with Price on the screen, they’re golden. On their own, however, as a film, the changes made almost betray the claustrophobic prose of Poe’s story. 

Poe’s paragraphs stretch across the page with lugubrious speed and oppressiveness, sealing in narrator and reader with the sick and perhaps mad Roderick Usher. The “slow burn” revelations of that madness, of the “curse,” of the history of the house and family, of Roderick’s determination, are all present in the film, but what brings them to the fore in the movie, what unsettles us, I think, are two quite different tactics.

“What exactly is this curse that is alive as Roderic believes the house is? Why can only he see and hear it at times?​”

Madeline as Literary Technique

The first is Corman’s slow camera and Price’s pacing. Hamminess or brilliance or both, Price’s Roderic is unpredictable, ever on the edge of a terrible act. Where Poe’s Roderic is more a lamenting victim ever awaiting destruction, we trust that Price’s will set himself to bringing it about. 

Combined with this, though, is the nature of that act. Critics of the original Poe story rightly suggest that the mostly silent Madeline (who never acknowledges our narrator) is a prop, a stand-in for Roderic’s own psychosis, for the supernatural element of the house, for both. And it is through that connection (one in the story shared by twins) that we also wonder at Madeline’s role as potential victim of incest. Poe’s story offers the darker potential (unmentionable in his age) of this overlapping sign: twin sister/house/supernatural/unconscious. What exactly is this curse that is alive as Roderic believes the house is? Why can only he see and hear it at times? And Poe’s language, its thickness and slow churning, parallel these possibilities.

Corman and Matheson change this somewhat. We still wonder at Roderic’s motive for keeping Madeline at the house forever, his possessiveness. It makes for a crazed stance against the more “legitimate” claim of Philip. It also may cause us to wonder/worry that Roderic’s desire is incestuous (Madeline is clearly living through some type of trauma and there are too many scenes in her bedroom with men looming over her). More, what Matheson and Corman perhaps unwittingly have paralleled is the very concept of possession of women, of their objectification as spoils of desire. 

Externalizing What, Exactly?

What was once only in Poe Roderic’s mind has now become an externalized conflict between Price Roderic and narrator/Philip. What Madeline actually wants (though she is frequently asked) is less important than she give the right answer to each of the men hovering over her. In the film, Madeline “dies” in the bedroom alone with Price, the terrible act we had been anticipating is realized. Fortunately, we do not have to wait two weeks for Madeline to crawl out of her tomb. 

Like so many of Poe’s tales, the unconscious/bird/house/woman/tomb/symbol sentences the man to his grief and fate, despair and death. 

For myself, Corman and Matheson made a film that is cult-worthy tripe in its own right, but somehow—with the help of Price’s eyebrows and innuendo coupled with a prejudice to objectification in both works—transformed Poe successfully (but not gratefully) to the screen.

Experiments in Translation