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The Fall of the House of Usher
In a decaying castle surrounded by a dank, mirrored lake live the morbidly nervous Roderick Usher and his sickly twin sister, Madeline. Their tale is told and dimly comprehended by the unnamed narrator, a boyhood friend whom Roderick has summoned. When Madeline soon dies—or seems to die—they entomb her body. On a stormy night, "cracking and ripping" sounds and a "shriek" from below convince the panicky Roderick that "We have put her living into the tomb!" The shrouded, emaciated figure of Madeline appears at the door of Roderick's book-strewn study, falls upon him, "and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse."
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I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.
Absolutely the worst movie.
Blistering performances.
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
Considering the large number of early horror films that drew inspiration (however loosely) from the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, I'm left asking myself why I'm so inexperienced with the author's work. 'The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)' compresses Poe's 1839 short story into thirteen convoluted minutes, and I don't think I understood a moment of it. Beyond the inkling of a supposedly-dead sister coming back to life, the film made no clear sense to me, and I suspect that at least a vague knowledge of Poe would be useful prior to viewing. Nevertheless, my ignorance didn't prevent me from being entranced by every single second of James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber's avante-garde excursion into German Expressionism. Clearly drawing stylistic inspiration from Robert Weine's 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920),' as well as the numerous artistically-similar pictures that emerged from Germany during the 1920s, 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is a superbly-spellbinding montage of creative photography, used to tell, without a single intertitle, a morbid tale of family terror.The directors utilise every trick in the book (and some they made up themselves) to give their film the dreamy, deranged visual logic of a dream or, more accurately, a particularly nasty nightmare. The camera often tilts steeply and woozily to simulate the characters' mental disorientation a technique that Carol Reed would later use, to a lesser extent, in 'The Third Man (1949)' and much of the shooting took place through prisms that distorted and reproduced images. Slow motion, both forwards and backwards, all adds to the tone of a drug-induced haze, as ominous, fragmented phantoms tower overhead. The warped and exaggerated set design directly references 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' and, on more than one occasion, Melville Webber's Traveller appears to emulate Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) himself. Shadows and lighting are used wonderfully to complement the mood, another technique borrowed from German Expressionism, and the gnarled outlines of unseen figures on the wall emphasise the overstated photography and set design, further stressing the Gothic overtones of Poe's story.
The film may be one you will enjoy, but this really is strongly dependent on the type of person you are. If you CAN allow yourself to see a strange Avant Garde-style film that is reminiscent of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, then you might just enjoy this film. Otherwise, it will probably be a very confusing film that only superficially seems like the Poe story. It's really all a matter of just "turning off your brain" and enjoying the strange imagery and bizarre camera-work. It IS very inventive and almost hypnotic at times and looks like a film I would expect to see being played in a gallery of modern art or in a strange little coffee house where everyone wears berets and listens to free-form jazz.
The Fall of the House of Usher has suffered a rather bad fate as a film, due to numerous problems.Not due to the fact that it's a bad film, on the contrary, but due to it's name. In the same year there was also a french full-length with the same name by Jean Epstein. And there are countless other recreations of this of the Fall in the House of Usher story.This film succeeds as a silent short expressed mostly through visuals and mood. It's not so much horror as it as an excuse to show surrealist images of words floating, off camera angles and general dillusion.The only thing that may put people off about this short is that it's clearly more about lush enchanting visuals then it is as a good representation on the Edgar Allan Poe piece.This is a fine silent short, and is highly recommended to fans of early silent expressionist cinema.
As a devotee of vintage horror and silent era in particular this should have been meat and drink to me. With a feature being released at the same time, commercialism was not one of the movie's flaws, but the reduction of the Poe tale to a vignette of a little over 10 minutes is woeful.
