Films

The first film in the celebrated series Roger Corman devoted to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1960) also marked the beginning of his iconic collaboration with Vincent Price. Drawing on the influence of Freudian psychoanalytic theories on horror cinema, Corman transforms Poe’s tale into an unsettling exploration of guilt, decay and family inheritance. When Philip Winthrop attempts to rescue his fiancée, Madeline Usher, from the gloomy mansion where she lives with her brother Roderick, he discovers a family marked by an ancient curse and a house that seems to possess a will of its own. A blueprint for the Poe adaptations that followed, the film became an essential classic of Gothic horror and American fantasy cinema.