General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

House of Usher

House of Usher, released on screen as The Fall of the House of Usher, is a 1960 American horror film directed and produced by Roger Corman, written by Richard Matheson from Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story "The Fall of the House of Usher", and starring Vincent Price as Roderick Usher.¹ It was the first of Corman's Poe adaptations and the biggest hit American International Pictures (AIP) had released up to that date, and it launched the "Poe cycle" of low-budget color gothic films that Corman made for the studio through 1965.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Roger Corman, for Alta Vista Productions and American International Pictures¹
Screenplay	Richard Matheson, based on Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, September 1839)¹
Cast	Vincent Price (Roderick Usher), Mark Damon (Philip Winthrop), Myrna Fahey (Madeline Usher), Harry Ellerbe (Bristol)³
Budget and schedule	$270,000, shot in fifteen days; $50,000 of the budget went to Price, and the budget was the highest AIP had allotted any film up to that time¹
Box office	Grossed 2 million dollars during the summer of 1960, the biggest hit AIP had seen up to that date²
Release	World premiere in Palm Springs, CA, 18 June 1960; Los Angeles opening 20 July 1960¹
Legacy	First of Corman's Poe films (seven more by 1965, ending with The Tomb of Ligeia); deemed worthy of preservation by the Library of Congress¹^•⁴

Spoilers

Plot and changes from the story

In the film, Philip Winthrop travels from Boston to the decaying Usher estate in rural Massachusetts to claim his fiancée, Madeline Usher.¹ Her brother Roderick tells him to leave: Madeline must not marry or bear children because she suffers from the Usher family curse of slow-mounting insanity, a condition of hyper-acuteness of the senses that both siblings share.² Winthrop keeps trying to persuade Madeline to flee while the house itself decays around them in tremors, falling chandeliers, and breaking staircase railings. Madeline apparently dies, and Roderick entombs her in the family crypt below the house; Winthrop learns from the butler, Bristol, that Madeline has suffered catatonic spells in the past, and that she has been buried alive.²

Contemporary reviews remarked on the differences from Poe's story. In Poe's tale, Philip is not Madeline's fiancé but rather an old friend of Roderick's, summoned to the house by Roderick himself; Philip makes no attempt to flee the mansion; and Roderick descends into insanity upon hearing the moans of the entombed Madeline.¹ Matheson's most notable addition was the romantic angle that makes Philip Madeline's fiancé.² A later critical analysis also notes that the film removed the overt implication of incest that hangs over Poe's original.⁶ Despite these liberties, critics have judged it one of the most faithful of Corman's Poe adaptations, and a scholarly study argues that Matheson's script followed Poe's theory of short fiction closely.⁷^•⁸

Title

The film's onscreen title is The Fall of the House of Usher, and the main title card reads "Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher", but it was also reviewed and advertised as House of Usher, the shorter title by which it is commonly known.¹ Its working titles were Mysterious House of Usher and Haunted House of Usher.¹ Outside the United States it was known by the longer title.²

Production

By 1960, Corman had spent the 1950s making black-and-white double-bill pictures for AIP on pre-set budgets and ten-day schedules. He suggested to AIP owners James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff that they instead try one fifteen-day picture in color rather than two ten-day pictures in black-and-white.² Poe's story was chosen as the property partly because the title was familiar to anyone who had read it in school and partly because, being in the public domain, the story rights cost the studio nothing.²

The crew and the star. With the larger budget, Corman hired the established science-fiction and fantasy writer Richard Matheson for the screenplay and spent heavily on Vincent Price for the role of Roderick Usher.²^•¹ The crew was drawn from the independent team Corman had assembled by 1960: cinematographer Floyd Crosby, editor Anthony Carras, production designer Daniel Haller, and composer Les Baxter.¹ Haller's sets were scavenged but sumptuous, and Corman framed his expensive star against them to make the most of the fifteen-day schedule.⁵

The film's striking opening shots show Mark Damon riding on horseback through a desolate landscape around the Usher mansion. Corman shot them the day after reading in the Los Angeles Times about a forest fire in the Hollywood Hills, arriving with Damon and a skeleton crew at the conveniently scorched location.²

Reception and legacy

The film was highly profitable for AIP, to the surprise of those involved, and the studio quickly greenlit another Poe production with Corman attached, The Pit and the Pendulum (1961).⁹ Corman, Price, Matheson, and most of the crew reunited for that film, kicking off the Poe cycle of the early 1960s; between 1960 and 1965 Corman made eight Poe films for AIP, ending with The Tomb of Ligeia.²^•¹ The cycle's recurring elements included misty outdoors, decrepit homes, revenge plots, and Vincent Price.¹⁰

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 83% Tomatometer from 53 reviews and a 74% Popcornmeter score; the site's critics consensus calls it "an early high mark for Vincent Price and a career triumph for director Roger Corman".¹¹ The Library of Congress deemed the film worthy of preservation.⁴ A new 4K restoration from the 35mm original negative has been screened at BFI Southbank.¹²

Other screen versions of the story

Poe's tale has been adapted many times. Jean Epstein's French silent La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928) is the best-known film of that director, influenced by German Expressionism.¹³ A British version was produced in Hastings in the early postwar period by first-time director George Ivan Barnett, released as The Fall of the House of Usher (1949).¹⁴ Later versions include a 1979 television variation with Martin Landau, Jesús Franco's 1983 film, Harry Alan Towers' 1989 The House of Usher with Oliver Reed, Ken Russell's The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002), and David DeCoteau's 2008 film.¹⁵ In 2023, Mike Flanagan's Netflix limited series The Fall of the House of Usher reimagined the Ushers as a modern pharmaceutical dynasty, drawing on Poe's works at large rather than adapting the 1839 story directly.¹⁰^•¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026