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After a string of ferocious sketches, a sumptuous oil painting to inaugurate Roger Corman's middle period. The house is a mausoleum surrounded by a wasteland, Lord Usher (Vincent Price) is a silver wraith and aesthete, "a morbid acuteness of the senses" is his curse. His sister (Myrna Fahey) is a blossom from a putrefied root, her suitor (Mark Damon) rides in and the crack on the wall multiplies (cf. Polanski's Repulsion). A collection of canvases illustrates a foul ancestry but the manse itself is part of the "plague of evil," chandeliers and cauldrons figure in its malevolent manipulation. The doom effect à la Murnau has Floyd Crosby reprising his Tabu rendering, a close camera gliding alongside the maiden as a candle illuminates her name on a crypt. "Is there no end to your horrors?" "No. None whatever." Poe as the classical vessel for modernist tensions, Richard Matheson's addition of the interloper proposes a youthful confrontation of the sins of generations prior, a Corman motif. A twinge of Ordet is brought to the key composition, Usher and the groom in the middleground on opposite sides of the screen, the elderly servant (Harry Ellerbe) in the back and in the foreground the sister in her coffin. (A detail of her hands occasions the abrupt sealing of the lid, fade to black as a gasp becomes a scream.) The blood-red robe and the engulfing tarn, "certain peculiarities of temperament" comprise the portrait of familial suffocation and engagement jitters. The ornamental veneer is stretched until it shatters for the swirling blue nightmare, the pallid heroine is alive at last in splattered madness, fire consumes the unwholesome embrace. "I suggest you leave. No? Then perish with us." Fulci's The Beyond receives the final tableau of the author's words on a charred CinemaScope landscape.
--- Fernando F. Croce |