Director/Screenplay/Photography – Brian Cunningham, Based on the Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Producers – Nic Brown & Janel Nash, Music – Joe Stockton, Visual Effects – Duncan Salot, Makeup/Practical Effects – Autumn Barefoot. Production Company – Mutiny Pictures/Thoughtfly Films.
Riker Hall (William Usher), Savannah Schaefer (Anna), Michael R. McGuire (Mr Usher), Spencer Korcz (Wilson Usher), Rita Hight (Mrs. Usher)
William Usher tends his ailing father. He strikes up an attraction to the home help nurse Anna but after he kisses her, she says it would be inappropriate to continue. Hurt, William then poisons and smothers his father. He becomes even more bitter when he finds that for all the time he spend tending the old man, he received nothing in the will. Anna returns and they develop a relationship. However, William’s brother Wilson tells him he must call it off. Alone, William spirals into madness and murder.
Brian Cunningham is a genre director I had never encountered before. A native of Kentucky, Cunningham has co-directed the horror films Overtime (2011), the documentary Monsters Wanted (2013) and the non-genre Loss Prevention (2018), before solo directing the horror film Wretch (2018).
The first thing that becomes apparent not long into watching The Fall of Usher is that despite giving all indications it is, it is not an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). The Poe story concerns the unnamed narrator’s visit to a large decaying mansion where his friend Roderick Usher is going mad. There have been a number of film adaptations of The Fall of the House of Usher (see below).
In the film, we have a character named William Usher who tends his ailing father, but that is about the extent of anything it has to do with the Poe story. Indeed, the fabulously decaying Usher mansion has been replaced by no more than a regular apartment. And that seems to be about it – there is no equivalent of Roderick Usher and his suffering from an over-acuteness of senses, There is no sister Madeline who ends up being prematurely buried, while this is clearly too low budget a film to have the house collapse into the tarn at the end.
On the other hand, while having nothing to do with the Poe story, The Fall of Usher is not entirely uninteresting as an Edgar Allan Poe film. One of these is where Brian Cunningham uses a series of intertitle cards where he directly uses, if I’m not mistaken, lines directly taken from Poe. Riker Hall’s monologues to the camera come written in very ornate, 19th Century-styled dialogue that sounds like pure Poe. The film blurs in and out of a subjective state of mind so you are never entirely sure what is real or imagined, which seems exactly like the fear-filled state of many Poe narrators.
Many other aspects of Poe are wound into the story. There is the guilt-ridden murderer protagonist who thinks he keeps hearing sounds in the wall a la The Tell-Tale Heart (1843). The hero William has a brother named Wilson who constantly admonishes him and tells him he must give up the girl he has found, which is named after the title character of William Wilson (1839), concerning a libertine who is haunted by a doppelganger. There is a Red Death of sorts – although with the film’s low-budget this is more a figure in a black hood with white mask who is shown in a red lighting. And later the hero shares a glass of Amontillado and ends up bricking up a murdered body a la The Cask of Amontillado (1846) and The Black Cat (1843).
Other adaptations of The Fall of the House of Usher include:- Jean Epstein’s French silent version The Fall of the House of Usher (1928); The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), a short silent British version; a dreary and not very faithful British version The Fall of the House of Usher (1949); Roger Corman’s The House of Usher (1960) starring Vincent Price; the inept tv variation The Fall of the House of Usher (1979) with Martin Landau; Jesus Franco’s cheap The Fall of the House of Usher (1983) with Howard Vernon; Harry Alan Towers’ cheap The House of Usher (1989) with Oliver Reed; Ken Russell’s demented variation The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002); the low-budget modernised The House of Usher (2006); David DeCoteau’s softcore gay House of Usher (2008); as an episode of the animated anthology Extraordinary Tales (2015); the gender-flipped Lady Usher (2020) starring Theresa Santiago; and the tv mini-series The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), which incorporates a medley of Poe stories.
Trailer here