Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And October continues. So we
Speaker 3: are still bringing you Halloween themed episodes of Weird House
Speaker 3: Cinema and also core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 3: Mind throughout this month. Today we are covering the nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty Roger Corman adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story
Speaker 3: The Fall of the House of Usher, starring who else,
Speaker 3: it's Vincent Price. This movie is sometimes billed with the
Speaker 3: full name of the story, as it's titled The Fall
Speaker 3: of the House of Usher, but sometimes you'll see it
Speaker 3: shortened to just House of Usher. In fact, I've seen
Speaker 3: it the latter format more times. I think it looks
Speaker 3: like that in all the classic posters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is another one of those cases where there
Speaker 2: have been enough at ats of the original post story
Speaker 2: in question that you should just go ahead and throw
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty on there whenever you're looking it up anywhere,
Speaker 2: just to be sure. And especially this is complicated since
Speaker 2: you don't know how this film is actually going to
Speaker 2: be titled in a given release.
Speaker 3: So this is one of a series of films from
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties that had three production elements in common.
Speaker 3: The first element is a script adapted from the works
Speaker 3: of Edgar Allan Poe, conveniently in the public domain by
Speaker 3: this time. The second element is it was directed by
Speaker 3: Drive in double feature god Roger Corman. And the third
Speaker 3: feature is that the movie starred the peerless Vincent Price,
Speaker 3: who I love the way Price fits into these Edgar
Speaker 3: Allan Poe characters. He just gets in there so perfectly.
Speaker 3: I was trying to think of an analogy, and what
Speaker 3: came to mind is it's like when you drop one
Speaker 3: of the game pieces into a Connect four set, you know,
Speaker 3: it just falls into place with this happy little clip.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, well it certainly clicks, that's for sure.
Speaker 3: So anyway, it was a three way collaboration, the Po
Speaker 3: Price Corman collaboration that was so nice. They did it
Speaker 3: like seven or eight times, depending on how much of
Speaker 3: a stickler you are for accurate story credits. And we'll
Speaker 3: come back to the Corman post cycle later in the
Speaker 3: Connections part of this episode. But I wanted to start
Speaker 3: today by mentioning that we've covered one of these movies
Speaker 3: on the show before for a previous Halloween season Weird House,
Speaker 3: and that previous movie was The Mask of the Red
Speaker 3: Death from nineteen sixty four, a lavish satanic plague tale
Speaker 3: featuring Vincent Price as the wicked corruptor of innocence Prince Prospero.
Speaker 3: And I love Mask of the Red Death. If you
Speaker 3: go back and listen to that episode. I'm sure I'm
Speaker 3: just running out of positive things to say about it,
Speaker 3: but I still think about it all the time. I
Speaker 3: love the atmosphere of good and evil as almost physically
Speaker 3: embodied power. I love the use of extravagant, brightly colored
Speaker 3: masquerade costumes set against this gray world. It creates this
Speaker 3: jewels on bone visual texture that I find so pleasing.
Speaker 3: Of course, I love Vincent Price, and I also love
Speaker 3: how Mask contrasts with Roger Corman's previous B movie work,
Speaker 3: stuff like Attack of the Crab, Monsters, Not of This
Speaker 3: Earth and It Conquered the World. All movies that I love,
Speaker 3: and we have talked about lovingly on the show many times,
Speaker 3: But all of these previous movies, I think you could
Speaker 3: say are self consciously schlock. Like Corman sort of knew
Speaker 3: he was making trash, but he was trying to make
Speaker 3: like fun, scrappy, sort of intelligent trash. Mask at the
Speaker 3: Red Death, on the other hand, I think is not
Speaker 3: schlock in the same way. You can argue that it
Speaker 3: has some subtle bits of self parody, but ultimately I
Speaker 3: think Mask is a very successful classic Gothic horror film
Speaker 3: when taken straightforwardly and it's made with real finesse, and
Speaker 3: then sort of on top of that, once you accept
Speaker 3: it at that level, you can unlock maybe second and
Speaker 3: third levels of pleasure by watching it with a more
Speaker 3: ironic lens.
Speaker 2: It is a very pleasurable film, and it is it
Speaker 2: is a prestige Roger Corman picture. And I would say, ultimately,
Speaker 2: if you're too good for Mask of the Red Death,
Speaker 2: then we probably don't have much in common. We probably
Speaker 2: probably don't have even like a groundwork upon which to
Speaker 2: build out this friendship.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but so anyway, I love to Mask of the
Speaker 3: Red Death so much. I wanted to come back to
Speaker 3: one of the Corman Poe Price movies this October, and
Speaker 3: I decided we should watch the one that started it all,
Speaker 3: the first of these collaborations. So here we are with
Speaker 3: House of Usher, from nineteen sixty. So as a point
Speaker 3: of comparison, I think it's interesting how scaled back this
Speaker 3: movie feels compared to Mask. Mask has a big cast,
Speaker 3: a lot of extra lots of location changes, you know,
Speaker 3: interior exterior. It has a lot of location changes within
Speaker 3: the main castle as bright colors, interesting costumes, big sets,
Speaker 3: and light effects that in some cases even border on psychedelic.
Speaker 3: You could say. Usher, by contrast, I think, feels like
Speaker 3: a really good bottle episode of a TV show. The
Speaker 3: cast is small, there are only four characters, really three
Speaker 3: principal characters in sort of a gruel boiling Butler. The
Speaker 3: setting is mostly confined to the interior of one house.
Speaker 3: There's nothing too crazy visually, at least not until around
Speaker 3: the climax. Then toward the end there are some sites
Speaker 3: and sounds that get kind of weird. But in general
Speaker 3: I would just say that Usher contains less flambuoyant original
Speaker 3: creativity than Mask, and it is a more disciplined attempt
Speaker 3: to capture the tone and plot of the original Pose story.
Speaker 3: But this is by no means. A dig lot of
Speaker 3: people cite Usher as their favorite of the Corman Price collaborations,
Speaker 3: and I think I can see why, like the wildness
Speaker 3: of Mask is a bit more my speed, but Usher
Speaker 3: has a really good script and a chillingly effective and
Speaker 3: ambiguous performance by Price, who has bleach blonde hair. By
Speaker 3: the way, where else are you going to get that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, We'll come back to the look of
Speaker 2: Vincent Price in this picture. That alone makes it stand out.
Speaker 2: But I agree this is a picture that in many
Speaker 2: ways makes it a smaller picture, but a smaller picture
Speaker 2: that's really allowed to breathe, you know, like the fewer
Speaker 2: elements involved all managed to sort of build up their
Speaker 2: own energy that by the end of the picture you
Speaker 2: don't feel like you've been slided at all. That being said,
Speaker 2: I think it is fair to say this is maybe
Speaker 2: a movie in which not as much happens compared to
Speaker 2: other pictures, and you've got to be on board with that.
Speaker 2: Like I watched this film zonked Out on an airplane
Speaker 2: and was the perfect perfect picture for that sort of setting,
Speaker 2: you know. I like a nice slow film like this.
Speaker 2: You can breathe in all the sights and sounds, especially
Speaker 2: the sites more so than the sounds here, but then
Speaker 2: also some strong performances in here as well. But like
Speaker 2: I say, if you want something that's really snappy, this
Speaker 2: is maybe not yet, so you've got to be on
Speaker 2: its wavelength. But if you're on its wavelength, a film
Speaker 2: like this is perfect.
Speaker 3: Oh this is a gloomy, languid, classic gothic haunted mansion story. Yeah,
Speaker 3: well wait a minute now that I say haunted mansion,
Speaker 3: actually I think a great thing. Maybe we can discuss
Speaker 3: the themes more when we get into the plot section,
Speaker 3: but I think this movie is interesting in that you
Speaker 3: could legitimately ask, at least for most of the runtime,
Speaker 3: whether there's actually anything supernatural happening or not, or whether
Speaker 3: it's all just kind of the consequences of Vincent Price's
Speaker 3: character Roderick and his delusional behave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if nothing out as Ilset is a film haunted
Speaker 2: by multi generational human evil. Yeah, and it definitely ruminates
Speaker 2: on that.
Speaker 3: All right, we usually do an elevator pitch. I'll try
Speaker 3: to give a straightforward plot set up here. Philip Winthrop
Speaker 3: travels to the desolate and decomposing Usher Estate to visit
Speaker 3: his fiancee, Madeleine, whom he courted and became engaged to
Speaker 3: during their time together in Boston. So she's gone ahead
Speaker 3: of him back to the Usher estate, and he's coming
Speaker 3: to beat her. But when he arrives, Philip discovers that
Speaker 3: Madeleine is in ill health and she is under the
Speaker 3: constant control of her strange and morose brother, Roderick played
Speaker 3: by Vincent Price. Over time, Philip begins to doubt what
Speaker 3: he's being told by Roderick and the household butler. Is
Speaker 3: Madeline really sick or is she having her will to
Speaker 3: live sapped by Roderick's psychic manipulations, or is there something
Speaker 3: more sinister and ghostly operating underneath it all?
Speaker 2: We'll find out, all right. Let's go ahead and listen
Speaker 2: to a little trailer audio for House of Usher.
Speaker 4: Don't take her man now, let me go in there.
Speaker 5: Only the incomparable genius of Edgar Allen Poe could knit
Speaker 5: them so closely together, the burning passions of the purest
Speaker 5: of loves, the deadly passions of the madly buriant.
Speaker 4: Hope when you're leaving this house with me tomorrow, Only
Speaker 4: I could.
Speaker 2: For hundreds of years, evil thoughts and evil deeds have
Speaker 2: been committed within these walls.
Speaker 4: The house itself is evil.
Speaker 5: Now they all are ashes.
Speaker 4: It's monstrous.
Speaker 2: It waits for me, because very soon I shall be dead.
Speaker 4: Oh medline, come away with me?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 5: Where is she? You buried your own sister alive?
Speaker 4: I did, but she's dead now. The master hand of
Speaker 4: the macap creates its masterpiece, all right.
Speaker 2: If you want to watch House of USh or follow
Speaker 2: the House of USh, or whatever you want to call
Speaker 2: this nineteen sixty film, there are a couple of ways
Speaker 2: to do it. If you're in the UK, I believe
Speaker 2: you have access to the beautiful Arrow Blue. If you're
Speaker 2: in the US, I think you can find it in
Speaker 2: the Vincent Price Collection box set from Shout Factory. Off
Speaker 2: the top of my head, I'm not sure about the
Speaker 2: current production status of either of those, but that's kind
Speaker 2: of the beauty of physical media is that even if
Speaker 2: it's out of print, there's a good chance you'll be
Speaker 2: able to find a copy out there. And if you
Speaker 2: have a rental store in your neighborhood in your city,
Speaker 2: like Atlanta's own Video Drone, for example, you can just
Speaker 2: go and rent it. And that's so beautifully simple.
Speaker 3: I have that Vincent Price box set from Shout Factory,
Speaker 3: and that is how I watched this movie. It's also
Speaker 3: how I watched Pitt in the Pendulum. It's got Mask
Speaker 3: of the Red Death in there, and it's also got
Speaker 3: some other fun stuff like Witchfinder General and The Abominable
Speaker 3: Doctor Five. So highly recommend that collection. It's very solid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Witchfinder General film is said to be another
Speaker 2: great price performance.
Speaker 3: That one I've only watched on mute while doing other things,
Speaker 3: but it looked interesting, so maybe I'll have to go
Speaker 3: back and turn the sound on. Sometimes it's by a
Speaker 3: filmmaker who we watched another movie by him. He was
Speaker 3: the guy who made that movie The Sorcerers about the
Speaker 3: people like the old people who can get into the
Speaker 3: young guy's brain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, short lived director died tragically young, but showed so
Speaker 2: much promise. Anyway, again, I watched this film. No doubt
Speaker 2: is Roger Corman intended on an iPhone in an airplane.
Speaker 2: But you know there are fewer distractions in some ways
Speaker 2: when watching a film in that format, so you know,
Speaker 2: sometimes it's the right time for that sort of treatment.
Speaker 3: Roger wouldn't hate on you for that.
Speaker 2: You don't know it all right, Well, since we're already
Speaker 2: talking about him, Yeah, let's get into the people behind
Speaker 2: this film, starting with Roger Corman, the director, the producer
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen twenty six through twenty twenty four. We've
Speaker 2: talked about him numerous times on the show, so we're
Speaker 2: going to try not to repeat too much of that
Speaker 2: instead sort of frame this within his output and within
Speaker 2: the history of Weird House. I believe this is our
Speaker 2: fifth Corman directed motion picture, but he also served as
Speaker 2: producer on some of the films we've covered. This, of course,
Speaker 2: is one of the films loosely classified as being part
Speaker 2: of the Pose cycle. In fact, again it is the
Speaker 2: film that kicked off the entire cycle. Usher came on
Speaker 2: the heels of nineteen fifty nine's Eye, Moobster, The Wasp Woman,
Speaker 2: and Bucket of Blood. Those all directed by Corman, and
Speaker 2: it was one of four Corman directed films that came
Speaker 2: out in nineteen sixty, along with Ski Troop Attack, The
Speaker 2: Little Shop of Horrors, and Last Woman on Earth.
Speaker 3: Well, I know Little Shop of Horrors. Now I'm curious
Speaker 3: about Ski Troop Attack. Yeah, it's like real stands the
Speaker 3: test of time. I bet, yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean that's the thing about Corman's output is, you know,
Speaker 2: certain genre films have become a legendary of his and
Speaker 2: you know, you instantly think of them when you think
Speaker 2: of Roger Corman. But for every one or two of those,
Speaker 2: there are three or four more in other genres, often
Speaker 2: that have just kind of fallen through the cracks for many,
Speaker 2: except for the Roger Corman completest, I suppose. Anyway, the
Speaker 2: Corman post cycle is generally considered to run eight films.
Speaker 2: You have Usher, then you have sixty ones, The Pitt
Speaker 2: in the Pendulum, sixty two's the Premature Burial and Tales
Speaker 2: of Terror, sixty threes the Raven and the Haunted Palace,
Speaker 2: and then sixty four is The Mask of the Red
Speaker 2: Death and The Tomb of Lagia. Of course, we should
Speaker 2: note that the Haunted Palace is actually based on a
Speaker 2: Lovecraft story and not a post story. It's just the
Speaker 2: title that ties into pose work. All of them star
Speaker 2: Vincent Price, except for the Premature Burial.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I've seen three of these movies at this point.
Speaker 3: I've seen Usher, the Pit and the Pendulum, and Mask
Speaker 3: of the Red Death. Mask is my favorite, easily, though
Speaker 3: all three of them I think are quite good, and
Speaker 3: maybe we'll have to come back to the Pit and
Speaker 3: the Pendulum sometime. Price's performance in that movie is a
Speaker 3: lot more unhinged and off the wall than in Usher.
Speaker 3: But let's see the premature Aerial and Tales of Terror.
Speaker 3: I think, is that one movie or two movies?
Speaker 2: That's true?
Speaker 3: Tales of Terror is supposed to be anthology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. These are Corman films,
Speaker 2: so sometimes there's two coming out a year, and those
Speaker 2: are inevitably not the only pictures he directed, certainly didn't
Speaker 2: not the only pictures he produced heuring a given year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then The Raven is interesting because that one
Speaker 3: is supposed to be a comedy. I have not seen it.
Speaker 3: I'm a little curious how that works. I feel like
Speaker 3: I would be less interested in an overt comedy with
Speaker 3: Price and po themes. But who knows. Maybe it's great.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean you have to acknowledge that that Vincent
Speaker 2: Price is terrific in everything. Oh, so he's kind of comedic.
Speaker 2: Timing is solid, so he may be able to deliver there.
Speaker 2: And you know, you do have some really good Roger
Speaker 2: Corman directed dark comedies such as Bucket of Blood or
Speaker 2: Little Shop of Horrors and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And frankly, I would say all of the movies
Speaker 3: of his I've seen that I've liked have some sense
Speaker 3: of humor about them. Probably House of Usher has the
Speaker 3: least humor of any of them, but he's always got
Speaker 3: a little bit of eye twinkling going on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we of course have to drive home that this
Speaker 2: is an adaptation of the work of Edgar Allan Poe,
Speaker 2: who have eighteen oh nine through eighteen forty nine American writer, poet, editor,
Speaker 2: and literary critic, best remembered for his spooky poems and stories,
Speaker 2: not only in the United States but internationally.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, so, I guess Rob is referring to there.
Speaker 3: There was an article that we were sharing off Mike
Speaker 3: that I read by a writer named Wynn Bin from
Speaker 3: I think it was just published a couple of days ago,
Speaker 3: at least published October of this year, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: about the popularity of Edgar Allan Poe among a lot
Speaker 3: of the writers and poets of Vietnam in the first
Speaker 3: half of the twentieth century. I think that's interesting, like
Speaker 3: what authors really resonate in different language cultures around the world,
Speaker 3: but apparently, like, yeah, a lot of Vietnamese writers in
Speaker 3: I think it would be around the nineteen twenties and
Speaker 3: thirties or so, really really thought that Poe was just
Speaker 3: like the best of the American writers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And of course that reminds me a bit of
Speaker 2: a Japanese author that we've discussed in the show before,
Speaker 2: because we've discussed adaptations of his work in cinema, Edugawa Ranpo,
Speaker 2: whose name is an allusion to the name Edgar Allan.
Speaker 3: Poe, and he was a writer of detective stories, wasn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, a lot of detective stories and the mysteries
Speaker 2: thriller is that sort of thing. Yeah, all right, So
Speaker 2: that's the source material. But then the screenplay, the adaptation
Speaker 2: comes to us via another name that we've talked about
Speaker 2: on the show before, the legendary Richard Matheson, who lived
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six through twenty thirteen. American writer who's best remembered,
Speaker 2: I would say, as the author of the excellent nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty four novel I Am Legend, upon which three films
Speaker 2: have been based. One even had Vincent Price in it.
Speaker 3: I've been thinking we should do that on the show.
Speaker 3: By the way, I think it's called Last Man on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, And of course the others being I Am
Speaker 2: Legend with Will Smith and then The Omega Man with
Speaker 2: Chuck Huston.
Speaker 3: The Vincent Price one is it's got some really good
Speaker 3: things about it, and I really enjoyed. I sampled that
Speaker 3: one in some music that I was working on. It
Speaker 3: works out pretty good.
Speaker 2: The episodes where we discussed Richard Matheson previously there was
Speaker 2: the film The Devil Rides Out. He did the adaptation
Speaker 2: on that as well, adapting a weekly novel. And then
Speaker 2: we talked about the film adaptation The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Speaker 2: That's an adaptation by Matheson of one of Matheson's own books.
Speaker 2: If I remember correctly.
Speaker 3: This guy snuck up on me. I didn't realize it first,
Speaker 3: but I think Matheson has written the scripts for a
Speaker 3: lot of the best movies or the movies with the
Speaker 3: best scripts that we've done from the mid twentieth century.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean he was excellent, excellent writer, worked on
Speaker 2: a lot of shows like Original Twilight Zone, Night Gallery,
Speaker 2: Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and had a big influence on an
Speaker 2: entire generation of horror and terror scribes, especially including Stephen King.
Speaker 2: Stephen King has frequently cited Richard Matheson as an influence.
Speaker 3: The Incredible Shrinking man I remember in particular, had a
Speaker 3: really good script.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great picture. If you haven't seen that one,
Speaker 2: you haven't listened to our episode on that, go back
Speaker 2: to one or the other. Don't be afraid of that
Speaker 2: kind of goofy title and perhaps you know comedic idea
Speaker 2: of a tiny man inside a house being attacked by
Speaker 2: his cat, because it's much more than that. It's actually
Speaker 2: a pretty deep flip. Yeah, all right, onto the cast,
Speaker 2: and this is going to be a pretty short cast.
Speaker 2: There are really only four people in this for the
Speaker 2: most part. A few extras here and there, but really
Speaker 2: only four people. The lead, of course, again being Vincent
Speaker 2: Prize playing Roderick Usher. Price lived nineteen eleven through nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety three. We've talked about him plenty of times on
Speaker 2: the show because we keep coming back to Vincent Price
Speaker 2: films and you never know exactly what you're going to
Speaker 2: get from him. He was active on screen from the
Speaker 2: late thirties to the early nineties. And you know, there's
Speaker 2: a certain vision, a certain version of Vincent Price that
Speaker 2: I think is solidified in the horror canon that instantly
Speaker 2: comes to mind when you think about him, and a
Speaker 2: lot of it is defined by his look, Right, what
Speaker 2: do you think of? You think of like that dark
Speaker 2: or certainly in later live gray and even white, slicked
Speaker 2: back hair. You think about that sharpened mustache, an optional
Speaker 2: goatee add on, and then of course he's going to
Speaker 2: be wearing some sort of a suit, maybe an optional
Speaker 2: Dracula cape, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: If this makes any sense, He's somebody who, really I
Speaker 3: think has the face of a character actor, a kind
Speaker 3: of interesting memorable face you would see pop up playing
Speaker 3: like second build characters with a little bit of personality
Speaker 3: to them, but instead he more often ended up playing
Speaker 3: leading male characters or leading villains. And it works pretty
Speaker 3: well that way, because he can sort of manipulate his
Speaker 3: interesting look with just sort of an inversion of the
Speaker 3: slant of his eyebrows to look quite sympathetic or quite evil.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and as we were alluding to earlier, this film
Speaker 2: also gives us a rather different looking price because he's
Speaker 2: clean shaven and he has bleached blonde hair. You might
Speaker 2: want to call him peroxide Price or platinum blonde Price,
Speaker 2: you pick, but either way, a very distinctive look. It
Speaker 2: reminds me a bit of in the movie The Ten Commandments,
Speaker 2: he shows up in that, and he's clean shaven there
Speaker 2: as well, which can throw you off if you're used
Speaker 2: to Vincent Price with facial hair. But add in the
Speaker 2: screaming blonde hair in this picture, and yeah, he looks
Speaker 2: sufficiently different. It ends up influencing your entire reception of
Speaker 2: the character.
Speaker 3: I think I was thinking about Barbie's hair color, so
Speaker 3: I was thinking, like Malibu Price.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. At this point
Speaker 2: in his career, Price had already taken on the mantle
Speaker 2: of horror star. I think by having already done House
Speaker 2: of Wax, which we've talked about in the show, that's
Speaker 2: one that really elevated him in the horror genre. But
Speaker 2: then also he'd already done fifty eight's The Fly, fifty
Speaker 2: nine's House on Haunted Hill, and Return of the Fly,
Speaker 2: as well as The Tingler and The bat oh Man.
Speaker 3: There's so many good Price roles in horror movies that
Speaker 3: sometimes you can't hold them all in your head. I
Speaker 3: was getting ready for this episode and I didn't even
Speaker 3: think of The Tingler until you just said it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a fun film as well. Yeah, but this
Speaker 2: is a really fun performance beyond just the different appearance
Speaker 2: for Vincent Price because he's this character is firm but fragile.
Speaker 2: You know, it's an interesting performance of emotional extremes as
Speaker 2: we'll get into, like there's a really strong will, but
Speaker 2: not if you're raising your voice or touching his garments
Speaker 2: or not taking your shoes. Shoes off in the house
Speaker 2: it is it is worth stressing that the house of
Speaker 2: Usher is a shoes off household and you need to
Speaker 2: be prepared for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Roderick Usher is a character who I like how
Speaker 3: ambiguous this character is, Like you, for a long time
Speaker 3: in the movie, you're not clear if he's friend or foe,
Speaker 3: how dangerous he is, what's going on. And even when
Speaker 3: it does become clear in some ways that he is
Speaker 3: dangerous and to be feared, at the same time, he
Speaker 3: is so weak he could he's just easily physically bested,
Speaker 3: and yet that doesn't solve the problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's almost like a living ghost in that regard. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all right, so that's the that's the lead. But then
Speaker 2: second billing, we have the personal Mark Damon as Philip Winthrop.
Speaker 2: This is the the individual that is engaged to the
Speaker 2: sister of Roderick Usher.
Speaker 3: By normal accounting, This is the protagonist, right, He is
Speaker 3: the good guy of the movie. Though I think you
Speaker 3: could still say that the main character is Vincent Price
Speaker 3: as Roderick Usher, but that's you know, villain first framing.
Speaker 3: This is the supposed good guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, personable Mark Damon. We previously talked about him
Speaker 2: because he was in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath from nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty three, so that would be in the future of
Speaker 2: the Mark Damon that we're seeing here. This was apparently
Speaker 2: a big, big film for him. He actually won a
Speaker 2: Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer for this film and
Speaker 2: when I was a familiar face in motion pictures during
Speaker 2: the fifties and sixties. But he's probably best remembered for
Speaker 2: Usher and Sabbath, at least as far as acting goes.
Speaker 2: But then, as we discussed previously, went on to be
Speaker 2: a really major producer in Hollywood and had his hands
Speaker 2: in some major pictures of note, including dust Boat or
Speaker 2: dust Boot if you will, The Never Ending Story Clan
Speaker 2: of the Cave Bear nine and a half week short
Speaker 2: circuit Fly to the Navigator, The Lost Boys, beast Master two,
Speaker 2: and as well as a pair of Universal Soldier sequels,
Speaker 2: among other pictures. When we last talked about him, he
Speaker 2: was still alive, but he actually passed away over the
Speaker 2: summer at the age of ninety one. He also, I
Speaker 2: have to mention again he has one writing credit, and
Speaker 2: it's The Devil's Wedding Night from nineteen seventy three. This
Speaker 2: is essentially a Dracula movie, despite the title. Oh and
Speaker 2: Joe Tomato apparently did some uncredited directing on it. But
Speaker 2: it's said to be pretty good. Actually I haven't.
Speaker 3: Seen it, Okay, Yeah, Well, in case you don't know
Speaker 3: what we're talking about when we keep calling him the personable,
Speaker 3: that's from the trailer for Mario Bava's Black Sabbath. So
Speaker 3: the announcers like, ooh, the chilling Boris Karloff, the personable
Speaker 3: Mark Damon.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe Mark Damon is fine in this. I'm
Speaker 2: not criticizing his work at all. It's more the sort
Speaker 2: of role this is. I guess I don't find it
Speaker 2: as personable as I would find like a Vincent Price
Speaker 2: character or you know, a Peter Lourie character and so forth.
Speaker 2: But and then also I'm wondering, if you have to
Speaker 2: say the personable Mark Damon, how personable. Is this performer right?
Speaker 3: It makes it, It makes him seem less personable. It's
Speaker 3: like introducing somebody by calling them trustworthy. Immediately you start
Speaker 3: wondering should I trust them?
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he is good in this I mean he's
Speaker 2: he is the straight man in this story where he's
Speaker 2: encountering like nothing but strange happenings and strange surroundings. So
Speaker 2: he's our grounding, he's our he's the point at the
Speaker 2: center of the dial. And so he's essential and it
Speaker 2: is essential that you have, you know, a square jowed,
Speaker 2: handsome young actor playing that role really, especially during this
Speaker 2: time period.
Speaker 3: I agree, I think he does fine. I'm not trying
Speaker 3: to slam him at all. I think he's good in
Speaker 3: this role. He is somewhat upstaged by the more interesting performances,
Speaker 3: especially of course by Vincent Price. But then I would
Speaker 3: say also later in the film, upstage somewhat by the
Speaker 3: performance of Murna Fay, he as Madeline Usher, who gets
Speaker 3: weirder as the movie goes on.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. mRNA Fay, who lived nineteen thirty three through nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy three, is the third build out of like four
Speaker 2: actors in this picture, and she is quite good. She's
Speaker 2: I think best remembered probably for this film role, as
Speaker 2: well as various television works she did. She did a
Speaker 2: lot of TV work in addition to a handful of
Speaker 2: films like Disney Zoro. She was on that series. She
Speaker 2: was on Father of the Bride in the early sixties.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, it's a good role that it first
Speaker 2: maybe seems like a little subdued, and you might think
Speaker 2: that she's not going to have much agency, but stick
Speaker 2: with it because she does get she does get to
Speaker 2: get some work in towards the end of the picture, it.
Speaker 3: Gets kind of I was reading a biography of her
Speaker 3: somewhere online that mentioned she did an interview I think
Speaker 3: it was in the year nineteen sixty, so the same
Speaker 3: year as House of Usher, where she was sort of
Speaker 3: complaining that she had been typecast in like moral upstanding roles.
Speaker 3: You know, she was always, oh, you know, tisk tisk,
Speaker 3: I am very good, I am very law abiding, and
Speaker 3: she wanted to explore, you know, more complicated, maybe darker roles,
Speaker 3: and well, I think she got her wish.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: She also apparently went on to be in an episode
Speaker 3: of the TV anthology series Thriller hosted by Boris Karloff.
Speaker 3: The episode is called Girl with the Secret, which is
Speaker 3: about Her, which is about a character who has to
Speaker 3: like keep a secret about her husband and is being
Speaker 3: blackmailed by someone. I haven't seen this episode of the show,
Speaker 3: but I pulled up like the IMDb listing for the episode,
Speaker 3: and the screenshot from it is somebody driving a car
Speaker 3: making this incredibly creepy grinning face. So now I'm tempted
Speaker 3: to it up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I haven't watched a lot of Thriller, but
Speaker 2: it's said to be a very good horror anthology series.
Speaker 3: I've seen at least one episode of Thriller. It was
Speaker 3: an adaptation of the Roberty Howard story Pigeons from Hell,
Speaker 3: which is like a ghost horror story.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, probably one of the rare non conan kin
Speaker 2: adaptations of his work. All right, pretty much. The fourth
Speaker 2: and final human in this picture is the Butler Bristol,
Speaker 2: played by American actor and Atlanta native Harry Ellerby, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen oh one through nineteen ninety two. He worked
Speaker 2: extensively in stage, screen and TV, with his screen and
Speaker 2: TV credits going from the early nineteen thirties through the
Speaker 2: early nineteen seventies, though I understand he remained active in
Speaker 2: theater longer than that, especially in like local Atlanta theater.
Speaker 2: His film credits include nineteen sixty threes, The Haunted Palace
Speaker 2: and nineteen sixty six's Chamber of Horrors. He appeared in
Speaker 2: an episode of the original Outer Limits as well. Okay,
Speaker 2: and you know he's good in this He basically he's
Speaker 2: the middleman. Though he's the butler in a haunted mansion,
Speaker 2: so you kind of know what you're going to get.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is his job to help carry the coffins
Speaker 3: and boil the gruel.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 2: Oh, but we have a very interesting credit to share
Speaker 2: regarding this picture. Now. I mentioned Night Gallery earlier in passing,
Speaker 2: and it's appropriate because this movie features a number of
Speaker 2: very creepy paintings that would look perfectly at home on
Speaker 2: the walls of the Night Gallery. These paintings are credited
Speaker 2: to Bert Schoenberg, who live nineteen thirty three through nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy seven, American painter whose work could be described as
Speaker 2: surrealist or psychedelic, and he was certainly celebrated during the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties, though he was also exploring the style in
Speaker 2: the fifties and seventies as well. In fact, I've seen
Speaker 2: some people argue that he was one of those artists
Speaker 2: working in California at the time that was kind of
Speaker 2: a precursor to the psychedelic art scene in nineteen sixties California.
Speaker 2: You know. So ultimately, when you get into like surrealism
Speaker 2: and strange art, there's plenty of stuff that seems ahead
Speaker 2: of its time and kind of informs that era. I suppose.
Speaker 2: So his work is, and you can look it up online.
Speaker 2: It's Schoenberg s H O. N. B.
Speaker 3: E Erg.
Speaker 2: His work is dreamy and weird at times, invoking occult imagery. Again,
Speaker 2: look it up because it's worth checking out. And certainly
Speaker 2: you get to see it a lot in this movie.
Speaker 2: It's not just an incidental detail. The paintings are important
Speaker 2: plot points, and you really get to drink them in.
Speaker 2: I think they really contribute to the great vibe of
Speaker 2: this picture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's this is never made explicit, but there is
Speaker 3: almost an Clyde a Picture of Dory and Gray kind
Speaker 3: of concept at work, where there are these paintings of
Speaker 3: the the you know, the patriarchs and matriarchs of the
Speaker 3: of the Usher household, and when we start to learn
Speaker 3: about their evils and their crimes, we see the paintings,
Speaker 3: and the paintings appear almost kind of warped or melted,
Speaker 3: as sort of altered in a way that reveals the
Speaker 3: evil of the character lying underneath.
Speaker 2: You know, it's interesting to think about the use of
Speaker 2: painted portraits in movies because it's often the case that
Speaker 2: you'll find either either a portrait actually does its job
Speaker 2: and you just buy it as being a portrait of
Speaker 2: a character. Generally it looks like one of the actors
Speaker 2: in the film, right, or it looks like the old
Speaker 2: count or the old baron that will inevitably come back
Speaker 2: to life and is you know, played by Christopher Lee
Speaker 2: or something, so you know what they're supposed to look like.
Speaker 2: But then in other pictures you can tell like the
Speaker 2: portrait just does not pass the sniff test. You know,
Speaker 2: you're like this, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying
Speaker 2: this as an historic work of art. This picture dodges
Speaker 2: those pitfalls and instead just goes for the utterly weird.
Speaker 2: These pictures feel like, you know, drawing on the door,
Speaker 2: the portrait drawing gray here. It's like they are like
Speaker 2: snapshots of the corrupted soul. They seem like they are dark, wrong,
Speaker 2: perhaps insane works.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, and they're not subtle. You know, It's not
Speaker 3: like they look a little bit creepy. It's they are
Speaker 3: oozing evil, demonic energy and just advertising the wickedness of
Speaker 3: the people portrayed.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was reading a bit more about these on the
Speaker 2: excellent website Vincent Price Legacy dot UK, and the author
Speaker 2: there points out that Schoenberg provided five portraits and two
Speaker 2: additional paintings to this production, and again they certainly pull
Speaker 2: their weight in delivering the film's vibe. Afterwards, two of
Speaker 2: these paintings apparently went to Roger Corman and then were
Speaker 2: subsequently stolen from his office. Another portrait was reportedly given
Speaker 2: to Vincent Price himself, who was an avid art collector,
Speaker 2: but according to the website Vincent Price Legacy, they whereabouts
Speaker 2: of this painting are unknown and it was never listed
Speaker 2: in the official estate documents concerning Price's extensive art collection,
Speaker 2: so it's unknown what happened to it, Like, did it
Speaker 2: you know, did he sell it? Is it lost? Is it?
Speaker 2: I'm assuming at this point that all of these paintings
Speaker 2: are like on the dark side of the moon somewhere,
Speaker 2: you know, transported there through dark arcade magic.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's a wild story. I'm almost tempted to doubt it,
Speaker 3: but no, it's got to be true, right, These paintings
Speaker 3: were made to disappear mysteriously.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, to be clear, I'm not sure if all of
Speaker 2: the Schoenberg paintings for this picture are missing, but at
Speaker 2: least some of them are, which adds to the mystique.
Speaker 2: But that website, Vincent Price Legacy also has some other
Speaker 2: dish details about Schoenberg that were obtained from out there.
Speaker 2: The Transcendent Life and Art of Bert Schoenberg by Spencer
Speaker 2: Kanza and this is a book from twenty seventeen. The
Speaker 2: author points out that Schoenberg was very much a part
Speaker 2: of the occult and counterculture scene in LA at the time.
Speaker 2: In the LA area, he partially owned the controversial weirdo
Speaker 2: hippie coffee shop in Orange County that was known as
Speaker 2: Cafe Frankenstein. Definitely look up a picture of Cafe Frankenstein
Speaker 2: has this signature glass window piece like a stained glass
Speaker 2: picture of Frankenstein's monster in the front, and this was
Speaker 2: created by Schoenberg. He also had murals inside of the establishment,
Speaker 2: and it was apparently kind of like a notorious hangout
Speaker 2: for dangerous hippies, you know, like there's some art going
Speaker 2: on there, there's some coffee drinking, maybe there's some other substances,
Speaker 2: who knows, and the local squares were not amused. I
Speaker 2: read one anecdote that they did not like that he
Speaker 2: had the Frankstein's Monster art in the front of the establishment,
Speaker 2: and when they pressured him, he was like, well, maybe
Speaker 2: I should do one of Frankenstein's Monster crucified. Maybe that
Speaker 2: would make everyone happy. So he was kind of a
Speaker 2: provocateur as well.
Speaker 3: I'm so sad this place no longer exists. I would
Speaker 3: want to go to California just to go here.
Speaker 2: I believe the stained glass piece still exists, though I
Speaker 2: think that isn't someone's collection, But at any rate, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he was apparently quite a character. At one point he
Speaker 2: was in a relationship with artist, poet and occultist Marjorie Cameron,
Speaker 2: who had previously been married to Jack Parsons. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: and Schoenberg also provided paintings for the nineteen sixty two
Speaker 2: film The Premature Burial, and he served as art director
Speaker 2: on fifty Eights The Brain Eaters in nineteen sixties Code
Speaker 2: of Silence.
Speaker 3: Oh, we covered the brain Eaters is Let's see what
Speaker 3: were all the weird things about that one? I think
Speaker 3: it had Leonard Nimoy in a minor role and he
Speaker 3: never got paid for it or something. And was it
Speaker 3: maybe or maybe not based on a Robert Heinlend story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it might have been. I remember, this is one
Speaker 2: that has a great poster that perhaps over sells the
Speaker 2: rest of the picture. But it was a still fun,
Speaker 2: fun one, still a fun episode to check out.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 3: I was trying to think what was the hilarious character
Speaker 3: from it, and it was Senator Walter k. Powers. You
Speaker 3: remember Walter k Powers.
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So anyway, we'll come back to these paintings because again
Speaker 2: they are vital parts of the picture and they're great. Okay,
Speaker 2: two more credits, just to run through really quickly before
Speaker 2: we get to the main plot. But the cinematography is
Speaker 2: by Floyd Crosby, who I can't remember if we talked
Speaker 2: about him before, but he lived eighteen ninety nine through
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five. Academy Award winning cinematographer and father of
Speaker 2: musician David Crosby. He worked on a number of Corman pictures,
Speaker 2: including Attack of the Crab Monsters in nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 3: You know, it never really analyzed the cinematography of Attack
Speaker 3: of the Crab Monster, but you know, I love the movie.
Speaker 3: That's got to be a part of it.
Speaker 2: And then finally, the music is by Les Baxter, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen twenty two through nineteen ninety six. So he's
Speaker 2: popped up on the show before because we have considered
Speaker 2: other scores by the master of exotica music, and none
Speaker 2: of these scores have been examples of exotica. Like if
Speaker 2: you look, I do recommend if you're having like a
Speaker 2: tropical drink and you want to have a nice, like
Speaker 2: loungy vibe, you know, pull up some Less Baxter play
Speaker 2: some of his exotica work. It's a great sound, but
Speaker 2: we don't really get that sound as far as I know,
Speaker 2: out of any of the scores he did. If you
Speaker 2: know of a Less Baxter score that is actually an
Speaker 2: exotica score, let me know about it, because I want
Speaker 2: to dig into that picture.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine if House of Usher had exotica going
Speaker 3: to Roderick Usher has got like a drink with a toothpick.
Speaker 3: That's got three different kinds of fruit on it.
Speaker 2: I mean, on one hand, I want to say it
Speaker 2: would be completely inappropriate, But on the other hand, like
Speaker 2: a lot of Baxter's exotica work, it has this kind
Speaker 2: of like a dark undertone. There's a sense of like
Speaker 2: rumbling volcanoes, you know, and slow moving lava. So in
Speaker 2: a way it might it might have lined up with
Speaker 2: some of those sort of geologic sensibilities of House of Usher.
Speaker 2: So I'm not sure. But again, this is not an
Speaker 2: exotica score. This is more of just like a nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty style orchestral score. But there are other example like,
Speaker 2: for instance, Frogs from nineteen seventy two, which we talked
Speaker 2: about in the show before, that one has a minimalist
Speaker 2: electronic score from Les Baxter, and I think maybe arguably
Speaker 2: it could have benefited from an exotica score as well.
Speaker 2: I don't know. All right, well, why don't we go
Speaker 2: ahead and just jump right into the plot of House
Speaker 2: of Usher?
Speaker 3: As is often the case with Roger Korman movies. I
Speaker 3: like the effect the credits, and there are not a
Speaker 3: whole lot of credits to get to in this movie,
Speaker 3: as we've already alluded to. I guess a shorter credit
Speaker 3: sequence than usual. But the effect behind them is this
Speaker 3: swirling mixing of clouds of colored mists. So you've got pink, green, violet, red,
Speaker 3: and blue, seemingly timed with the appearance of different actors' names.
Speaker 3: Like I'm not sure if there is any intended significance
Speaker 3: that there's suddenly a blast of sprite canned green across
Speaker 3: the picture when the name of the personable Mark Damon
Speaker 3: splashes up, But that is what we get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very colorful. It's a color picture. We might
Speaker 2: as well enjoy the color.
Speaker 3: That's right, and it is something that we should appreciate
Speaker 3: that at this time making this kind of movie, it
Speaker 3: was still a question like would you pony up for
Speaker 3: the to make this movie in color or would you
Speaker 3: just shoot it in black and white? You know, today
Speaker 3: that's not really much of a I mean, some films
Speaker 3: are still made in black and white, but for the
Speaker 3: most part, it's just assumed, Yeah, you're making a movie,
Speaker 3: you will make it in color. In nineteen sixty making
Speaker 3: a movie of this sword, it was like a toss up,
Speaker 3: you know, you could go either way. It was a
Speaker 3: different type of investment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you could have made a strong case,
Speaker 2: you know, gothic car gloomy setting. Maybe that does need
Speaker 2: to be in black and white. So I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe they did feel like they needed to prove themselves
Speaker 2: a little bit with the title sequence.
Speaker 3: So after the credits, the action opens on a barren
Speaker 3: landscape of brown and gray swampland you've got mud, fog,
Speaker 3: matted tufts of dead grass, withered tree limbs without a
Speaker 3: single leaf. All of the dead plants are also wrapped
Speaker 3: in these brittle, dead vines. So the land is it
Speaker 3: appears totally strangled, just death upon death. And then a
Speaker 3: character enters the picture. It is Mark Damon, playing the
Speaker 3: character of Philip Winthrop, and he is on horseback in
Speaker 3: a heavy purple riding cloak and a tall top hat.
Speaker 3: He makes his way through the swamp on horseback along
Speaker 3: a sodden dirt path to reach his ultimate destiny nation,
Speaker 3: the titular House of Usher, which is shown to us
Speaker 3: as a dark, decrepit mansion with curtains drawn across the windows,
Speaker 3: no light emanating from it, and mist surrounding the foundation
Speaker 3: like a white blanket.
Speaker 2: Oh and this just looks tremendous. I can't drive home enough,
Speaker 2: just how incredible this house looks. It is like a
Speaker 2: it is, yes, it is a great, big, old Gothic
Speaker 2: hulk of a mansion, but it also looks kind of
Speaker 2: like just a decaying whale carcass, you know, just you know,
Speaker 2: a heap of excess in ruin that is literally poisoning
Speaker 2: the surrounding landscape is on the verge of falling into
Speaker 2: hell itself. Like this is like wealth and over indulgence
Speaker 2: dragged across the centuries, you know, pulling souls down into
Speaker 2: darkness with it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Winthrop approaches this, this whale carcass, the mansion, passing
Speaker 3: through a broken stone gate, and he goes in between
Speaker 3: these black, twisted, almost melted looking trees. And I actually
Speaker 3: read a production note that somewhere in here the designers
Speaker 3: used some trees that had partially burned in a recent
Speaker 3: California wildfire when the film was made. I don't know
Speaker 3: if it's in this shot, but if it were, that
Speaker 3: would make sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I recently was in California. We did a
Speaker 2: lot of driving through the countryside. We saw a number
Speaker 2: of these sorts of trees, and this, well, not a
Speaker 2: landscape like the fall of the House of Usher, but
Speaker 2: trees landscapes that had these sorts of trees in them,
Speaker 2: and yeah, you can certainly lean into a haunted interpretation
Speaker 2: and so forth.
Speaker 3: So Philip comes to the front door, which is wreathed
Speaker 3: in cobwebs, and he wraps with the giant bronze knocker.
Speaker 3: The door is answered by a gray haired servant in
Speaker 3: a black coat, and he's got a sad, apprehensive face
Speaker 3: framed by these silver sideburns. Philip introduces himself to the
Speaker 3: servant as Madeline Usher's fiance and asks to see her,
Speaker 3: but the butler, whose name is Bristol, tells him that
Speaker 3: she is confined to her bed because she is taken ill.
Speaker 3: So Bristol tries to deny Philip entry, saying that Madeleine's
Speaker 3: brother Roderick, has forbidden any visitors, but Philip is very pushy.
Speaker 3: He won't take no for an answer, so Bristol leads
Speaker 3: him inside.
Speaker 2: And already we are seeing some red candles. This film
Speaker 2: is all about the red candles. Only red candles in
Speaker 2: the House of Usher, that's right.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the interior of the house is a little
Speaker 3: more inviting than the outside, but there's still some threatening energy.
Speaker 3: One thing that this is not really a complaint about
Speaker 3: the movie. It's rather just sort of a fact about
Speaker 3: how movies are made, especially at this time, based on
Speaker 3: things the characters say. I think we're supposed to understand
Speaker 3: that it is always kept very dark inside the Usher mansion.
Speaker 3: Even candlelight is weak and scarce, but it doesn't really
Speaker 3: look that way like for the audience looking at the sets,
Speaker 3: everything is usually quite brightly lit. There may just be
Speaker 3: no way around that. It's kind of like suspending your
Speaker 3: disbelief for a play. You know that this is really
Speaker 3: taking place in a room, even though you're looking up
Speaker 3: at a stage. But this does raise an interesting ongoing
Speaker 3: problem even in movies today, with the art of visual storytelling,
Speaker 3: how do you convincingly show that a scene is dark
Speaker 3: but also allow the audience to see what's happening. It's
Speaker 3: kind of an oxymoron, but it's a thing different filmmakers
Speaker 3: have tried to tackle in different ways. Sometimes they just brightly,
Speaker 3: you know, they just brightly light it anyway and then
Speaker 3: ask you to suspend your disbelief. Other Times the scene
Speaker 3: is actually dark and that contributes to a kind of
Speaker 3: emotional or atmospheric effect, but it can create frustrations when
Speaker 3: trying to follow the drama.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a time or two watching this film
Speaker 2: where they were talking about how dark the room was,
Speaker 2: and I was like, well, even I can really make
Speaker 2: out everything. Maybe the lighting is off on my phone
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think this is still just a tension that visual
Speaker 3: storytellers struggle with even until today. You know, I remember
Speaker 3: people talking about stuff in the the last season of
Speaker 3: Game of Thrones, you know, apart from any like writing
Speaker 3: issues about that, but questions about certain scenes and episodes
Speaker 3: that were like very very dimly lit and dark scenes,
Speaker 3: and even that does highlight, Like, yeah, you can do that,
Speaker 3: and that can be good in some ways. It can
Speaker 3: create an intended atmospheric effect. It can make you feel
Speaker 3: a certain way, but then you're going to have a
Speaker 3: lot of viewers complaining that they can't tell what's going on,
Speaker 3: or they can't follow what's what's supposed to be happening
Speaker 3: in a scene.
Speaker 2: I've also read I'm I can't one percent match my
Speaker 2: experience up with this, but I've I've observed some conversations
Speaker 2: about how really dark scenes in movies, especially modern movies,
Speaker 2: perhaps don't play as well on streaming platforms versus physical media,
Speaker 2: you know, And I'm not enough of a tech head
Speaker 2: on all of that to really weigh in, but if
Speaker 2: listeners out there have any feedback on that, I'd love
Speaker 2: to I love to hear from you. I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: kind of like all in on any argument for physical
Speaker 2: media over depending entirely on streamers. So when it comes
Speaker 2: to films.
Speaker 3: Or I would wonder also just about watching things on
Speaker 3: home video versus in the movie theater, the movie theater
Speaker 3: might be a case where more dimly lit scenes come
Speaker 3: across better.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Yeah, that's the in theater propaganda is
Speaker 2: really big on telling me that the darks are darker,
Speaker 2: and you know, having watched Son of Frankenstein on the
Speaker 2: big screen, I mean those those really those dark shadows
Speaker 2: are really luscious up there, so I kind of buy
Speaker 2: into it.
Speaker 3: Anyway, That's not what's going on in House of Usher.
Speaker 3: Everything is very well lit here. But so we come
Speaker 3: inside and yes, we do have these these red candles everywhere,
Speaker 3: cherry red candles. And I like this little moment where
Speaker 3: Bristol the butler asks Philip to take off his boots
Speaker 3: and he's like, what for and he just says, you know,
Speaker 3: mister Roderick will explain, and Bristol disappears mysteriously for a
Speaker 3: moment here, but then reappears with slippers for him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, some real culture show being asked to take your
Speaker 2: shoes off in this shoes off household here, which I
Speaker 2: really I really appreciated this because I prior to watching
Speaker 2: the film, I've been meeting up with some family and
Speaker 2: it was clearly like a mix of shoes on households
Speaker 2: and shoes off households. Meeting in a rental home, you know,
Speaker 2: where you're like, what, why are people in the kitchen
Speaker 2: with their shoes on? What's happening? And you know it
Speaker 2: just they're different approaches.
Speaker 3: Wait, if you're comfortable sharing, which way are you? I
Speaker 3: don't even know? Do you all take shoes off in
Speaker 3: the house?
Speaker 2: Were shoes off households?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 4: Cool?
Speaker 2: But you know I mean if someone comes and I
Speaker 2: forget to say, hey, you can take your shoes off
Speaker 2: and they're wearing their shoes, I'm not going to freak out.
Speaker 2: It's like, that's on me because I didn't give you
Speaker 2: a heads up. Also, as comedian Shang Wang points out,
Speaker 2: there are certain circumstances where you may have to like
Speaker 2: run through the house with the shoes on to do something,
Speaker 2: you know, like turn the alarm system off or something
Speaker 2: I don't know. There are circumstances that the demands you
Speaker 2: keep them on.
Speaker 3: Well, what is totally commonplace in some cultures and some
Speaker 3: families is treated as quite strange here. This is not
Speaker 3: something that Philip Winthrop is used to. But yeah, we're
Speaker 3: told that Roderick will explain. So Philip is led up
Speaker 3: the grand staircase. So he goes along this carved banister
Speaker 3: and hand rail past these tapestries again the cherry red candles,
Speaker 3: to an upper hallway and eventually to Roderick's room and ooh,
Speaker 3: there's a very good boo scare right at the first
Speaker 3: time we meet Vincent Price. So Bristol goes to knock
Speaker 3: on the bedroom door, but before his knuckles can touch
Speaker 3: the wood, the door swings inward and into the doorway
Speaker 3: bursts Roderick. It is a fierce looking, clean shaven Vincent
Speaker 3: Price with platinum blonde hair, wearing a red velvet jacket
Speaker 3: and a black tie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, seeming to tower over him as well. Here.
Speaker 3: Yes, Price does come off as very physically large in
Speaker 3: this movie, and I think that'll be interesting to talk
Speaker 3: about maybe later when we I don't talk about the
Speaker 3: weird contrasting aspects of his physical presence and whether or
Speaker 3: not he should be taken as threatening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because he seems physically imposing that we've learned that
Speaker 2: he's actually quite fragile.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll get to that soon. So Roderick is initially
Speaker 3: furious that Bristol has admitted a visitor. He's furious but
Speaker 3: soft spoken, so he's like, how dare you? But in
Speaker 3: a library voice, and Philip explains that he insisted he
Speaker 3: believed he had the right. So Roderick brings Philip into
Speaker 3: his room to discuss, and in here Philip starts talking,
Speaker 3: but before he can even finish a sentence, Roderick winces,
Speaker 3: covering his ears and saying, mister Winthrop, if you please,
Speaker 3: an affliction of the hearing sounds of any exaggerated degree
Speaker 3: cut into my brain like knives. So you have to
Speaker 3: be you have to use your inside voice when speaking
Speaker 3: to Roderick. He cannot stand a raised voice. It causes
Speaker 3: him such pain. So Roderick goes to rest in a
Speaker 3: high back chair and Philip begins to explain what's going on.
Speaker 3: He says that he must be allowed to see Madeline
Speaker 3: since they are engaged to be married. Roderick seems disturbed
Speaker 3: by this news and tells him that it's impossible. Madeleine
Speaker 3: is confined to her bed and their engagement has to
Speaker 3: be called off. It was he should think of it
Speaker 3: just as an unfortunate mistake, and Philip must leave the
Speaker 3: estate at once. He says, it is not a healthy
Speaker 3: place for you to be. Philip, of course, does not
Speaker 3: accept this, and it would be a strange thing if
Speaker 3: he just conformed. He's like, no, I don't understand why
Speaker 3: you're saying this, and he says he's not going to
Speaker 3: leave without seeing Madeline. Multiple times in this argument, again
Speaker 3: Philip raises his voice and whenever he gets louder, Price
Speaker 3: closes his eyes and grits his teeth in pain. So
Speaker 3: he reacts every time. But while they're going back and forth,
Speaker 3: their dispute is cut short when Madeleine herself appears in
Speaker 3: the doorway of Roderick's and again this is mRNA Fahe now,
Speaker 3: she's obviously very happy to see Philip and flattered that
Speaker 3: he made the journey here. To the mansion, but there
Speaker 3: is some kind of cloud hanging over their reunion, somewhat literally,
Speaker 3: in the form of Roderick himself, who cuts it short
Speaker 3: to escort Madeleine back to her room, explaining that she
Speaker 3: must go back to bed.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is another film where people are sent to
Speaker 2: bed a very strict bedtime schedule here in House of USh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they go and Philip is left alone in
Speaker 3: Roderick's room, and here is where we see one of
Speaker 3: the first of the Bert Schoenberg paintings, not of a
Speaker 3: person in this case, but of the house itself in
Speaker 3: a wild impressionistic style. I was trying to think of
Speaker 3: a way to describe this. This is a great painting.
Speaker 3: It looks so it's so colorful and almost happy in
Speaker 3: the way the colors are jumbled, but also does look
Speaker 3: quite evil. It's like a cross between a haunted mansion,
Speaker 3: a monet painting of a big pile of Halloween candies,
Speaker 3: and also sort of a boss from Legend of Zelda
Speaker 3: Ocarina of Time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty fabulous again, very strong night Gallery vibes.
Speaker 2: You know, I can basically hear the theme music in
Speaker 2: my head. You know, it looks like a like a
Speaker 2: decaying mansion made out of meat, with like an eye
Speaker 2: opening in the center of it.
Speaker 3: It's tremendous, the eye in the center. That's what I'm
Speaker 3: reacting to with the Zelda comparison. It looks like the
Speaker 3: first boss you fight in Okarina of Time. That thing
Speaker 3: in the tree. Anyway, While Philip is looking at the
Speaker 3: painting waiting for Roderick to return, the fireplace suddenly spits
Speaker 3: a bunch of cinders onto his legs, and this will
Speaker 3: be the first of many attempts by the house to
Speaker 3: murder the characters, but he just kind of brushes it off.
Speaker 3: Roderick comes back and asks with concern what happened, but
Speaker 3: Philip is not worried about it. He's just like, I
Speaker 3: think your fireplace needs a screen, and Price says, does it.
Speaker 3: After this, they pick up the conversation sort of where
Speaker 3: they left off. We learn that Roderick is a man
Speaker 3: of the arts. He paints. The painted work we were
Speaker 3: just talking about is his own, and Roderick also plays
Speaker 3: the lute. But here the conversation gets weirder. Roderick wants
Speaker 3: to know if Philip really intends to marry Madeleine, if
Speaker 3: Philip says, of course he does, and Roderick says, do
Speaker 3: you intend to have children? And Philip says, god willing?
Speaker 3: Then Roderick gasps with despair, and he says god willing.
Speaker 3: He explains that this would be a nightmare and it
Speaker 3: cannot happen. Why, well, here we get one of Vincent
Speaker 3: Price's many lovely tortured monologues. So I just want to
Speaker 3: read from part of what he says here with some abridgements.
Speaker 3: Price says, because the usher line is tainted, you saw Madeleine,
Speaker 3: and you see me, we are dying, mister Winthrop. As
Speaker 3: you saw her today, she is and will remain, which,
Speaker 3: by the way, again, in suspension of disbelief, I will say,
Speaker 3: nothing looked all that unhealthy about Madeline. Like she looked fine.
Speaker 3: But we are by the way the characters talk, we're
Speaker 3: supposed to understand that when we saw her in the
Speaker 3: previous scene, she looks sickly and like like she is
Speaker 3: about to die.
Speaker 2: But really she just looks like she still has her
Speaker 2: night down on, yeah, and has had time to put
Speaker 2: on all her makeup.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Madeleine is supposed to look sick in the same
Speaker 3: way that these brightly. Rooms are supposed to look dark. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but anyway, price continues. Believe me, sir, I bear you
Speaker 3: no malice were things otherwise I should welcome you into
Speaker 3: our family joyously. But under the circumstances it is quite impossible.
Speaker 3: And then a little later he says, Madeleine and I
Speaker 3: are like figures of fine glass. The slightest touch and
Speaker 3: we may shatter. Both of us suffer from a morbid
Speaker 3: acuteness of the senses. Mine is the worse for having
Speaker 3: existed the longer, but both of us are afflicted with it.
Speaker 3: Any sort of food more exotic than the most pallid
Speaker 3: mash is unendurable to my taste buds. Any sort of
Speaker 3: garment other than the softest is agony to my flesh.
Speaker 3: My eyes are tormented by all but the faintest illumination.
Speaker 3: Odors assail me constantly, and as I've said, sounds of
Speaker 3: any degree whatsoever inspire me with terror. And then Philip reasons, ah,
Speaker 3: that's why your servant asked me to remove my boots,
Speaker 3: and Roderick says yes. And even so I could hear
Speaker 3: your coming, every footstep, every rustle of your clothes. I
Speaker 3: could hear your horse approaching. Hear the clatter of its
Speaker 3: hoofs across the courtyard. Your knock, the grating of the
Speaker 3: door bolt was like a sword stroke to my ears.
Speaker 3: I can hear the scratch of rat claws within the
Speaker 3: stone wall. Mister Winthrop, three quarters of my family have
Speaker 3: fallen into madness, and in their madness have acquired a
Speaker 3: super human strength, so that it took the power of
Speaker 3: many to subdue them. Oh excellent, and I love this
Speaker 3: for many reasons. First of all, the eventsid Price's delivery
Speaker 3: in the scene is great, but I also thought it
Speaker 3: was really interesting the relationship between the supposedly afflicted characters
Speaker 3: and the senses. I think a lot of times characters
Speaker 3: in horror stories like this who seem to be suffering
Speaker 3: from some kind of vague affliction are presented in the
Speaker 3: opposite way. They're presented as insensate or unconscious, kind of
Speaker 3: detached from reality. The ushers instead are hyper sensitive to
Speaker 3: all stimuliz sound, light, and taste, and they are thus
Speaker 3: more present and more vulnerable to every little bit of life.
Speaker 3: And there's also an interesting relationship of this to their
Speaker 3: cursed super strength. And warning there will be spoilers ahead,
Speaker 3: so if you want to see this movie without things spoiled,
Speaker 3: you know, go ahead and watch it for yourself. But uh,
Speaker 3: a spoiler's incoming. Later in the film, when Madeline does
Speaker 3: finally succumb to the Usher madness, we see that she's
Speaker 3: able to break metal chains and she kind of becomes
Speaker 3: a goth hulk.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's it is like they're the multi generational evil
Speaker 2: of the Usher family has reached terminal velocity, and you
Speaker 2: can tap into that velocity if you want to, if
Speaker 2: you have the willpower, I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's like, at the same time that they
Speaker 3: are dying and incredibly fragile, they're also becoming Superman. They're
Speaker 3: gain they're gaining all of Superman's sensory powers, like his
Speaker 3: superheroing and everything, and they're gaining Superman's strength.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Winthrop of course reacts to this with extreme skepticism.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 3: And then he's like, it is so dark in here, Roderic,
Speaker 3: can you light a candle? And so Roderick goes and
Speaker 3: lights two red candles on the mantle above the fireplace,
Speaker 3: and then he says, two pale drops of fire guttering
Speaker 3: in the vast, consuming darkness. My sister and myself. Shortly
Speaker 3: they will burn no more.
Speaker 2: I think this may have been the scene where I
Speaker 2: thought to myself, I can see every corner of this room.
Speaker 2: I think you're over reacting, Roderick, but you know, he
Speaker 2: kind of is a lot of the time.
Speaker 3: But so here the sort of the central dispute between
Speaker 3: the characters is established. Roderick says, hey, our family line
Speaker 3: is cursed. Madeleine and I are suffering from a physical
Speaker 3: and mental decomposition as a result of this curse. And
Speaker 3: Madeleine cannot be allowed to leave this house, cannot have children,
Speaker 3: or she will pass the curse along to them and
Speaker 3: the evil will continue. Philip, on the other hand, does
Speaker 3: not believe in the idea of this curse. He's dismissive
Speaker 3: of the whole thing and says, if Madeleine still wishes
Speaker 3: to marry him and wishes to have children, they will
Speaker 3: do so and they will leave the house together.
Speaker 2: This is something that Philip does bring up. It is
Speaker 2: the fact that he does already know her. Yes, it's
Speaker 2: you know, like they have a relationship already they you know.
Speaker 2: It's like it's just that now he is on Roderick's turf,
Speaker 2: and here he has come to meet her family and
Speaker 2: is therefore encountering different dynamics.
Speaker 3: I do think that's actually very interesting because this is
Speaker 3: an exaggerated horror version of a real dynamic, which is that,
Speaker 3: you know, people often act different when they're around their family.
Speaker 3: You can meet a person in one setting, and then
Speaker 3: when you go to meet their family, they just change
Speaker 3: a little bit. They act a little bit different. I
Speaker 3: think a lot of people have probably experienced this with
Speaker 3: like the family of a significant other, you know, with
Speaker 3: their in laws or whatever. Of course, this takes that
Speaker 3: to monstrous dimensions.
Speaker 2: Yes, but but yeah, it does plan on some real dynamics.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, like even in my own life,
Speaker 2: you know, I recognize that, Yeah, you know, I love
Speaker 2: my family, But if I'm visiting with them more than
Speaker 2: a couple of days, I feel myself falling back into
Speaker 2: a former self. You know. I feel like I can
Speaker 2: only main pin who I am outside of that dynamic
Speaker 2: for like a day or so, and then I begin
Speaker 2: to slip into this former self, and you know, I
Speaker 2: just observing the way that I change or regress when
Speaker 2: I am in this environment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's a really common experience. But so
Speaker 3: Philip here he says, I'm going to stay at the
Speaker 3: house until Madeline is well enough to leave. And Roderick
Speaker 3: is like, you know, okay, but now now that you know,
Speaker 3: whatever consequences fall upon you here, that's not my responsibility.
Speaker 3: That's on you, you know.
Speaker 2: And he's gonna have some time to kill in the
Speaker 2: House of Usher here. He's gonna start pointing out some
Speaker 2: problems with the foundation and so forth. And I couldn't help,
Speaker 2: but think, wouldn't it be an interesting read on this
Speaker 2: if Philip was a real fixer upper, you know, like
Speaker 2: a handyman type, and he was like, let me get it, Roderck,
Speaker 2: let me go over to the home depot. I'm going
Speaker 2: to pick up a few things. I can spackle this
Speaker 2: crack up. We'll get shoup and running a noe time
Speaker 2: now pards the lab and Roderick would be like, you
Speaker 2: can try, but this home is beyond repair because of
Speaker 2: the curves.
Speaker 3: Oh you know what Roderick is. He's like Homer Simpson
Speaker 3: in that episode where it's like, you know, the problem
Speaker 3: was water damage. A simple five cent washer will get out.
Speaker 3: So anyway, one of the weird things. The first time
Speaker 3: I was watching this, I was confused about I thought
Speaker 3: Philip arrived late at night, but I think he's supposed
Speaker 3: to have arrived earlier in the day, because we see
Speaker 3: like time pass and then it's like later in the
Speaker 3: evening and Philip is alone in his guest room getting
Speaker 3: ready to go down for supper, and here we see
Speaker 3: the first of the Poltergeistye stuff, Like he's got a
Speaker 3: chamber stick that's like a little candle holder with a
Speaker 3: dish on the bottom, you know, He's got that sitting
Speaker 3: on a table, and it starts to scoot across the
Speaker 3: surface of the table by itself. Now, when I first
Speaker 3: saw this, I was like, ah, okay, so there are
Speaker 3: definitely ghosts here. But then Philip hears a rumbling sound
Speaker 3: and he goes to look out his window and sees
Speaker 3: there is a giant crack running up from the foundation
Speaker 3: up the side of the house. Part of the frame
Speaker 3: of the house seems to be shifting, so maybe that's
Speaker 3: what made the candle inside move. Maybe it wasn't a ghost,
Speaker 3: And we get some nice creepy close ups of the
Speaker 3: crack running along the length of the exterior wall. It's
Speaker 3: just drooling cobwebs and dust.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this house is not up to cut. We are learning.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, as Philip is coming down for supper, he
Speaker 3: nearly gets squashed by a falling chandelier, you know, just
Speaker 3: misses him. He dodges out of the way, and Madeline
Speaker 3: comes out and sees this, and she begs him to
Speaker 3: leave the house for his own safety. But he's like, no,
Speaker 3: it's fine. It's just an old, creaky chandelier. Everything's okay.
Speaker 3: So they have dinner and they're sitting at the strange
Speaker 3: dinner table. Apparently again the ushers can only eat unseasoned
Speaker 3: mash and white bread. But Roderick does appear to have
Speaker 3: a taste for wine served in nearly opaque blood red goblets.
Speaker 3: I guess maybe wine is not too exotic a flavor.
Speaker 2: No, no, you know, especially if you're just having potatoes
Speaker 2: and molasses for dinner and you can handle slightly spicy wine.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Philip notices that Madeline is not eating at all.
Speaker 3: He's also like, hey, Roderick, are you going to get
Speaker 3: that crack in the wall fixed? What you're talking about?
Speaker 3: And I do not think Roderick is planning on it.
Speaker 3: Other topics of conversation at dinner are that the soil
Speaker 3: around the mansion is turned sour. No plants will grow
Speaker 3: in the usherlands. And then also that friends in Boston
Speaker 3: keep asking about Madeline, and she seems encouraged by this,
Speaker 3: but Roderick looks irritated at the delivery of this news.
Speaker 3: So after supper, Philip and Madeline they go up to
Speaker 3: the sitting room I guess with Roderick, and they listen
Speaker 3: to him giving a little concert. He places loot. Remember
Speaker 3: the lute from earlier. Roderick says, yes, I play the lute,
Speaker 3: but I don't know listening in this scene, does he
Speaker 3: play it Either sounds like he is just now learning
Speaker 3: and kind of improvising, or he is so advanced as
Speaker 3: a lute player that now he is only interested in
Speaker 3: like non rhythmic twelve tone compositions.
Speaker 2: At the very least, it's it's you know, he can
Speaker 2: only handle these very soft sounds. He gentle music. So yeah,
Speaker 2: maybe it's he's into some sort of like weird or
Speaker 2: deep ambient kind of a thing. Or or yeah, it's
Speaker 2: like I don't need to learn to play this lute
Speaker 2: all that much because this is about all I can
Speaker 2: handle anyway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I am I am cursed. It is forbidden for
Speaker 3: me to play in a key, so I shall only
Speaker 3: pluck the notes at random, and then Philip says, remarkable,
Speaker 3: you composed it yourself. But Philip kind of like he
Speaker 3: can't get enough of the twelve tone lute. He's like,
Speaker 3: give me another, let's hear song. But Roderick insists with
Speaker 3: a severe expression, that now Madeleine must go to sleep.
Speaker 3: In fact, all three of them must go to sleep.
Speaker 2: It is nice seven point thirty p m. All to bed.
Speaker 3: So there's another scene later that night where Philip sneaks
Speaker 3: into Madeleine's room to talk with her in secret. He
Speaker 3: tells her that in the morning he wants to take
Speaker 3: her away from the house if she'll let him. What
Speaker 3: is Madeleine's state of mind again, She seems conflicted, Like
Speaker 3: she she does buy into the idea that she is
Speaker 3: sick from a curse and terrible things could befall them
Speaker 3: if she were to leave, But also you can tell
Speaker 3: that she wants to leave. She's excited by the idea,
Speaker 3: and something kind of comes alive within her at the
Speaker 3: idea of escaping with the man she loves. So she's
Speaker 3: sort of in the middle position between the two other characters.
Speaker 3: Roderick is fully convinced of the Usher curse, Philip doesn't
Speaker 3: believe it at all, and Madeleine is torn in between
Speaker 3: the two ideas. But this scene takes an interesting turn
Speaker 3: because Roderick suddenly appears at the door. Remember he's got
Speaker 3: super sensitive hearing, so he hears anytime someone is talking
Speaker 3: in the house. He's stern and angry at first, and
Speaker 3: tries to send Philip to bed, but after Madeleine shows
Speaker 3: a bit of defiance, shows that maybe the spell is
Speaker 3: breaking and she might want to leave the house with Philip,
Speaker 3: Roderick then changes tack, and he sort of turns and
Speaker 3: becomes pathetic and pitiable, which I think you could interpret
Speaker 3: multiple ways. As I've said, this movie and Price's performance
Speaker 3: and contain a lot of ambiguities that you could read
Speaker 3: in different directions. But I think you could certainly interpret
Speaker 3: this as a kind of emotional manipulation. If he can't
Speaker 3: convince her that she has to stay for her own wellbeing,
Speaker 3: you know something bad will happen to her if she leaves.
Speaker 3: I guess something bad is going to happen to her anyway,
Speaker 3: Maybe he can at least recruit her to stay on
Speaker 3: behalf of his feelings and his well being.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think it's important to note that this
Speaker 2: is a film where you just had it on the background.
Speaker 2: You could think of it as just like, okay, here's
Speaker 2: Vincent Price and Vincent Price role. But there are a
Speaker 2: lot of little nuances to the way he plays all
Speaker 2: of these decisions and all of these actions from his character.
Speaker 2: I feel like any prime Vincent Price performance is going
Speaker 2: to be, you know, a masterclass in its own way.
Speaker 2: You know, sometimes he's more hamming it up. Sometimes there
Speaker 2: are more subtleties, but he's never just going through the motions.
Speaker 2: So certainly at this period in his career. Yeah, by
Speaker 2: the time we get to them up at show, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe but not here.
Speaker 3: So later that night and yes, still the same twenty
Speaker 3: four hour period, the scenes just keep piling up. Before daybreak,
Speaker 3: Philip is lying in bed and then he hears a
Speaker 3: bunch of weird sounds echoing through the house. So he
Speaker 3: runs around, investigating the sounds and looking for Madeline. He
Speaker 3: sees some creepy sits along the way, like wind blowing
Speaker 3: in through the windows. There's a staircase railing that gives
Speaker 3: way under his hand, there's a heavy door creaking open
Speaker 3: and shut over and over, and Philip eventually follows the
Speaker 3: sounds into the mansion's chapel. There's a chapel inside the
Speaker 3: house where he finds Madeline sprawled out I believe, on
Speaker 3: the altar, asleep, and Bristol, the butler, comes in to
Speaker 3: tell him that Madeleine often sleep walks and ends up
Speaker 3: here in the chapel. Bristol says that she is obsessed
Speaker 3: by thoughts of death and has been ever since her
Speaker 3: return from Boston. So Bristol takes Madeline back to her bed,
Speaker 3: and then the next morning there's a scene where Philip
Speaker 3: comes into the kitchen. Bristol is here again, and now
Speaker 3: he's boiling a huge cauldron of gruel over and open fire.
Speaker 3: And I'm looking at that. I'm thinking, I don't know
Speaker 3: how many gallons of ruel that is, but who is
Speaker 3: going to eat all that gruel? There are four people
Speaker 3: in this house.
Speaker 2: Well, freeesome for later, you know, you give me want leftovers.
Speaker 3: So Philip says he's gonna take breakfast up to up
Speaker 3: to Madeline in bed. He's like, hey, how about some
Speaker 3: eggs for my Madeline? And Bristol is like, oh no, no, no, sir,
Speaker 3: not eggs much too threatening to the taste buds. She
Speaker 3: will only want gruel. Eggs are one of the exotic flavors.
Speaker 2: Eggs are too spicy for the ushers.
Speaker 3: Yes, so gruel it is. We also get more, like
Speaker 3: more of the crumbling house attacks, like at one point,
Speaker 3: Philip is standing by the gruel cauldron talking to Bristol
Speaker 3: and the cauldron like the wall is sort of shaking
Speaker 3: and the cauldron swings toward him, but Bristol is like,
Speaker 3: oh careful, sir.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, if your gruel is pretty thick, you're
Speaker 2: gonna get some bubbles and you could get splattered. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's just that's just gruel one on one.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So after this, there's a very funny scene where
Speaker 3: Winthrop awkwardly tries to feed Madeline gruel in bed. He's like,
Speaker 3: come on, eat up, honey. She's not angry, not even
Speaker 3: for gruel, and he tries to cheer her up by
Speaker 3: opening the windows and letting sunshine in. Tries to convince
Speaker 3: her once again to come back to Boston with him,
Speaker 3: but in this scene she seems to have regressed to
Speaker 3: her original state of hopelessness. She tells him soon I
Speaker 3: shall be dead, and he obviously does not like hearing this.
Speaker 3: He tries to remind her of how happy and full
Speaker 3: of life she was in Boston, but she says, maybe
Speaker 3: you'll understand once you see see what. Well, it's time
Speaker 3: to go investigate the family crypt here. We're going to
Speaker 3: get another kind of partial explanation of what is going on.
Speaker 3: So underneath the mansion there is a subterranean crypt full
Speaker 3: of bones of all of Madeline and Roderick Usher's ancestors.
Speaker 3: She shows Philip the coffins one by one, going down
Speaker 3: the line and listing their names and saying their relationship
Speaker 3: to her, until finally she gets to the spot of
Speaker 3: her own coffin, which is empty and waiting for her.
Speaker 3: And Philip hates this. He's like, there's a coffin here
Speaker 3: with your name on it. This is monstrous. She says,
Speaker 3: it waits for me. And as a side note, I
Speaker 3: think the crypt set here is nice. By the way
Speaker 3: the characters talk about how there's something wrong with the
Speaker 3: air in the crypt. They never fully explain that, but
Speaker 3: I like that just as a little like detail that
Speaker 3: kind of excites the mind, like, oh, could there be
Speaker 3: something in the air that's causing a problem. Or are
Speaker 3: they just saying like it is evil in here Mmm?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, who knows what's like leaking up through the
Speaker 2: earth into this mansion, though it also also seems like
Speaker 2: there's a lot of evil leaking out of this mansion
Speaker 2: into the earth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So, once again, Madeleine says to Philip that
Speaker 3: he just doesn't understand. And there is something I think
Speaker 3: very effectively unsettling about this repeated theme that multiple times
Speaker 3: characters tell Philip that there's something wrong but he doesn't understand,
Speaker 3: and then they don't explain it immediately, like you know,
Speaker 3: I'm soon to die. This coffin waits for me, and
Speaker 3: he's like, why would you say that you can live?
Speaker 3: And she can't explain. All she can do is tell
Speaker 3: him that he doesn't understand. I think the idea that
Speaker 3: there is some understanding that would make sense of this
Speaker 3: all but it can't be explained to him or can't
Speaker 3: be explained yet, is very creepy.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I feel like Matheson in the script here
Speaker 2: is really, you know, touching on the actual gap that
Speaker 2: often exists between my experience and your experience, between my
Speaker 2: mental state and your mental state, and it can feel
Speaker 2: like there's something that can't be bridged there, you know,
Speaker 2: at least not with the tools that one has immediately
Speaker 2: at their disposal.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Oh. In the scene we get another house attack.
Speaker 3: There's a coffin scare, like a coffin falls out of
Speaker 3: the wall, nearly crushes the two of them, but they
Speaker 3: dodge out of the way, and then Madeline faints once again,
Speaker 3: and Roderick arrives and carries her away. So in the
Speaker 3: next scene we finally are going to get some explanation.
Speaker 3: Roderick says it is time for Philip to understand. So
Speaker 3: they go out on the balcony overlooking the twisted marsh below,
Speaker 3: and Roderick says, the tarn is very deep. One of
Speaker 3: the Usher women drowned herself in it. She was never found.
Speaker 3: I dare say, it's deep enough to swallow this house entire.
Speaker 3: And then there's another little exchange, but Usher goes on
Speaker 3: to I again want to quote his monologue here because
Speaker 3: I think it's great. Roderick says, once this land was fertile,
Speaker 3: farms abounded, earth yielded her riches. At harvest time, there
Speaker 3: were trees and plant life, flowers, fields of grain. There
Speaker 3: was great beauty here at that time. This water was
Speaker 3: clear and fresh. Swans glided upon its crystal surface. Animals
Speaker 3: came to its bank trustingly to drink. But this was
Speaker 3: long before my time. And then something crept across the
Speaker 3: land and blighted it. The trees lost their foliage, the
Speaker 3: flowers languished, and shrubs grew brown and shriveled. The grain
Speaker 3: fields perished, the lakes and ponds became black and stagnant,
Speaker 3: and the land withered as before a plague, a plague
Speaker 3: of evil. And here Roderick takes Philip inside to show
Speaker 3: him the paintings, the paintings that we alluded to earlier,
Speaker 3: of the portraits of his ancestors. So we go through
Speaker 3: them one by one and we see each painting, and
Speaker 3: then Roderick names his relative and then begins to list
Speaker 3: sort of the high points of each relative's biography, which
Speaker 3: are mostly negative epithets and lists of crimes. So it
Speaker 3: turns out all of the Usher ancestors were horrible. They
Speaker 3: were thieves, swindlers, betrayers, blackmailers, liars, exploiters, slave traders, murderers,
Speaker 3: and assassins.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this Rundown reminds me a lot of the card
Speaker 2: game Gloom. I don't know if you're familiar with with
Speaker 2: this one. It has kind of like an Edward Gory
Speaker 2: kind of vibe to it, where you're trying to like
Speaker 2: play the most cursed upper crust family.
Speaker 3: I'm alware of it, but I've never played it.
Speaker 2: It's pretty fun, as Zarich, it's been a number of years,
Speaker 2: but it has this kind of vibe like who can
Speaker 2: out usher the other player.
Speaker 3: Who has the most evil ancestor?
Speaker 2: But oh yeah, this tour of the worst of the
Speaker 2: worst in the Usher family is tremendous, and we have illustrations.
Speaker 2: Of course, we have those wonderful, dark, grotesque portraits of
Speaker 2: each individual, each one not as much a photorealistic image
Speaker 2: of the individual, but like a psychic portrait of their soul.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I included some screenshots of these paintings here
Speaker 3: in the outline for you to look at. Robie, do
Speaker 3: you want to comment on any individually. I think this
Speaker 3: first one mentioned Anthony Usher, is interesting because it is
Speaker 3: h This is supposed to be like an evil old man,
Speaker 3: but this face looks almost childlike in a way, except
Speaker 3: the face rendered with these sort of jigsaw puzzle lines
Speaker 3: running through it. But it's you know, pictured with these
Speaker 3: like large eyes with large dilated pupils, cannoting a kind
Speaker 3: of I don't even know how to explain it. It's
Speaker 3: it looks like a kind of evil innocence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. It's it's hard to
Speaker 2: really put it in words. Yeah, but those those eyes
Speaker 2: are wide and curious and kind of innocent. But the
Speaker 2: rest is almost decade and patchwork.
Speaker 3: There's another one that shows a man who whose eyes
Speaker 3: are hidden in shadow, but it's like his outline is
Speaker 3: sort of sort of shifting through the air so that
Speaker 3: he actually does not have a fixed outline at the
Speaker 3: back of his neck and his head. Instead, there are
Speaker 3: like these multiple lines that just blur out into this
Speaker 3: cloud of red, as if he is taking form out
Speaker 3: of a mist of blood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one has a has strong vampiric elements to it,
Speaker 2: like get a sense of like biological disorder, like inner
Speaker 2: disease or disease of the soul. And you know, virtually
Speaker 2: no eyes, just dark pits as well, so less innocence
Speaker 2: with this particular character.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then we also see probably the most infernal
Speaker 3: looking boat Captain picture I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, oh my goodness, the boat Captain was like
Speaker 2: just the burning ember eyes. Yeah, like he this is
Speaker 2: the guy who volunteers to bring Dragula to England. Like
Speaker 2: this is He's like, yeah, bloawed him up.
Speaker 3: But so the point is that going back through time
Speaker 3: before Roderick and Madeleine, everyone in the Usher line seems
Speaker 3: to have been, in one way or another, the worst
Speaker 3: kind of person imaginable, someone who becomes rich by destroying
Speaker 3: the lives of others and then, at least in terms
Speaker 3: of the external world, gets away with it. But do
Speaker 3: they really get away with it because a lot of
Speaker 3: these people were told end ups. It's something bad does
Speaker 3: happen to them. But it's not like they face justice
Speaker 3: from outside. It's like they go mad or they're taken
Speaker 3: ill or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, like they don't. They don't get their come
Speaker 2: uppance in a real firm manner like they in the
Speaker 2: sense that they they stay rich, they stay highly successful
Speaker 2: in their own deplorable fields, and then the rest of
Speaker 2: our world, the world just kind of looks on is like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: of course the Ushers got away with it. Again, that's
Speaker 2: what they do. And here we are.
Speaker 3: So Philip protests. He is like, but sir, you cannot
Speaker 3: believe that the sins of the father should be visited
Speaker 3: upon the children. And Roderick says you do not, sir.
Speaker 3: Then the House of Usher seems to you normal. And
Speaker 3: then Philip says it is neither normal nor abnormal. It
Speaker 3: is only a house. And I think this plays on
Speaker 3: another interesting theme in the movie, that the duality the
Speaker 3: different meanings of the word house in English. So it
Speaker 3: is the house of Usher that we're told is evil
Speaker 3: and cur and house can mean the literal building, an
Speaker 3: ancestral family dwelling which seems infused with wickedness and crumbles
Speaker 3: kind of pointedly with the intent to cause harm. But
Speaker 3: also the word house is used to refer to a
Speaker 3: lineage a family, usually an aristocratic or royal one, as
Speaker 3: in the House of Windsor. It's kind of interesting that
Speaker 3: you only use the word house to refer to a
Speaker 3: family if it's like a prominent, rich family. And adding
Speaker 3: to that, there's this kind of overlap with the idea
Speaker 3: of the curse here in the two meanings of house,
Speaker 3: because if the idea is that the ancestors of the
Speaker 3: Usher line became rich by way of their sins. It
Speaker 3: is their wickedness that generated the money to buy the
Speaker 3: land and build the physical house, which are the physical
Speaker 3: things that are now cursed. So the reason they have
Speaker 3: a mansion and a vast estate is because of the
Speaker 3: evil crimes of the past.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all of these things that were purchased and acquired
Speaker 2: via that wealth is tainted by the acts that generated it.
Speaker 3: So Roderick explains his theory that evil is not just
Speaker 3: a word, it is a substance, a living reality, and
Speaker 3: like any living thing, it can be created and was
Speaker 3: created by his ancestors. And now the evil they created
Speaker 3: lives on within the house. Again, the ambiguity, he says
Speaker 3: house so is that the building or the living descendants
Speaker 3: or both, and it will live on as long as
Speaker 3: the house still exists, which is why Roderick insists that
Speaker 3: neither he nor Madeleine should ever have children. It would
Speaker 3: be to allow the evil to live on for another generation.
Speaker 3: So Roderick says explicitly that all of the near fatal
Speaker 3: accidents that have occurred since Philip arrived were not accidents.
Speaker 3: It is the evil of the house lashing out trying
Speaker 3: to kill Philip and Philip violently rejects this. He says, no, Roderick,
Speaker 3: the evil in this house is you. I will not
Speaker 3: let your sick can fantasies destroy Madeleine's life. She leaves
Speaker 3: with me today. And when he yells price again, he
Speaker 3: shows the fragility. He clutches his ears and he shrinks
Speaker 3: in pain.
Speaker 2: You know, this is a common response in films when
Speaker 2: there's a new theory regarding the nature of evil. It
Speaker 2: reminds me a little bit of the nineteen seventy three
Speaker 2: British horror film The Creeping Flesh, which is not one
Speaker 2: of my favorites. It's a little I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't like the mouth feel of this particular one, but
Speaker 2: it has Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in it, and
Speaker 2: one of the characters. At one point it's like I
Speaker 2: have made a breakthrough in the nature of evil. Evil
Speaker 2: is real and we can put it under a microscope
Speaker 2: and study it. Look look at the evil, and you
Speaker 2: know it's always a controversial hypothesis.
Speaker 3: Now regarding the evil is you interpretation of the story
Speaker 3: referring to Roderick here, one thing I think worth mentioning
Speaker 3: is that it is never are made explicit in the movie,
Speaker 3: but there is sort of an unspoken theme that a
Speaker 3: lot of viewers have picked up on in like film
Speaker 3: critics literary critics talking about the story over the years.
Speaker 3: It could be implied that Roderick is acting in a
Speaker 3: way out of jealousy, that in fact, he has desire
Speaker 3: for his own sister and he wants to control her
Speaker 3: and keep her at the house because he can't stand
Speaker 3: the thought of her going away and marrying Philip. I
Speaker 3: think that's a plausible reading of the evil as you
Speaker 3: interpretation of the story, though the evil is you could
Speaker 3: also be true about Roderick and simply be that he's
Speaker 3: so wrapped up in his delusions about the physical manifestation
Speaker 3: of evil caused by the horrible ancestors that he unknowingly
Speaker 3: projects this delusion onto Madeline and unnecessarily warps her mind
Speaker 3: and ruins her life as well. But then another interpretation
Speaker 3: is that the external evil is real and Roderick is correct.
Speaker 3: And I think the interesting thing is that it's possible
Speaker 3: to take the movie on any of these interpretations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, though I think the middle is the more. It's
Speaker 2: the one I lean more towards. I think it's the
Speaker 2: more interesting of the concepts, you know, because if it's
Speaker 2: just him, you know, creeping on her and having designs
Speaker 2: for her, I don't know that's you know, that's gross
Speaker 2: and all, but it's not matter. It only gets me
Speaker 2: so far. And then like the actual physical reality of
Speaker 2: evil too. I mean that, you know, definitely gets into
Speaker 2: a nice supernatural zone. But it's that that middle area,
Speaker 2: that idea that it's just like sheer projection of paranoia
Speaker 2: and and and shame and uh and so forth from Roderic,
Speaker 2: Like just this is the sheer power of his dark thoughts,
Speaker 2: you know, uh, in a non supernatural way. Like I
Speaker 2: feel like that's very compelling.
Speaker 3: I agree, that is also my preferred interpretation. But I
Speaker 3: thought it was worth mentioning the three different ways because
Speaker 3: I've seen sort of u people writing about this movie
Speaker 3: that take it all three.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I do like that ambiguity in a film,
Speaker 2: you know, where you're open to your own interpretation.
Speaker 3: Anyway, After this confrontation between Philip and Roderick, Philip goes
Speaker 3: to Madeleine's room and makes one last bid to convince
Speaker 3: her remember she's been vacillating. She'll say like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: let's go and then like, no, no, I'm cursed. I
Speaker 3: have to stay. So he's like, you've got to leave
Speaker 3: with me. There is nothing wrong with you that leaving
Speaker 3: this house won't cure. And Hope kind of gathers in
Speaker 3: her mind again and she says, yes, I will go,
Speaker 3: and they kiss. She seems afraid but also excited. So
Speaker 3: they got to pack their things and get ready to go.
Speaker 3: But while they are packing their things and they're in
Speaker 3: their separate rooms, Roderick goes into Madeleine's room and begins
Speaker 3: to argue with her, reminding her of all the evils
Speaker 3: and calamities that he says will occur if she leaves
Speaker 3: the house. And tensions rise, and you can hear Philip
Speaker 3: hears through the wall that they begin to yell, which is,
Speaker 3: you know, that's not normal normally everybody keeps the Library
Speaker 3: voice in this house. And phil Pilip finally hears Madeleine's
Speaker 3: scream and when he comes into the room, Roderick is
Speaker 3: standing at the window and Madeleine is lying on her sheets,
Speaker 3: apparently dead. Now Philip yells at Roderick, you killed her,
Speaker 3: but Roderick says, no, there is no mark on her.
Speaker 3: You are the one who killed her. He's like, I
Speaker 3: warned you, and I warned you. Her heart could not
Speaker 3: withstand the strain of leaving, the strain you put upon her.
Speaker 3: At least she's now been spared the agony of trying
Speaker 3: to escape. One candle left to burn. Now before the darkness.
Speaker 2: Comes way to go, Philip, you killed her.
Speaker 3: And the interesting thing is that Philip and Roderick have
Speaker 3: been at opposite ends of this, and Madeleine's been in
Speaker 3: the middle. Roderick's like, there's a curse. Madeleine is sick.
Speaker 3: Philip is like, there's not a curse. She's not sick,
Speaker 3: she's fine, And they're both sort of trying to convince Madeline.
Speaker 3: But now that Madeleine is apparently dead, you start to
Speaker 3: see Philip succumbing to Roderick's interpretation. So they're like in
Speaker 3: the family chapel praying over Madeleine's body, and you can
Speaker 3: see Philip is is filled with guilt, and he even
Speaker 3: asks in a subsequent scene he's he's talking to Bristol
Speaker 3: later and he's like, could it be that I that
Speaker 3: I did this, that I, you know, excited her her
Speaker 3: illness and I killed her? Like he is starting to
Speaker 3: buy into the curse theory.
Speaker 2: Now he's been there too long. He's becoming a part
Speaker 2: of the House of Usher.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, and then there's a part that did make
Speaker 3: me laugh out loud. When they're there. The two of
Speaker 3: them are in the chapel praying over Madeleine's dead body
Speaker 3: with the open casket, and Roderick is like, oh, by
Speaker 3: the way, she's not at peace, now she's in hell.
Speaker 3: All ushers go to hell.
Speaker 2: That is deliciously awful, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And Philip's just like shut up. But so they
Speaker 3: start this vigorous bickering. But one thing we the audience see,
Speaker 3: and Roderick sees, but Philip does not see, is that
Speaker 3: Madeline's fingers begin to flex and stretch. Uh oh. So
Speaker 3: Roderick catches a glimpse of the and he quickly snaps
Speaker 3: the coffin lid shut, and it's like, okay, quickly, let's
Speaker 3: carry her coffin down to the crypt. Hurry up now,
Speaker 3: And so the mourners leave the chapel, they shut the crypt,
Speaker 3: and we zoom slowly on the coffin until finally we
Speaker 3: hear Madeleine scream, and we have arrived at the most
Speaker 3: classic of Edgar Allan Poe theme's premature burial. That's right,
Speaker 3: So now everything is building up to the climax. The
Speaker 3: next morning, Philip is getting ready to leave. He again
Speaker 3: is buying into the Roderick theory. He's distraught the ideas
Speaker 3: have gotten to him, and he's worried that he really
Speaker 3: did kill Madeline by putting these ideas in her head
Speaker 3: about leaving the house. But Bristol, the butler, is trying
Speaker 3: to console Philip, and he lets slip that, you know, Madeleine,
Speaker 3: she suffered from many health conditions, and there were many
Speaker 3: health conditions that run in the family. He starts to
Speaker 3: list them, you know, nervous conditions, something you know, a
Speaker 3: failure of the heart, and then he starts to say,
Speaker 3: but catches himself catalepsy, which is a condition where people
Speaker 3: fall into a kind of unconscious trance or spontaneous coma
Speaker 3: where they are immobile and can appear to be dead,
Speaker 3: but they're not. Philip hears this and he realizes what
Speaker 3: it means. What if Madeleine was still alive and only
Speaker 3: appeared to have died. What if she has been buried
Speaker 3: alive in the crypt so Philip. He freaks out. He
Speaker 3: runs down under the house into the chamber. He finds
Speaker 3: Madeleine's coffin strangely wrapped shut with a padlocked chain, and
Speaker 3: then he goes and finds an axe, breaks the chain open,
Speaker 3: only to discover that the coffin is empty. That's not good,
Speaker 3: So Philip goes and confronts Roderick, wanting to know where
Speaker 3: Madeleine is, and Roderick, he doesn't try to deny it.
Speaker 3: He says she's in a secret place and he won't tell.
Speaker 3: And Philip threatens Roderick with the axe, but Roderick is
Speaker 3: not moved. He does not back down. He says, go on,
Speaker 3: you would be doing me a great favor. And so
Speaker 3: again it's interesting here, how so physically unthreatening Roderick is
Speaker 3: in this scene. He has all the power, but he's
Speaker 3: so physically weak, so fragile. He cringes and cowers in
Speaker 3: pain when Philip yells at him, and when Philip threatens
Speaker 3: him with an axe with violence, he's just like, go
Speaker 3: ahead and do it. So it's a very unusual and
Speaker 3: fascinating power dynamic in the drama.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like you can kill me, and you know,
Speaker 2: and I'll go to Hell where I belong, but just
Speaker 2: don't raise your voice or touch my garments. And because
Speaker 2: it just can't take that.
Speaker 3: Right, So Philip is he's searching all over the house
Speaker 3: looking for Madeline. He eventually he just becomes totally exhausted
Speaker 3: and passes out. And here we get a great dream
Speaker 3: sequence where Philip wanders through an altered version of the
Speaker 3: House of Usher, filled with blue fog, and eventually makes
Speaker 3: his way into the chapel, which has all of the
Speaker 3: horrible Usher ancestors moaning at him and reaching out to
Speaker 3: grab his flesh. And when Philip goes to the head
Speaker 3: of the chapel, he finds Madeline's coffin, occupied only by
Speaker 3: a skeleton. And then he searches further and further deeper
Speaker 3: into the dream, and somewhere in the dream he can't
Speaker 3: find her, but he imagines Madeline alive, still covered in flesh,
Speaker 3: trapped in her coffin and screaming wide eyed in terror.
Speaker 3: I love the dream.
Speaker 2: Sequence, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So anyway, when Philip wakes up, he goes to
Speaker 3: Roderick's room, where Roderick is just sitting there plucking his
Speaker 3: lute and Phillip's like, you murdered your sister, mister usher,
Speaker 3: and I intend to see that you hang for it,
Speaker 3: and Roderick says, arrange it quickly. Then the old house
Speaker 3: crumbles the time window is closing, but Roderick goes on.
Speaker 3: He starts another monologue where he's like, if you only
Speaker 3: knew the agonies I have spared you in this world
Speaker 3: that I have endured on your behalf. Did you know
Speaker 3: I could hear the scratching of her fingernails on the
Speaker 3: casket lid? Did you know I could hear her screaming
Speaker 3: my name for help? And then Roderick seems he suddenly
Speaker 3: like it's like something seizes him and he calls out,
Speaker 3: be done, be done. And Philip realizes what this means.
Speaker 3: Madeleine is still alive and Roderick can hear her screaming
Speaker 3: for help now, so Roderick rants and raves in agony.
Speaker 3: He can hear her scratching and all that, but Philip
Speaker 3: doesn't know where to find her, and we cut away.
Speaker 3: We see a chained coffin, a different chained coffin with
Speaker 3: Madeline's bloody fingers reaching out through the crack. Ooh, it's
Speaker 3: a chilling image and then finally Philip, Roderick and Bristol.
Speaker 3: They run around. Philip is trying to find her. He
Speaker 3: makes his way into another part of the crypt where
Speaker 3: the coffins of the Ushers have all been pulled out
Speaker 3: of their places, and the skeletons the bones are scattered
Speaker 3: across the floor, and they find Madeleine's secret coffin thrown open.
Speaker 3: The chain's broken. So here's the payoff of the monologue
Speaker 3: we got in Act one where Roderick says, oh, she
Speaker 3: has the madness. Remember the madness he mentioned earlier where
Speaker 3: his relatives all go mad and gain the strength of
Speaker 3: many men. So Philip at this point is running through
Speaker 3: the house, finding and unlocking secret passageways to locate Madeleine.
Speaker 3: Roderick arms himself with a pistol, but is that going
Speaker 3: to do any good? Could you possibly imagine it? Would?
Speaker 3: We finally get the ultimate climax of the film, where
Speaker 3: I don't want to spoil too much, but for a
Speaker 3: movie that is mostly kind of visually subdued apart from
Speaker 3: like the paintings and the dream sequence, when we finally
Speaker 3: see Madeleine in her madness, in her glorious madness, with
Speaker 3: her hands covered in rivulets of blood from where she
Speaker 3: has scratched her fingernails away on the inside of the coffin.
Speaker 3: Her eyes are just wide with absolute terror and insanity.
Speaker 3: Her hair is thrown back. They cast these like these
Speaker 3: amazing blue lights over her face. She is awesome to behold.
Speaker 2: Yeah, She's like a bansheet or a wraith, you know.
Speaker 2: She has that kind of energy to her avengeful spirit.
Speaker 3: And of course we get avengeful final confrontation, whereas the
Speaker 3: house is fully crumbling. Everything's on fire now, the House
Speaker 3: of Usher is meeting its ultimate physical demise. Also Madeleine
Speaker 3: confronts her brother and she takes him by the neck
Speaker 3: and strangles Roderic amidst all the fire and the smoke
Speaker 3: and the falling rubble, and it's a tremendous and terrifying climax.
Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah, Oh my goodness. Like the mansion looked amazing
Speaker 2: earlier in the picture, and as a fiery husk consumed
Speaker 2: in this cataclysm, it also looks amazing. The curse comes
Speaker 2: to full fruition here, just absolutely apocalyptic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so Philip is the only one who survives.
Speaker 3: The house burns and collapses, and then as he walks away,
Speaker 3: comes out of the gate, wanders into the swamp, with
Speaker 3: everything he loved destroyed. We see the final quote from
Speaker 3: the original post story. The words appear on the screen,
Speaker 3: and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed,
Speaker 3: sullenly and silently over the fragments of the house busher.
Speaker 2: Fabulous, fabulous, And of course the moral of the story
Speaker 2: is never meet your significant other's family. Just don't do it.
Speaker 3: So again, a different, different kind of film, a different
Speaker 3: kind of proposition than Mask of the Red Death, which
Speaker 3: is wilder and more visually extravagant, and you know, has
Speaker 3: more kind of variety in it and all that. But
Speaker 3: I think for what it is as a tighter, cozier
Speaker 3: tale of the macabre, House of Usher is really strong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a film that vibes hard. Again, It's
Speaker 2: maybe not the ideal viewing experience for you if you
Speaker 2: want something a little more action based or something that's
Speaker 2: going to hit you a lot of jump scares. But
Speaker 2: in terms of like just pure gothic horror po vibes,
Speaker 2: it's hard to beat House of Usher.
Speaker 3: So happy Halloween, everybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is a fun one. I enjoyed watching that.
Speaker 2: I'd never seen it before, and I originally enjoyed the experience.
Speaker 2: It's a good film to really focus on, but I mean,
Speaker 2: you could have it on in the background and it
Speaker 2: would still be very visually pleasing, but it's also a
Speaker 2: good one to really dive into. All Right, well, we're
Speaker 2: going to go ahead and close it out here, but
Speaker 2: just a reminder that while Stuffed About Your Mind is
Speaker 2: primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and
Speaker 2: Thursday science and culture podcast on Fridays. You know, we
Speaker 2: have to we have to release a little steam. We've
Speaker 2: we've got to dive into some weird films and talk
Speaker 2: about those. So hey, you know, you get stressful weeks ahead,
Speaker 2: don't worry. Weird House Cinema will be here for you.
Speaker 2: In fact, next week's is going to be a nice
Speaker 2: Halloween selection as well. I can't promise anything, but I'm
Speaker 2: hoping we can maybe even get it out like just
Speaker 2: a little after midnight on Halloween Eve, you know, so
Speaker 2: it's technically on Friday, but it's but it's actually Thursday,
Speaker 2: you know, that sort of thing. We'll see what we
Speaker 2: can do.
Speaker 3: We'll do our best.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and If you want a full list of all
Speaker 2: the movies we've covered on Weird House over the years,
Speaker 2: you can go to letterbox dot com. That's L E
Speaker 2: T T E R B O x D dot com.
Speaker 2: Our username is weird House. We have a nice list there.
Speaker 2: You can explore that. If you're on Instagram, st b
Speaker 2: ym podcast and that's where we also update you on
Speaker 2: what's happening on Weird House. And if you go to
Speaker 2: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com or the link
Speaker 2: tree on Instagram, you can eventually get to our tea
Speaker 2: public store. We have some new Halloween designs in there
Speaker 2: that we've been asked to promote, and I think they're
Speaker 2: pretty cool. If you need a shirt, you need a sticker,
Speaker 2: it's fun. It's there for fun. We don't need you
Speaker 2: to buy a shirt or a sticker, but if you
Speaker 2: would like to, it's there for you.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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