![]() ![]() On the other hand, the narrator is now given a name and arrives at the house accompanied by his wife. This version follows the general path of the Poe story and does retain elements from it such as having the narrator and Roderick Usher as boyhood friends. Like most of the film adaptations, a number of changes are made to the story. ![]() Even the reading of the Poe story seems second-hand, taken more from the classic Roger Corman film adaptation The House of Usher (1960) than the actual Poe story. The film radiates an appalling cheapness, from the bad colour processing to the cardboard facade of the exterior of the house. Their version of The Fall of the House of Usher had a simultaneous cinema and tv release – no attempt has been made in the cinema print to disguise the tv origin with the fade-outs for commercial breaks having been left in during dramatic climaxes. Wells’s The Time Machine (1978) – and sensationalistic cinematically-released documentaries on subjects that have ranged from Bigfoot in Mysterious Monsters (1976) to life after death in Beyond and Back (1978) and The Bermuda Triangle (1979), as well as Biblical works such as In Search of Noah’s Ark (1977), In Search of Historic Jesus (1980) and the tv series The Greatest Heroes of the Bible (1978). The perpetrators are Schick Sunn Classics, a company that specialised in tv adaptations of classic stories – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1980), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1981) and the notoriously bad adaptation of H.G. (Melodramatic means overly dramatic, and most of Poe’s stories are full of it.) Read any Poe story – or just read “Usher,” and this will be painfully obvious.This must not only be the worst version of the oft-filmed Edgar Allan Poe short story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) – see below for the other versions – but possibly the worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ever made. From one perspective, it adds a gravity and ominousness to the very definitive ending: just imagine a deep, movie-announcer voice booming, “THE HOUSE OF USHER.” On the other hand, it could be ironic melodrama, though we find this interpretation less likely given that Poe was really all about the theatricality. As far as capitals go, we can’t tell you definitively. The phrase is used as though it belongs to someone else. What we mean is that the quotes emphasize the artificiality of this phrase. Either to Roderick Usher or to the narrator – whoever you think composed the tale – this phase belongs to someone else it is not his own, and he uses quotes to indicate as much. The text revealed that the peasants around the estate coined the name “House of Usher” to refer both to the mansion and to the family who owned it. If this is the case, then we can rationalize the formatting of these final few words. Recall that in “What’s Up With the Epigraph” we discuss the possibility that this entire work is fiction by the deranged mind of Roderick Usher. Why would he put these words in capitals and in quotes? Quotes generally indicate that you’re using someone else’s terminology rather than your own there’s a sense of irony, as opposed to genuine intention. If you’re reading “Usher” online, or if you’ve got a less-than-accurate hard copy in your hands, you might be missing the idiosyncrasy of the last line, which Poe wrote like this: “ and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘HOUSE OF USHER.’” (42) Those are not our capitals they were part of Poe’s text, and they’re definitely not easy to nail down. As we discuss in “What’s Up With the Title?”, Roderick’s literal fall to the floor is tantamount to the fall of the Usher bloodline, and is accompanied by the physical fall of the house itself. This is good evidence for the argument that Madeline is just a manifestation of his fears. Remember that he predicted his death earlier in the text, and supposed that it would be caused by fear. It could be that she is a manifestation of Roderick’s fears, not an honest-to-goodness “ghost.” Then you’ve got Roderick’s death. It could be that she and Roderick are really two halves of the same person, and so one cannot live without the other. There are several different ways to think about this reappearance, which we talk about in “Character Analysis.” It could be that Madeline’s ghost is back to take vengeance on her brother for intentionally burying her alive. ![]() Let’s talk about the freaky scene BEFORE the ending before we talk about the actual ending. ![]()
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