I Survived the Premature Burial
Living through these interesting times with Roger Corman's Poe Cycle
There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.
-Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial”
Nevermore. Nevermore. That inescapable word. Issued from a raven’s beak, spread across the only time and space you or I will ever know. An intimate betrayal you never saw coming. A loved one’s life cut short by disease, insanity, violence, some awful combination of all three. The echo of guilt distorts the survivor’s senses, the Id erupts with all manner of apparitions and cursed emblems. A black cat, a bleeding house, a corpse reanimated, but caught in the shrieking terror of its death throes.
The images and scenarios of Edgar Allan Poe, culled from personal tragedy and refracted through America’s subterranean tell-tale heart, conjured on the silver screen for as long as we’ve been making horror movies.
From 1960-1964, Roger Corman made eight ambitious Poe adaptations for the teen drive-in crowd—weaving a haunting tapestry of “psychoanalytic fragments [...] deployed as freely as the pieces of Poe, mixed in with elements of everything from Grand Guignol to EC horror comics, tossed together precisely as in a dream,” as Geoffrey O’Brien puts it for Criterion.
By some Lovecraftian fate, I’d been making my way through Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle around the time of my Father’s death—an uncanny cinematic stage for my grief to play out as technicolor phantoms in a pop-gothic psychodrama.
The Fall of the House
My Dad died at home on January 10, 2020 — a hard-earned peace to close out a five-year battle with infection, itself a complication of an invasive spinal surgery. You learn what it means to be haunted by someone’s ghost when you lose them too soon. When you’ve seen them slowly decay through unfathomable, prolonged suffering. You’re left with the dull, constant ache of grief punctuated by flashes of madness. Family secrets surface only to spark more unanswerable questions. You’re Vincent Price’s Nicholas Medina in The Pit and the Pendulum, shrieking “True! TRUE!” at the twisted corpse of your loved one, laying bare the agony of their final moments. You’re widower Verden Fell in The Tomb of Ligeia, grieving behind dark shades, carrying some unshakable feeling that the person you just buried was neither made for this world nor able to accept the next. You’re Roderick Usher—convinced your family is cursed by a tangible, evil entity whose house must be cleansed by fire.
In 1959, American International Pictures (then the independent outfit that made cheap B&W sci-fi double-bill flicks for the teen drive-in crowd) wanted their star director Roger Corman to make two black-and-white horror films for under $100,000 each on a 10-day shooting schedule. Corman countered with the idea of making one horror film in color for $200,000 on a 15-day shoot, pitching an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
“What drew me to [the story] first was the macabre setting,” says Corman. “The house itself, surrounded by fog, deserted, then within the house, the relationship between Roderick Usher and his sister. It was just a fascinating situation.” Previous generations of filmmakers had exploited Poe with loose adaptations, from expressionistic silent shorts to lavish, art-deco psychological thrillers — virtually all retrofitted with new plots, or the deck of images reshuffled to fill out feature-length runtimes and meet the needs of budding exploitation genres.
A couple filmmaking generations later, Corman crystallized this Hollywood mode of translating Poe with 1960's House of Usher. A “free invention,” O’Brien describes it, “on themes suggested by phrases, images, and situations in Poe,” making possible “a different kind of horror movie, less about storyline and more about the creation of an all-encompassing environment.”
And House of Usher‘s environment is pure artifice—minimal sets adorned with regal furniture, deep red candles, and no shortage of cobwebs in the crypt, enveloped in a foggy, simulated swamp exterior. (“One of my theories was that these stories were created out of the unconscious mind of Poe,” says Corman. “And the unconscious mind never really sees reality.”) We enter this haunted mind palace through a dream portal of foggy opening credits and follow our avatar, Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon), to the doors of the House of Usher. In the main plot deviation from the book, Winthrop is not an old friend of Roderick Usher’s, but fiancée to Roderick’s sister Madeline (Myrna Fahey). Roderick rejects his ailing sister’s engagement outright, convinced their bloodline is cursed and must end with them.
There’s a stagey quality to House of Usher and the rest of the Corman Poe films, undercut by a scrappy, experimental energy indicative of the era’s Old-to-New Hollywood growing pains. There’s also Vincent Price’s killer star performance. Frocked in a Bauhausian refraction of Victorian robes, hair unnaturally slick and platinum-blonde, Price’s Roderick Usher stalks this technicolor haunted house like a possessed porcelain figurine set aflame inside an imposing diorama. He wears the character’s grief and chronic hypersensitivity with a muted “kabukiness” of sorts, grounded by his impressive frame, silky voice, and commanding aura.
“The history of the Ushers is a history of savage degradation,” Roderick tells Winthrop as they stand beneath a series of strange, ominous portraits of the Usher family’s most infamous and deviant members. “And always in this house. For hundreds of years, foul thoughts and foul deeds have been committed within its walls. The house is evil now.”
Anyone who knew my Dad will tell you he was an honest man and a true friend to all. That’s the legacy he left behind, and I love him for that. And like so many men of his and countless generations, his depression was never fully understood nor comprehensively treated in his lifetime, and the pressures of family, religious, and financial legacies were brutal impositions on his heart and home. Leaving me to wonder how and when it might all manifest in me down the road. In my worst moments, I’ve felt like the final carrier of some long-held family curse, only a matter of time before my foundations crack and the House of Andersen consumes me.
But a curse is the mind trying in vain to make sense of life’s random terrors, and Roderick Usher is what happens when you give in to those phantoms. Determined to end the Usher line and contain its viral evil, Roderick buries his cataleptic sister alive—the Poean device, the ultimate expression of a life gone too soon. “There was no other way, there was no other way…” Roderick tells Madeline after she escapes from the crypt, hunts him down in a blind fury, and wraps her hands around his neck. Winthrop escapes from the house as it collapses into the earth. Freshly carved, flaming ruins sink into the surrounding dream fog. The Fall of the House of Usher is the fall of all families, whether by time or unfortunate circumstance. We could be cold for days, stumbling through our last dark alley, or frozen… and breathing still as the dirt pours in from all sides. This mortal coil ends underground. But for the living, there is another way. A way out—even as, to riff on a few bars from Poe, the deep and dank tarn closes silently over the fragments of our once great houses.
Attack of the Premature Burial
In the months that followed my Dad’s passing, I found myself awash in physical symptoms of grief—waking nausea, flashes of pain in my side, belabored breathing, among other phantom maladies. I began to obsess and preemptively despair over my lung health, googling the same symptoms again and again, only to stare at the same WebMD worst-case scenario results. This became a daily anxious trance, filling up my free hours until I could hardly sit down to a meal or watch TV or even go on my phone without thinking of my own fragile mortality. In the thick of all this, I found a helpful cinematic nightmare in The Premature Burial, my favorite entry in the Corman Poe cycle.
House of Usher was a hit upon its release, recapturing AIP’s drive-in youth audience and elevating (if you’ll excuse the belabored term) the horror genre to zeitgeist-capturing status. (In its east-coast engagements, Usher played on a double-bill with Psycho.) Naturally, a whole string of Corman/Poe flicks followed. For his third bite at the apple, Corman took the framework of Poe’s nineteenth-century buried-alive-sploitation joint and infused it with a kaleidoscope of pet Poeisms—sins of the fathers, family conspiracy, past deeds impinging on the present, physical paralysis cloaked in nightmarish apparition. Premature Burial is unique in that it’s the only one without Vincent Price. Ray Milland subs in as Guy Carrell, a British nobleman and artists plagued by the fear of catalepsy—a phantom ailment he’s convinced he inherited from his Father.
“Can you possibly conceive it? The unendurable oppression of the lungs, the stifling fumes of the earth, the rigid embrace of the coffin, the blackness of absolute night and the silence, like an overwhelming sea.”
As Guy's mental state deteriorates and he becomes more consumed by escaping his Father’s fate, he constructs an elaborate burial vault, complete with multiple layers of safeguards and a lethal elixir as a last resort. But what’s meant to assuage fears only inflames them. In one of Corman’s best monochromatic nightmare-within-a-dream-sequences, Guy imagines himself awake and stuck inside his coffin, eventually breaking free only to find every safeguard of the tomb crumble to dust in his hands.
“[Milland] was extremely good in his anticipation of possibly being buried alive,” says Corman. “It was his worst nightmare, and it came true.” Guy eventually succumbs to his mounting fears, enters a cataleptic state, and is buried alive. Milland’s performance—laced with the sadness and paranoid pathos of his Lost Weekend days—entombed in the foggy dream-like artifice of Corman’s faux-Victorian setting, hit me like a haunting from my own Id, alerted me to the paranoid dance in which my body and mind were locked. Waiting for the same mortal ball that befell my Father to drop on me.
Masque of the Red Death, 2020 A.D.
Knowing where you are is the first step to tunneling yourself out. By March of 2020 I’d found a good therapist and some helpful tools for processing my grief. Even got my hypochondria under control, just in time for a new pandemic to strike. To borrow another bar from Poe, no pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. I was neither the first nor the last to queue up Corman’s Masque of the Red Death and find it an uncanny, prophetic COVID-era fable. Hard to miss in a film where an evil prince brings about his own demise throwing a huge party for all his cronies while a pandemic lays waste to the forgotten populace.
The premise is pretty much a verbatim lift of Poe’s story, so I’ll hand it over to the man himself to set the scene…
The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.
The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death".
From there, Corman takes a variety of liberties (as usual) with Poe’s sparse, vibey tale—absorbing everything that came before while pointing toward everything that would come in the next 20 years of horror cinema. The film also distinguishes itself from the rest of Corman’s Poe cycle in its distinct, new-agey ruminations on death. “Somewhere in the mind is the key to our existence.” Says Vincent Price’s Prospero in a conversation with Francesca (Jane Asher), a peasant girl who he’s taken into his den of iniquities after having just set fire to her village. “My ancestors tried to find it. To open the door that separates us from our creator.” Prospero is a mustache-twirling, Satanist caricature with, as Tom Milne wrote for the British Film Institute, “a genuine chill of intellectual evil, because Vincent Price, initiating horrible tortures with a characteristic air of sadistic glee, also conveys a genuine philosophical curiosity as to the unknown territories into which his quest for evil may lead him."
He’s also a smug, Trumpian asshole whose opulence in the face of mass suffering and death only seems to shield him from any consequences… for a time. And out of this mid-century medieval Apocalypse Now, Corman and Price facilitate a mood and visual pulse approaching the commercial psychedelia of Easy Rider or The Monkees’ Head, portending the looming slow-burn collapse of America’s post-war “greed is good” establishment.
Flies all green 'n buzzin' in his dungeon of despair
An evil prince eats a steamin' pig in a chamber right near there
He eats the snouts 'n the trotters first
The loin's 'n the groin's is soon dispersed
His carvin' style is well rehearsed
He stands and shouts
“All men be cursed!”
And disagree, well no one durst
He's the best of course of all the worst
Some wrong been done, he done it first
-Frank Zappa
A Dim-Remembered Story of the Old Time Entombed
Three years later, our 21st Century Red Death still holds its fractured “dominion over all,” try as we might to bury it in our minds. COVID surges come and go. Our leaders fund wars and venerate genocide. Mental illness, isolation, and social paranoia abound. The poverty gap grows ever wider. Our homes, a sea of ever-tightening, honeycombed spaces—fractured theaters of the mind. My own humble apartment—frequently mood-lit as it is, home to two black cats, and adorned with old movie posters and nautical kitsch and Friedrich prints and antiques and trinkets from departed grandparents, a picture of my Dad in his youth on the mantle in the living room—a secret mausoleum of the before times. As the days get shorter and the nights and mornings get colder, a fog occasionally hangs over the ocean. The tide rustles and whispers and the Long Beach skyline towers over the coast like some cyberpunk update of the ominous castle by the sea in Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum. The fog—an emblem of our vaporous, shrieking confusion at our mortality, the past clouding up the clear sky of the present—and the waves, unrelenting in their performance of life’s rolling eternal pattern. And me and the other tired beach bums, prematurely aged by morbid times and loves lost, walking the red ethereal line between.
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