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Short filmTranscript
00:00 My BFI Player Plus choice this week is a brilliantly creepy short from Czech filmmaker Ján Svankmajer,
00:09 an adaptation of a timeless tale of terror from the grandfather of modern horror, Edgar
00:14 Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe's works have long been fertile source
00:43 material for filmmakers. Adaptations of his stories and poems date back to the early 20th
00:48 century, with classics like The Pit and the Pendulum, Raven and The Murders in the Rue
00:52 Morgue proving popular with fans of silent cinema. In the 1960s, Roger Corman directed
00:57 a string of Poe adaptations, including The Tomb of Ligier, The Mask of the Red Death
01:01 and The Fall of the House of Usher, the last of which has been brought to the screen by
01:05 countless directors, but rarely with the wit and invention of Ján Svankmajer. Svankmajer
01:22 himself made several films inspired by Poe, from the short film The Pit, The Pendulum
01:26 and Hope to the feature-length Lunacy in 2005. According to Svankmajer, the power of Poe's
01:32 writing had almost nothing to do with the story and everything to do with atmosphere.
01:43 He succeeds in describing the most intimate reactions of the human souls, Svankmajer explained,
01:48 to that primal horror that rises up through our subconscious, for which the situations
01:52 are simply a kind of explosive trigger. In other words, Poe's writings may be full of
01:59 the ancient trappings of Gothic literature, but the terrors they describe are universal
02:04 and immediate. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Svankmajer combines live action and
02:14 animation to conjure startling images to accompany Poe's words, images which eschew actors and
02:19 instead give us a building which lives and breathes and dies before our very eyes. The
02:25 furniture moves, the floor comes alive, a coffin makes its own way into a tomb and the
02:30 walls of the building crack and rot sensually around us. The result is astounding, provocative
02:37 and wholly unmistakable.
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