The Fall of Usher

This mimics the style of Poes tales so it's a psychological horror movie presented by an unreliable narrator. I'm not a fan of the typical slasher horror genre. This movie is not so easily classified. The set is confined to one house and is narrated by someone who seems to be on the brink of insanity. This movie held my attention and I found the focus on the main character dealing with extreme stress intriguing. It does have graphic violence but not to the excess of many horror movies. It's not for children and no typical slutty sex of some horror genres. It explores relationships so it's more for adults who appreciate such. I think it's worth watching.

Who in their right mind would a modern day The Fall of Usher without reading the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. I watched the trailer thinking that is was a period piece boy was I wrong. It looked boring and there was something off about the movie that turned me off.

Quite frankly. The 1960's version of House of Usher is better than this version and this because of the great Vincent Price makes the movie really creepy and you have to have Roger Corman do the direction.

How about no more adaptions of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall House of Usher. One is enough and that is about it.

Its up to you if you want to watch it.

This may not be a movie for everyone, as the previous and only other review clearly indicates. But, it truly is a work for fans of Poe's writing.

It is dark. It is unrelenting. And the atmosphere descends through black depths as the truths of the horror unfold.

Poe's writing is not scary in the modern horror-movie-fan sense, rather, it is dark, ominous, and unrelenting as the reader peels back layer after layer of the narrator's insanity to uncover the actual horror story.

The Fall of Usher is not a retelling or modernization of any specific works of Poe, but a re-weaving of many of the themes and atmospheres from multiple stories.

The movie opens with a classic Poe device of the main character talking directly to the audience (or perhaps just himself), and although that specific device does not return, the use of archaic Poe language, dialogue, narration and silent movie-esque cards, keeps the viewer grounded in Poe's era even while the setting remains modern day.

This is the definition of slow-burn done right--not boring, not plotted poorly, but rather the viewer is taken on a ride of reveal after reveal, a step-by-step uncovering the actual reality that is being hidden deep in the mind of the unreliable and insane narrator. Even the tiny cast and small set evoke the claustrophobia which lies at the core of several of Poe's stories.

Most "fans" of Poe, are not really fans of his actual writing--most find it overly complex and opaque, even if they love the soul of the horror story as told. The Fall of Usher definitely follows not only the "soul" of Poe's works, but the actual complex, opaque devices and dialogue, and because of that, it's true that its audience may be niche.

If you truly love to *read* the works of Poe, if you swoon over the complex language he uses to evoke his dark atmospheres, if you live for half-page-long sentences, stuffed with iterative atmospheric descriptions, then you will find SO much to love in this movie!

I remember watching Romeo & Juliette several years ago with Leonardo DiCaprio and liking it a lot. Sure, it's not easy to process old Shakespearean English in our day & age - and it's similar here, with "The Fall of Usher." I especially liked the part where Romeos' father says, "Bring me my broadsword," while grabbing a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

But, if you can get past that aspect of the film, I rather like the way Edgar Allen Poe wrote, way back when. And after that, I found the rest of this movie enjoyable enough. It's generally pretty slow in the narration and story-telling, and not necessarily really "scary" or containing a lot of cheap "jump scares."

Here, the horror lies in the descent of a mans' consciousness into madness and the process by which he finds himself undone. It's a slow, psychological kind of horror. I found the movie enjoyable enough.

This movie couldn't have possibly been any worse. They made a terrible choice casting the lead role. I would say that hair and costuming made him look terrible, but it's more likely he just showed up wearing whatever he wanted to. No care was put into this. The narration is poorly written and exponentially more grating than your common movie narration, which is a pretty weak device in the first place. I'm sure the filmmakers have never read the source material and probably don't even really like Poe's stories. They just needed an IP to attach to their weak efforts for increased visibility. The worst ever.