For tonight’s matinee, we showcase three films exploiting what might be called Architectural Horror, which is a term I just made up right now and immediately decided to copyright so please don’t use it or I will have to talk to the lawyers.
The horrifying saga continues. October will not be denied.
Taking stock, here is where we find ourselves on October 18th: 7 films from franchises, done; 5 decades, done; 5 films from before 1970, done; 1 silent, done; 1 classic Universal horror, done; 1 film with a witch/witchcraft, done; 1 Tobe Hooper film, done.
Though not the first of his stories to appear on film, The Fall of the House of Usher is perhaps Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known Gothic tale, and arguably the best suited for cinema. Its central themes — the embodiment of individual interiority in physical architecture, the more or less haunted house, the living grave, the unreliable narrator, the tension between what is seen and what is felt, the rampant doublings of character — all seem appropriate to an imagistic treatment.