House of Usher (2008) - 3/4

David DeCoteau's House of Usher falls in a long tradition of "The Fall of the House of Usher"-adaptations. Jean Epstein's La chute de la maison Usher and Watson and Webber's The Fall of the House of Usher are both avant-garde classics that take advantage of the non-narrative aspects in Poe's writing. Roger Corman's House of Usher is a classic of horror cinema that follows Poe's narrative to mine its symbols for their psychoanalytic connotations. DeCoteau's Usher, written by Simon Savory, falls somewhere in between Corman's and Epstein's visions. DeCoteau's Usher is a deliberate attempt to put the potentially therapeutic nightmare of a psychologically damaged mind on screen, making narrative superficial and subordinate to the psychological symbolism.

It's worth looking at how DeCoteau's Usher is distinguished from previous adaptations. In Epstein's Usher, the visitor to the house of Usher is an elderly acquaintance of Roderick's who is not even named. He is merely a witness to the events surrounding the fall of the house. Complementing his role as witness is the variety of sensory malfunctions Epstein gives him: he uses an ear trumpet to hear and suffers presbyopia. He's not only a witness, but a bad witness to a distinctly Usher world. None of the visitor's personality enters that world, but his flaws of perception alter how we receive it. In Corman's Usher, the visitor is named and while he too is a witness to the Usher world, he's too indignant to witness it passively. He is not a friend of Roderick and in fact only meets him in the first act. It is rather with Madeline that he has a relationship, a romantic one as it happens. To save Madeline, he actively effects change in that world. In DeCoteau's Usher, the visitor, Victor Reynolds (Michael Cardelle), takes priority over the Ushers themselves. The world he enters is distinctly his nightmare and not a nightmare he has entered by accident. Not only are his senses sharp, but the Ushers tell one another that he has the power of "sight," a sort of psychic vision into the house's otherworldly aspects. His power of sight is not that of a detached observer, but of a creator. The house of Usher is a Reynolds world populated by Ushers.

So, where Corman was able to leave the supernaturalism of the house ambiguous and merely a manifestation of Roderick's troubled mind, DeCoteau doesn't have that recourse. There is no objective witness. If the house is a manifestation of a troubled mind, it is Reynolds's mind. However, it is also through Reynolds's mind that the whole film is seen. The house of DeCoteau's Usher really is a vampiric entity in symbiotic relationship with the Ushers. They and the house grow weaker until the house is able to consume victims. Thus is Reynolds summoned to the house in capacity as both saviour and victim of the Ushers. It is by Roderick (Frank Mentier) that Reynolds is invited, not merely an old friend but his former lover in a relationship that ended when he enlisted in the military. Both Roderick and Madeline (Jaimyse Haft) tell Reynolds in private how much he's needed, making his importance very clear; yet it is nebulous just why exactly he is important. While it initially seems he is there to liberate the Ushers from the house, they eventually decide he must be sacrificed. Their decision doesn't proceed so much from any narrative or character developments as much as by the dream logic at work.

The nightmare Reynolds finds himself in is interesting for being more sexual than violent. I referred to DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum, made a year later, as a psychosexual horror. House of Usher, while not as pure, falls in the same category. On Reynolds's first night in the house, Roderick wastes no time stripping and making out with him for a few minutes. Reynolds ends the session when the moment of penetration comes dangerously near. He is molested by the hands of ghosts in a bathtub. He has visions of ghostly muscular men in underwear warning him to flee. Each of them were victims of the house, yes, but also of Roderick's camera. It is as if Roderick's look of sexual desire captured their souls. Madeline also attempts to seduce Reynolds with some ferocity, but falls into a cataleptic state before she can get his pants down to fellate him. It is as though Reynolds is forever approaching sexual moments, but being prevented or preventing himself from fulfilling them. Or rather he is being both tantalized and reproved with fruitless sexual relationships. Madeline is given a speech about a ghost child she believes haunts the house. It's not the ghost of a child that died, but the ghost of the potential child her barren womb can never realize, "For every woman there is a child waiting to be born," she says. This is an expression of conventional sexuality: the idea that we must "be fruitful and multiply." She adds, "I fear the unborn far more than I fear the dead." So both Roderick and Madeline are viewed as haunted, Roderick by male sexual conquests he's sacrificed to the house and Madeline by her infertility. Both are haunted, then, by their fruitlessness. Reynolds's importance to the Usher's therefore seems to be the possibility of fruitfulness, but ultimately the vampiric barrenness of Usher means he can only be a saviour through sacrifice.

Reynolds's sexual reticence and his status as sacrificial victim has mystical connotations. From early in the film he can be seen wearing a cross. Roderick draws explicit attention to it. His role as both saviour and victim makes him Christ-like. The Ushers, however, have a distinctly pagan quality. They must continue to sacrifice victims to the house. The relationship of Roderick and Madeline to the house is an interesting one. Despite their concern for Reynolds, they compulsively perform the sacrificial ritual. They have no fruitfulness outside of the destruction of others. Where Corman deliberately shot the exteriors for his Usher where there had recently been a forest fire, the grounds of DeCoteau's Usher contain a lovely garden. Madeline explains the garden is over the family burial grounds. There is no growth without death for the Ushers. But the house is insatiable. Their sacrifices must be endlessly repeated. They are held captive to it, but it's not clear why. Freud considered compulsive repetition to be a particularly destruction reaction to feelings of guilt. In this case, it is Reynolds's own feelings of guilt about his fruitless sexuality. One is reminded of how Pope John Paul II referred to birth control and pro-choice as a "culture of death." Reynolds is able to deny his own sexuality and project it onto the pagan, parasitic Ushers while he remains a Christ-like victim.

A distracting aspect of the film is that it's just a little too precious and fresh. The house itself is a newly-built modern manor. One would expect a grotesque and delapidated old mansion. It is implausible that this house is in the process of falling to pieces. The actors are also too young for the roles they are asked to portray, with the exception of Madeline's Jaimyse Haft, who gives the film's best performance. Roderick looks like he would still get carded at a pub. They are also all extraordinarily attractive. Even the butler and the ghosts are studly young men. I can't deny the pleasure of looking at these faces and bodies. It is an enjoyable part of the film, of course. But in DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum there is a good reason for having only attractive people and the pleasure of looking at them integrates with the content of the film. In House of Usher, there is no internal reason for the attractive cast. Nor does the enjoyment of these bodies integrate with the film's content.

House of Usher is the second of DeCoteau's Poe films I've seen, though it was made before The Pit and the Pendulum. He also adapted The Raven in 2007, which I have yet to see. In the two I have seen, I've been impressed by DeCoteau's and Savory's experiments in sexualizing Poe's narratives. From the expressionistic and symbol-rich material of Poe's stories, they've created nightmares with which to explore psychosexual depths. The narrative-light content of Poe's stories allow the space to make such explorations. The Pit and the Pendulum is something of a masterpiece. House of Usher is not as sure-footed, but is still a fascinating psychosexual nightmare from which we might experience a little catharsis. In following its own unique path with the many permutations Poe's story permits, House of Usher proves a worthy entry in the grand tradition of House of Usher films.