ABOUT THIS WORK
The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Melville Webber and J.S. Watson Jr., is a surrealist interpretation of Poe's famous short story of a brother and sister under a family curse. Released in 1928, this unsettling work was heavily inspired by Charles F. Klein's film version of The Tell-Tale Heart, released the same year. With no dialogue, the film's emphasis is entirely on image, employing stark color contrasting, layering, and optical distortion. Much of the footage is shot through prisms to create these lush, dreamlike visual effects. This score, while engaging with the gruesome sense of foreboding that is Poe's hallmark, is equally sensitive to the strangeness of the visual environment presented to us on the screen. The richly varied timbre, registral extremes, and percussive effects all coalesce into a soundscape whose madness is both wildly dramatic and inescapably alluring.
NOTE ABOUT THE FILM AND RIGHTS TO SCREEN: The Fall of The House of Usher (1928) is in the Public Domain as it failed to display a Copyright Notice on the film meaning it was never actually under Copyright Protection so it is freely available to watch. This version has also notably been inducted into the National Film Registry back in 2000. The work is housed on ARCHIVE.ORG and is accessible using the following link.
PLEASE NOTE: price listed is for score ONLY, not for the film, which is available for free. Two films are included in the download package. See DOWNLOAD PACKAGE tab for further details.
