Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Both the book and its film adaptation narrate the case of Roderick Usher (Herbert Stern, in
the film) who suffers from an unnamed malady, perhaps based upon a family congenital
illness. Poe then tells the tale of the deterioration and consequent fall of the last two
members of this family line - Roderick and Madeline (Hildegarde Watson). In the film,
Watson and Weber intentionally let the camera tell its own story, as opposed to Poe, who
strained the tale through the perspective of the puzzled narrating traveller. Thus the viewer
is presented to this triangle of characters: the narrator – Roderick – Madeline. The
Doppelgänger theme appears in the book, especially when, in the opening paragraph, we
read about the reflection of the house in the tarn, and a “striking similitude between the
brother and the sister” when Madeline “dies” (fig. 17).
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Figure 17. The Fall of the House of Usher
Thematically, the story is not only considered to be a masterwork of Gothic
literature, but it also, when adapted to a film, helped to establish the Gothic elements that
would later be deployed in noir productions: the crumbling haunted mansion gives form to
the feelings of terror, doom, and guilt of the main characters (in The Spiral Staircase, for
example). The whole space has almost no reality beyond their assortment of states of
schizophrenia, restlessness, and fear, and yet the shots of collapsing walls, stairs, and
twisted corridors, manage to echo the characters’ sins. Indeed, the scaring results of the
curse reach their peak when the “traveller” turns up at the Usher mansion and finds that the
sibling residents are living under a strange family curse. Roderick has (unintentionally)
caused the death of his sister, puts her in a coffin, and stubbornly tries to resurrect her
spirit. The filmic devices used are related to the ones we see in film noir. For example, the