It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”. They had set up in an old stable; the cast was made up of Herbert Stern (a local architect), Sibley Watson’s wife Hildegard, and Webber himself. They only had twelve kilowatts of direct current for lighting, and very little heat, let alone room for sets...
... it was clear they could not make anything like
The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the Gaston Leroux adaptation that had reconstructed the Grand Opera in Paris for its shocked audience the previous year. So instead, over the next two years, they created a thirteen-minute feature that has been called one of the first avant-garde films produced in the United States: a work that seeks to evoke not the plot or even characters of its source material but Poe’s claustrophobic, itchy energy