The first of the Corman-Poe Cycle. From it you learn to expect that the rest in the series will also have (almost) nothing to do with the Poe story named by the title except the title. In fact, it has only two things in common—the house and its tenants are decaying. Human decay—a real thing that Poe, following Plato, schematized as a familiar, large scale, multipart structure—a house (rather than a society).

Besides that, there’s … nothing more that the film and the original story have in common. Per the CPC formula, the sub-plot is a developing romance between the Roderick Usher’s sister and a young dude who is her fiancé. Fiancé? Yes—he and the female Usher met in NYC a year earlier. How someone so inhumanly frail and bedridden could survive in the Sleepless City is unfathomable. Oh, she also turns berserker-grade homicidal at the drop of the hat. She attacks young dude and then Vincent, and then the house burns down.