All the Poe films function as immersive experiences—you step inside, just like the unwary visitor advancing through swirls of mist toward a somber ancient dwelling on whose door he raps with its heavy knocker, to be drawn into a situation not merely menacing but beyond saving. Every object, every gesture, every phrase spoken, every creaking step and gust of wind, every mirror and artwork has a message, and the message is always the same: the disaster has already happened, the crimes are already committed, the land drained of life by “a plague of evil,” the inhabitants irretrievably traumatized. The horrors of the past cannot be undone; they can only happen again. An accursed past lingers in portraits and statuary and in the surprising quantity of religious pictures and artifacts that lurk in the background, creating an unspoken narrative that is like a continual subversive whisper.

Everything old is sinister, imbued with ancient pollutions and oppressions, even if the “old” settings and objects are manifestly anything but. This house of the dead is encountered not in the murky tones of an old black-and-white movie seen on The Late Show, but in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor, the crypts and corridors laid bare in gliding panoramic camera movements, the buried past come to life again in an alluringly brand-new package. Thus revamped, the relentlessly dismal themes and the terrors of the traditional old dark house take on the unexpected flavor of a game. A toy box of props and flamboyant costumes is opened for the spectator’s vicarious indulgence: we are invited, or lured, to a twisted costume party with a hint of forbidden pleasures.

When Corman proposed House of Usher to American International’s Samuel Z. Arkoff, Arkoff was troubled by the idea of a horror picture without a monster. Corman, by his own account, replied: “Sam, the house is the monster.” The phrase provides a neat point of entry into the whole series. The subject consistently is houses, or rather The House, the multiple chambers and gated basement cells it conceals, the living who inhabit it and the dead entombed within it. The house is both dwelling and grave; it embodies the family, a family poisonously and incestuously enmeshed because walled off from the outside world; it is the theater of the mind, a splintered consciousness “honeycombed with secret passages.”

All of this is decisively laid out in House of Usher, an astonishing transition in Corman’s career. Before it came out in the summer of 1960, he had already, in four years and working with legendarily minimal budgets and shooting schedules, released twenty-four features. Yet the peculiar merits and frequent oddities of those films—among them Not of This Earth, War of the Satellites, The Undead, The Wasp Woman, and A Bucket of Blood—did not foreshadow the sustained hypnotic effect of House of Usher. From its opening shot of Mark Damon riding slowly in thick fog through burnt-out woodland, it established the sense of a border region alien yet familiar. Everything that happens feels like the playing out of a ritual, and even the woodenness of Damon’s performance as the suitor in search of his vanished fiancée seems appropriate. Like other intruders in the cycle (whether spurned lover or suspicious relative or concerned physician), he is the uncomprehending outsider—the square—who will never grasp the internal rhythms and rules of the space into which he has trespassed.

Corman, in a classic understatement, spoke of Price displaying “always a little quirk, a little neurosis within him”—a comment bringing to mind House of Usher’s venerable family retainer: “It’s just that he is highly overwrought, sir.” I remember watching him for the pleasure of seeing just how far he would push things, into what extreme of weeping or railing or wheedling, trembling terror or gleeful sarcasm. If he seemed to approach (or on occasion go beyond) absurdity, that was only to be expected: the roles and scenes he was called on to play demanded the extreme, and this he was prepared to give. For this he was not only admired but loved by many. It is hard to imagine another actor doing justice to some of his dialogue—“Was he not my father? Was I not the spawn of his depraved blood?”—or so convincingly wrapping his voice around a phrase like “absorbing the miasma of barbarity.” If there were any doubt that these movies took place in a theater of the mind, Vincent Price was there to drive the point home. In general the film’s scenarios impelled him toward a final paroxysm of madness and despair, after which there was nothing left but to let the house burn down, a climax often resorted to. (That said, I also have a fondness for Price’s one-time stand-in Ray Milland, who in the underrated Premature Burial brings to his protagonist, haunted by a dread of cataleptic trance, a more tight-lipped, locked-in air of mania, suggesting at moments a meticulous Buñuelian obsessive along the lines of Él or The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, as for example when he instructs his wife: “I loathe flowers—you must promise never to bring those sickly funeral decorations into the house.”)

Behind Poe—and Lovecraft, and Buñuel—another ancestral figure looms: Sigmund Freud. When Corman has spoken about Poe, he has characterized him chiefly as a pioneering explorer of the unconscious, a nineteenth-century forerunner of Freud, and indeed acknowledges trying “to use some of Freud’s concepts of symbolism and dream theory in the Poe pictures.” Certainly there is no shortage of dreams, hallucinations, and haunted flashbacks—ancestral portraits coming to menacing life, a child witnessing his mother’s murder at the hands of his father, a man waking inside his own coffin—registered with tricks of distortion and abstraction that were novel for American International but familiar from half a century of experimental filmmaking. The shadowy presence of Freud also lets loose the specters of incest (House of Usher), marital rape (The Haunted Palace), pedophilia (The Masque of the Red Death), pervasive suggestions of sexual perversity and aggression held just enough in check to avoid scandal.

The psychoanalytic fragments are deployed as freely as the pieces of Poe, mixed in with elements of everything from Grand Guignol to EC horror comics, tossed together precisely as in a dream. What is absent is nature. The sun does not shine here. (Corman was deliberate about this method of locating the films within the unconscious, up until The Tomb of Ligeia, in which an actual ruined abbey proves beautifully foreboding even in bright sunlight.) The settings are not only unnatural but utterly artificial; yet it is the blatant fakeness of those omnipresent mists and cobwebs that reinforces the inescapability of the place where we find ourselves: inside the dream, inside the mind, in a phantasmal house surrounded by an equally phantasmal simulation of the natural world, drawn deeper into an enclosure that must finally be destroyed by fire.