The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher", published in 1839, has proved irresistible to filmmakers across every era of cinema. The tale of a crumbling ancestral estate, a family consumed by obsession, and the thin line between madness and grief carries a weight that translates, in theory at least, to almost any visual medium. This 1928 French silent adaptation, directed by Jean Epstein and produced through his own company Films Jean Epstein, is among the earliest surviving screen versions of that material, and for many years it occupied a respected corner of silent-era canon precisely because of how freely it departs from conventional storytelling. Epstein was writing his own film theory at the time, developing ideas about what he called "photogénie", the notion that cinema could reveal qualities in objects and faces that no other art form could access. That intellectual framework sits very visibly over every frame of this film, for better or worse.

Epstein had already made a name for himself in French avant-garde circles before this production, and his approach here pulls the Poe source material away from pure narrative and towards something closer to pure sensation. The story, such as it is, concerns Roderick Usher's consuming belief that his family line carries a hereditary curse, and his increasingly extreme efforts to prevent his sister Madeline from marrying her fiancé Allan, who arrives at the estate to find a household already halfway lost to decay and dread. Jean Debucourt takes the lead as Roderick, with Marguerite Gance as Madeline and Charles Lamy as Allan. The film runs at 63 minutes, a modest runtime that, depending on your tolerance for Epstein's methods, may feel either brisk or punishing. It is worth noting for context that 1928 was a genuinely fertile year for silent cinema more broadly, a last flowering before synchronised sound took hold, and you can find some of that year's more audience-friendly work reviewed here on the site, including The Cameraman (1928) and The Docks of New York (1928). Epstein's film occupies a very different corner of that same moment, one more interested in what cinema could be as an art form than in simply entertaining a Saturday night audience.

As a piece of French cinema, the film sits at an interesting angle to most of what the country's industry was producing at the time, and if you want a sense of how varied French filmmaking has been across the decades, the site has covered everything from Sugar Cane Alley (1983) to Mustang (2015). On the horror side, Epstein's film is also an interesting reference point for just how wide a range the genre covers, from this kind of slow, dreamlike dread through to far more visceral efforts like The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988). Whether Epstein's experiment here earns its reputation is, of course, exactly the question.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Jean Epstein's adaptation of Poe's gothic tale, is a film of striking visuals let down by nearly everything else in my opinion. The cinematography (swirling mists, distorted mirrors, and expressionistic lighting) creates an appropriately eerie atmosphere, and there's no denying the craft in its dreamlike compositions. But as a viewing experience, it's a slog: the pacing is so slow, emotionally distant, and so avant-garde that it forgets to tell a coherent story. What little narrative exists drowns beneath endless shots of hands trembling, curtains billowing, and characters staring meaningfully into the void. Silent films (the version I watched had english narration in a french accent though) already demand patience, but this one compounds the challenge with abstraction. Without dialogue or conventional pacing to anchor you, the 60-minute runtime feels twice as long. The performances (though stylised for the era, I accept) come across as stiff and alienating rather than haunting. You're left admiring isolated images while checking your watch. A visually interesting artefact that fails as entertainment. Its historical significance is clear, but as a film to actually sit through it's dull, disconnected, and ultimately unsatisfying.

And that, honestly, is where I keep landing with this one. There is a version of this film that exists in film studies essays and repertoire cinema programmes, framed as a radical gesture against mainstream storytelling, and I can see the argument. But watching it in an armchair rather than a lecture hall is a different experience entirely. The isolated images Epstein conjures are genuinely arresting, and I would not want to dismiss the craft involved in achieving them in 1928. Still, craft alone does not make a satisfying evening, and a film that leaves you more aware of the clock than the characters has, somewhere along the way, lost the thread. Some artefacts are better admired than watched.

Rating: ★  | Year: 1928  | Watched: 2026-03-26

View on Letterboxd →

Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Physical: Amazon US

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1920s: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928) · A Throw of Dice (1929)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)