One night in 1840, a traveller trying to get to the House of Usher has trouble finding a carriage to take him there, as the isolated house is reputed to be cursed. His host and friend, Roderick Usher, lives there alone with his wife, who is in poor health and whose portrait he has undertaken to paint. Each brushstroke on the canvas seems to take a little of her life away.

France, 1928, black and white, 66 min.
Directed by Jean Epstein. Screenplay: Jean Epstein based on the short stories The Fall of the House of Usher, Oval Portrait and Beatrix by Edgar Allan Poe. Image: Georges Lucas, Jean Lucas. Sets: Pierre Kéfer: Pierre Kéfer. Costumes: Fernand Osché. Coordination of special effects: Ruggieri. Production: Les Films Jean Epstein. Starring : Marguerite Gance (Lady Madeline Usher), Jean Debucourt (Sir Roderick Usher), Charles Lamy (the friend), Fournez-Goffard (the doctor), Luc Dartagnan (the servant).

Poe's tenuous, engaging and morbid plot gave Epstein, a thrifty and stubborn representative of the French avant-garde of the 1920s, the opportunity to create a ‘space-time’ whose spellbinding effect owed nothing, according to the filmmaker's credo, to the skills and tricks of the theatre and the novel, but everything to the specific, almost mystical power of the cinema. […] Epstein's main talent lies in a certain sobriety, a certain nakedness within the baroque and the delirious. The techniques he employs [...] are the culmination of a cinematic practice based, for the most part, on a controlled, skilful use of natural landscapes, actors and framing, refined to the point of abstraction.
Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionary of Cinema. Les Films. Robert Laffont, Paris, 1992, p. 248.