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Veteran actor and film producer Mark Damon, perhaps best known for starring in Roger Corman‘s 1960 gothic horror film House of Usher, has died. He was 91. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Damon passed away on Sunday (May 12) from natural causes in Los Angeles, California, according to his daughter, Alexis Damon Ribaut. Born on April 22, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois, Damon’s acting career started with minor roles in the classic 1950s television series Gang Busters, Meet Corliss Archer, and I Led 3 Lives. He signed with 20th Century Fox in 1956 and continued his TV work, appearing in Cavalcade of America, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Tales of Wells Fargo. His big break came in the 1960 horror film House of Usher, where he starred alongside Vincent Price, Myrna Fahey, and Harry Ellerbe. Damon won a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer for his performance as Philip Winthrop. The film was directed by Roger Corman,...

Roger Corman's 1960 feature films "House of Usher" was the first film in a long series of Edgar Allan Poe-based movies at American International Pictures. From 1960 to 1964, Corman directed eight Poe films, with all but one of them starring Vincent Price. After "House of Usher," Corman made "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Premature Burial," the anthology film "Tales of Terror," "The Raven," "The Haunted Palace," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Tomb of Ligeia." Technically, 1963's "The Haunted Palace" isn't a Poe movie. It was named after Poe's 1893 poem but was in fact based on the 1927 short novel "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft. Poe, it seems, was a bigger marquee name than Lovecraft, so the latter author's story was merely folded into Corman's short-lived but well-remembered Poe subgenre. 

Fans of gothic horror would do well to marathon all eight movies. They're all...

One of the great unsung traditions of horror is a character’s external environment reflecting their internal state. It has found its way into films as diverse as Repulsion (1965), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), and Relic (2020) to name just a few. Edgar Allan Poe was hardly the first to use the device, it had been a feature of the Gothic romances popular in the decades before him, but Poe moved it from character-deepening subtext to overt metaphor in his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Roger Corman’s 1960 film adaptation of the story latches onto and expands this and several of Poe’s obsessions into what has become a classic of slow-burning terror. The Fall of the House of Usher is the first in what has come to be called the Corman Poe Cycle. These eight films produced between 1960 and 1964 are among the most stylish,...