April 26: Sunn Classics — Four wall your TV set and watch a Sunn Classics movie. List here.

There is a specific kind of comfort found in the Sunn Classic Pictures catalog. These are the folks who gave us In Search of Historic Jesus and The Bermuda Triangle, specializing in that 1970s brand of investigative docudrama and Grizzly Adams. In 1979, they decided to take a swing at Edgar Allan Poe as part of their Classics Illustrated made-for-TV movies, and the result is a flick that feels like a gothic fever dream filtered through the lens of a Saturday afternoon matinee.

Conway told me, “We also bought Classics Illustrated, the comic book of all the classic novels. So I got to do a series of 12 movies of the week, making Last of the Mohicans, Legend of the Wild, Fall of the House of Usher, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and The Adventures of Nellie Bly, and we were just a bunch of kids. We were all in our mid-20s and didn’t know what we were doing.”

It’s 1839, and Jonathan Criswell (Robert Hays, just a year away from earning his wings in Airplane!) is an architect who really should have ignored his mail. He receives a plea from his old pal Roderick Usher (the eternally intense Martin Landau) to visit the family estate. Jonathan brings along his new bride, Jennifer (Charlene Tilton, taking a break from the Ewings on Dallas), and they quickly realize the Usher house is not exactly a Home Sweet Home situation.

James said, “Once we sold Greatest Heroes of the Bible and the Classics Illustrated movies, we were flooded with all of these great actors. We had big network budgets and the money to get these casts. The more I worked with these actors, the better I got at anticipating what they want and learning that each has their own wrong way of working. And it was fantastic.  I got to work with a lot of dream people that I’d always loved and admired. For example, in Fall of the House of Usher, I got to work with Ray Walston, Martin Landau, Charlene Tilton and Robert Hayes.

Bobby Hayes and I would drive down to where the sound stages were, about a 20-minute drive. Every day, we would all ride together, and he had just been sent a script for a movie called Airplane! So he would read from the script to us as we were driving. It was such a hysterical script. And then, of course, the movie became such a big hit.”

Roderick is a mess of hypersensitive nerves, and his sister, Madeline, is drifting in and out of a catatonic stupor. The big family secret? A curse fueled by generations of devil worship and general nastiness that ensures no Usher makes it past the age of 37. As the walls literally and figuratively start to crumble, Jonathan realizes that being a good friend might just get him buried alive or worse.

If you’re coming into this expecting the psychedelic, saturated colors of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price era, you might need to adjust your tracking. This is a very TV-movie version of Poe, but that’s where its charm lies. Martin Landau is the MVP here. He doesn’t just play Roderick Usher; he vibrates with the kind of high-strung energy that suggests he’s been drinking forty cups of coffee a day in a dark basement. On the flip side, you have Robert Hays, who feels a bit like he wandered in from a different movie set, but his earnestness actually works as a foil to the Usher family’s gloomy theatrics.

Director James L. Conway—who also gave us the cult slasher The Boogens—knows how to squeeze atmosphere out of a limited budget. He leans heavily into the Schlocky Gothic aesthetic: dry ice fog, cobwebs that look like they were bought in bulk and a mansion that seems to be held together by pure spite. This was shot in Utah, which isn’t exactly the first place you think of for 19th-century New England gothic, but the landscape’s isolation actually adds to the end-of-the-world feel of the Usher estate. This isn’t the definitive version of the story, but it’s a delightful time capsule of late-70s television horror. It’s spooky, slightly campy, and features Landau acting like his life depends on it. Crack a beer, turn down the lights, and enjoy the decay.

This played theaters, by the way! When I asked, “I never realized that some of the Classics Illustrated TV shows – Fall of the House of Usher – played in theaters,” he replied, “I vaguely remember our distribution company needing product that year, so we tried screening Usher.”

You can watch this on YouTube.