*The Fall of the House of Usher* (1928) – The Public Domain Review

It was the middle of the winter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first began filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” They were located in an old stable; the cast included Herbert Stern (a local architect), Sibley Watson’s wife Hildegard and Webber himself. They had only twelve kilowatts of direct current for lighting, and very little heat, let alone space for sets. This was a thoroughly unprofessional production, and like Sibley Watson told Filmmakersthe magazine of the Amateur Cinema League, “the amateur trying to compete with the professional producer on his own property is licked from the start.”