Movie-A-Day #280: House of Usher (1960).

After being discovered delirious in a gutter just four days earlier, Edgar Allan Poe died on this day in 1849. He never regained his wits enough to explain what had happened to land him in the street wearing another man’s clothes. And his cause of death still remains a mystery because his death certificate and all of his medical records have disappeared. It was a strange, fitting end for a man who forged his personal demons into a literary genre all its own. Roger Corman’s string of Poe adaptations in the 1960s is almost uniformly good, starting with “House of Usher.”