It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”. They had set up in an old stable; the cast was made up of Herbert Stern (a local architect), Sibley Watson’s wife Hildegard, and Webber himself. They only had twelve kilowatts of direct current for lighting, and very little heat, let alone room for sets. This was a thoroughly unprofessional production, and as Sibley Watson told Movie Makers, the magazine of the Amateur Cinema League, “the amateur who tries to compete with the professional producer on his own ground is licked from the start.”

After all, it was clear they could not make anything like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the Gaston Leroux adaptation that had reconstructed the Grand Opera in Paris for its shocked audience the previous year. So instead, over the next two years, they created a thirteen-minute feature that has been called one of the first avant-garde films produced in the United States: a work that seeks to evoke not the plot or even characters of its source material but Poe’s claustrophobic, itchy energy. It is a movie that, like the House of Usher itself, is an “after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into everyday life —the hideous dropping off of the veil.”

Poe’s story is quintessential Gothic fiction: a young man arrives at a stately home to visit his friend Roderick Usher, who is going mad because his sister Madeline, his only companion, is dying. When she does die, Roderick, fearing that doctors will experiment on her corpse, decides to secretly bury her in the crypt beneath the house. A few nights later, during a storm, Madeline bursts into the room where the men are sitting — it turns out she was not dead when entombed, but the effort of escaping has killed her, and out of revenge she kills her brother too. The traveler runs out of the house just as it falls into a fissure in the ground.

Sibley Watson and Webber’s adaptation dispenses with any language at all — aside from an opening shot of Poe’s text, the only words that appear on screen are a distorted SCREAM and RIPPED and CRACK as the men begin to suspect something has gone wrong. Before her first “death”, Madeline wanders through nearly empty spaces served by disembodied gloved hands, wrapped like a Biblical priestess. As Roderick, in stylized makeup that makes him look like a vampiric Rudolph Valentino, goes mad, the image disintegrates too: kaleidoscopes before the lens create recurring hammers and gloves, as images of books and Madeline dissolve into each other. When Madeline reappears she is already a ghost, and the House of Usher rips apart into the murk.

Although they were amateur filmmakers, both Webber and Sibley Watson had professional sensibilities. Webber was an archeologist and painter; Sibley Watson had, in 1920, used his family fortune to help buy The Dial and was hard at work turning it into America’s foremost literary magazine. He had championed William Carlos Williams, published T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and translated Rimbaud. He was a believer in modernism, particularly in its ability to evoke feeling without passing through representation.

“Even the professors admit”, he wrote under his pseudonym W. C. Blum in The Dial in 1921, “that Rembrandt was a great painter, not because he painted beds and women that resembled actual beds and women, nor because his paintings excite religious or sensual ecstasies, but because his paintings were well constructed. In this case why bother with likeness and the emotions at all; why not give the valuable skeleton, the pure shapes?”

Though it was Webber’s suggestion to pick “The Fall of the House of Usher” as the material to adapt, it is easy to see what attracted Sibley Watson to the text. In Poe’s story, Roderick is akin to a proto-modernist, obsessively creating abstract paintings while his sister lies dying in her room. The narrator writes that even Henry Fuseli’s (1741–1825) phantasmagories were too concrete for him: “If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher.”

Sibley Watson was not the only person to have seen the modernist potential of Poe’s story. The very same year, the French director Jean Epstein had collaborated with Luis Buñuel on their own adaptation. In comparison to the Rochester work, the French version’s explanatory intertitles and relatively straightforward plotting seem hopelessly commercial, despite the experimental slant; even worse, Epstein and Buñuel chickened out by making the Ushers husband and wife rather than suspiciously intimate brother and sister.

The Watsons and Weber collaborated again — in the same stable — on Lot in Sodom (1933), whose sensual celebration of male nudity made it one of the first queer films in American cinema, as well as a remarkable commercial success. If they could not compete with the professional producer on his own ground, they broke their own.