ghastly

The BFI has gone over to the dark side over the past three months with their Gothic season and what could I do but follow? Initially I said to myself I'd only book to see films I'd never seen before, but there weren't many of those. Still, there were bits and pieces to savour: I still have yet to see Jess Franco's 1970 version of Count Dracula but I have now seen an experimental film shot around the making of it, and I think I may have got the best of it. Cuaceduc, Vampir follows the story in chronological order (as far as I could tell) so is in its way a version of Dracula, albeit one wherein dialogue is replaced by the sound of jackhammers and cobwebs are applied by people, not spiders. And yet, mysteriously, it works, enthralling right up until the death of the Count, which is read out to camera by Christopher Lee straight from Stoker's novel. You can't get more faithful than that.

The 1949 UK version of Fall Of The House Of Usher – another highlight - tries a similar tack. It begins in a gentleman's club where some appallingly stilted men gather round while one of their number reads Poe's tale from a volume of his stories, slowly. For a moment I thought that this would be the whole of the film, a man reading the story out in a very forced manner. But no, there is a dramatisation, though the performances are so laboured that the sense of being read to never entirely goes away.

We may infer that the reader has drifted into a light doze about halfway through, because the plot goes intriguingly off-piste, as though he's passed, still speaking, into a strange dream, wherein Roderick Usher is belatedly introduced - by the family doctor (imagine a cross between Peter Hichens, Barry Humphries and Poe himself) - to his own mother, a demented hag living in a nearby temple, brooding over the severed (but still somehow living) head of her ex-lover. The doctor warns Roderick not to interfere with the head: 'She'll tear you to pieces!' Roderick takes this curious family reunion in his stride, though I find myself wondering how Nicky Campbell and Davina MacCall would have handled it.

Roderick and the doctor handle it by deciding to destroy the head with the aid of 'Simon the gardener' (who wears a tie for the occasion). The tie avails him not – he is caught is a mantrap and falls victim to the murderous hag, while the others run off without bothering to assist – and the story reverts to something a little closer to the original.

In the midst of it some very wooden performances, Gwen Watford's Madeline Usher is the only thing that resembles a living breathing human being, and they can't nail her into a coffin fast enough.

This is practically outsider cinema – made in Hastings. During its weirder moments, it even appears to be turning Japanese – and it's pretty amazing, not just in spite of itself but every now and again, because. It ends with the reader's audience asking him questions about the story (not the ones I would have asked). His response, the film's last line, is delivered in a portentous drawl that befits a philosophical proposition: 'Your guess is as good as mine.'
 

The stilted delivery only adds to the madcap fun, but should you wish to avoid having to work with awful actors, you can always do Usher with inanimate objects. This '49 version showed alongside Czech animator/director Jan Svankmajer's 15 minute take on the story from 1980, featuring nobody at all, though here both the landscape and the house are alive. Indeed, the chairs leaping from the house windows into the mire gave more enthusiastic performances than almost anybody in the '49 version. Wooden they aren't – except in the extremely unimportant sense of being made out of wood.