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Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In the low-budget Roger Corman film from 1960, known in the United States as House of Usher, the narrator falls in love with the sickly Madeline, much to Roderick's horror. As Roderick reveals, the Usher family has a history of evil and cruelty so great that he and Madeline pledged in their youth never to have children and to allow their family to die with them. When Madeline falls into a deathlike catalepsy, her brother (who knows that she is still alive) rushes to have her placed in the family crypt. When she wakes up, Madeline goes insane from being buried alive and breaks free with insanity-induced strength. She confronts her brother and begins throttling him to death. Suddenly the house, already aflame due to a fallen lit candle, begins to collapse and the narrator flees as Roderick is killed by Madeline and both she and the Usher's sole servant are consumed by the falling house. The film was Corman's first in a series of eight films inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1980 the Czech surrealist film maker Jan Švankmajer adapted the story as a short film relying entirely on imagery and inanimate objects in place of actors.

In the 2008 David DeCoteau film, it is implied that the house is a living being, dependent on the human souls that Roderick and Madeline provide it with. The central character is called Victor Reynolds, a reference to the name allegedly called out by Poe the night before his death.

List of films

• La Chute de la maison Usher (France, 1928) by Jean Epstein
• The Fall of the House of Usher (US, 1928) by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber
• The Fall of the House of Usher (UK, 1949) directed by Ivan Barnett
• House of Usher (a.k.a. Fall of the House of Usher and The Mysterious House of Usher) (1960) by Roger Corman with Vincent Price
• The Fall of the House of Usher (1966) (TV)
• '"Zánik domu Usheru" (The Fall of the House of Usher) (1980) (animated version by Jan Švankmajer)
• "Histoires extraordinaires: La chute de la maison Usher" (1981) (TV) with Mathieu Carrière
• Revenge in the House of Usher (1982)
• The Fall of the House of Usher (1982) (TV) with Martin Landau and Ray Walston
• "El hundimiento de la Casa de Usher'" (1983) by Jesús Franco with Howard Vernon
• The House of Usher (1988) with Oliver Reed
• The House of Usher (2006)
• House of Usher (2008) by David DeCoteau

Plays

• The Fall of the House of Usher (1974) adaptation by Steven Berkoff
• The Fall of the House of Usher (2009) musical adaptation written by Brent Cirves and composed by Mike Johnson for the 2009 Capital Fringe Festival and the New York International Fringe Festival^[11]

Music

Between 1908 and 1917, French composer Claude Debussy worked on an opera called La chute de la maison Usher. The libretto was his own, based on Poe, and the work was to be a companion piece to another short opera (Le diable dans le beffroi) based on Poe's "The Devil in the Belfry". At Debussy's death the work was unfinished, however. In recent years completions have been attempted by two different musicologists.

The Alan Parsons Project's first release (1976's Tales of Mystery and Imagination) features a long instrumental named after this story. The track has five parts: "Prelude", "Arrival", "Intermezzo", "Pavane", and "Fall" and its style showcases 20th century classical music and progressive rock. The music incorporates fragments of Debussy's unfinished opera.

Peter Hammill composed and recorded an opera based on the story in 1991. In this work, the house itself becomes a vocal part, to be sung by the same performer who sings the role of Roderick Usher. The libretto by Chris Judge Smith incorporates material from other writings by Poe, and also adopts the subplot of a romantic attraction between Madeline Usher and the narrator, who is given the name Montresor. This recording still had drums in it though and thus was not a real opera. Hammill realized that and released a totally overhauled version in 1999, without drums but with an added violin and layers of electric guitar that created an orchestral sound. He also resang all of his own vocals.

Another operatic version was composed by Philip Glass, with a libretto by Arthur Yorinks.

This story is also the inspiration for the classical guitarist Nikita Koshkin's "Usher-Waltz", a piece for solo guitar.

Further, the story served as inspiration to the American composer Ian Krouse's "Roderick Usher’s ‘Phantasmion’ (Grand Sonata ‘Quasi una fantasia’) Op. 25, 1836", which was composed for - and premiered by - classical guitarist Scott Tennant.