Low-budgets don’t matter when you’re backed by the sublime Vincent Price and such solid source material as the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

Marking the first of eight immensely-lovable, loose film appropriations of the literary legend’s work, 1958’s House of Usher is a typically dramatic delight from Roger “King of the Bs” Corman. A ripping yarn about the cursed Usher family and the haunted mansion in which the family traditionally resides, House of Usher has all the phantasmagorical features you’d expect from this kind of old-school horror. It is also has Vincent Price with blonde hair delivering an intensely powerful performance as the hypersensitive, unhinged Roderick Usher whose enigmatic nature is as central to the story as the oppressive eponymous house.

It’s classic ham and heart-stopping suspense when the fragile and fraught Roderick Usher faces down the incensed inquiries of blue-eyed Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon). I’d be upset as well if I’d journeyed out to the most discomfiting dwelling in the middle of nowhere to find my lover in cataleptic ill-condition that subsequently encourages her barmy brother to inter her alive. Winthrop wants answers and, with a few accompanying uncanny flourishes in the visuals and music, he gets them in full-on thesp fashion from the manically inconsistent Mr. Usher.

The film throughout is atmospheric and gloriously creepy, conjuring up a great sense of the miasmic malevolence of the Usher Mansion. Edgar Allan Poe would probably approve of the kind of sinister tension and terror presented in this particular snippet, and it stands as a tantalising taster of how effective Corman and Price’s adaptations are.

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