Fans,
a month or two ago, I revisited Roger Corman's exquisitely mounted film of THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM starring the Immortal Vincent Price, and I noticed a number of plot devices and images that seemed to have been re-staged in DS.
Just a little while ago, a friend of mine posted this trailer for HOUSE OF USHER (1960) on a film page we're both on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QslKMIOeME8I'd forgotten about that gruesome image of a bloodied hand groping its way out of a chained coffin. Interesting to speculate that that might have inspired Malcolm Marmorstein, if he was the one who came up with the idea of the vampire being released from such a coffin.
G.