Table Of Content
- Madeline Usher
- In other media
- Real-Life 'Baby Reindeer' Stalker Speaks Out Following Netflix Show Success
- Ian Bohen Teases ‘Yellowstone’ Will Have the “Best Series Finale in History”
- ‘Last Week Tonight’: Past Seasons Will Be Available for Free on YouTube
- Film
- How Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher Adapts Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Story
- Season Info
Further, Roderick believes that his fate is connected to the family mansion. The Fall of the House of Usher begins streaming all eight episodes Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023 on Netflix. Trucco’s character is Rufus Griswold, a name shared with the 19th century scribe whose reflections on Poe after the latter’s death helped shape our possibly incorrect perception of the author as an opioid-addicted madman, which adds a layer of irony to Flanagan’s Sackler-esque prism. Costumes and hair, incidentally, are a huge part of the characterizations in this show, from Greenwood’s mustache to Thomas’ disturbing man-bun. Production design, oddly, is less central, and this is the first of the Flanagan shows not to be a tour de force in that department.
Madeline Usher
Prospero’s fate is merely the first as “The Fall of the House of Usher” also spins back to detail the truth behind the demise of Camille L’Espanaye (Kate Siegel), Leo Usher (Rahul Kohli), Victorine LeFourcade (T’Nia Miller), Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan), and Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas). Sliding through it all is the mysterious man who works as a sort of fixer for the Ushers, Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), totally reimagined from the title character in Poe’s only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Compelling Edgar Allan Poe adaptations have been thin on the ground since Roger Corman’s films in the 1960s.
In other media
From his arrival, the narrator notes the family's isolationist tendencies, as well as the cryptic and special connection between Madeline and Roderick, the final living members of the Usher family. Throughout the tale and her varying states of consciousness, Madeline completely ignores the narrator's presence. After Roderick Usher claims that Madeline has died, the narrator helps Usher entomb Madeline in an underground vault despite noticing Madeline's flushed, lifelike appearance. The bedroom door is then blown open to reveal Madeline, bloodied from her arduous escape from the tomb. In a final fit of rage, she attacks her brother, scaring him to death as she herself expires. The narrator then runs from the house, and, as he does, he notices a flash of moonlight behind him.
Real-Life 'Baby Reindeer' Stalker Speaks Out Following Netflix Show Success
However, it's an incredibly easy show to enjoy on an episode-by-episode basis, largely because Flanagan’s direction is sharp throughout, including excellent use of music and tight editing—some scenes are too underlit, but that’s just the Netflix brand nowadays, and I’m done fighting it. Usher has been reimagined as the head of a massive pharmaceutical company he runs with his twin sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell). Every episode includes flashbacks to a young Roderick (Zach Gilford), Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald), and Annabel Lee (Katie Parker), Roderick’s first wife. These fill in how the Ushers made their fortune, but they’re kind of a narrative drag. It’s important that Roderick and Madeline are cruel, selfish creatures—less so how they got that way.
Ian Bohen Teases ‘Yellowstone’ Will Have the “Best Series Finale in History”
The film was Corman's first in a series of eight films inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A second silent film version, also released in 1928, was directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber. A storm begins, and Roderick comes to the narrator's bedroom (which is situated directly above the house's vault) in an almost hysterical state. Throwing the windows open to the storm, Roderick points out that the lake surrounding the house seems to glow in the dark, just as Roderick depicted in his paintings, but there is no lightning or other explainable source of the glow. The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar. Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace", then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it.
The Fall of the House of Usher occasionally feels like Dopesick when dealing with Roderick’s chosen profession, as it chronicles a crisis that feels similar to the contemporary opioid epidemic; when dealing with the entitled Usher clan, it can feel a bit like Succession. The addition of Roderick’s offspring and wife are a Flanagan creation that borrows heavily from other Poe stories as source material. When one steps back and looks at the whole narrative of the season of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it sags in places. Most of the flashbacks to a young Usher and Dupin are thin, especially compared to the wicked fun on display in the fates of the Usher children. It feels like padding to get episodes to a full hour when Flanagan and company could have leaned even more into the episodic structure that highlights a single Poe per chapter.
Film
What’s more interesting is to watch how the fallout of their decisions fell on Roderick’s many children, all torn apart by some of Poe’s most memorable creations. Twin siblings Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) Usher are sitting atop the Fortunato pharmaceutical company. For decades, they’ve made billions off an opioid called Ligodone, a painkiller marketed as non-addictive, even though its actual addictive properties have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Without giving too much away — because trust us, you’ll want to be surprised — the horror drama follows Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company, who must face his shady past when each of his children begin to die in mysterious and brutal fashion. As the doting mother of both Frederick and Tamerlane, Annabel Lee was devastated to lose custody of her children after Roderick gorged them with money they couldn’t refuse.
'The Fall of the House of Usher': All the Buried Edgar Allan Poe References - Vanity Fair
'The Fall of the House of Usher': All the Buried Edgar Allan Poe References.
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
When the dragon's death cries are described, a real shriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a hollow metallic reverberation can be heard throughout the house. At first, the narrator ignores the noises, but Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical. Roderick eventually declares that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and that they are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed. The content on this site is for entertainment and educational purposes only.
The show generally doesn’t look cheap and there are evocative images aplenty, but despite “house” being right there in the title, the domestic locations, however ostensibly opulent, are never memorable. Lenore’s mother, Morella, recovers well after she’s moved to a proper clinic. It takes years of procedures and reconstructive surgery, but she endures it.
The Usher patriarch then sits in a dilapidated mansion with Carl Lumbly’s Auguste Dupin (based on Poe’s famous recurring character who is considered the first detective in fiction) and offers him a confession. We then flash back a few weeks to when the Usher clan were on top of the world, having become Sackler-esque billionaires peddling opiates that have inflicted untold misery on the American public, and begin to watch their painful demise. Presenting vintage Poe stories filtered through Mike Flanagan's deliciously dark lens, The Fall of the House of Usher will get a rise out of horror fans. As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, he and Roderick hear cracking and ripping sounds from somewhere in the house.
The family is made up of Flanagan’s regular ensemble of actors, and to buy them as relatives requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, but for Flanagan fans, there’s great fun to be had seeing how these favourites fit into his new tale of terror. Ruth Codd (the highlight of The Midnight Club) plays Roderick’s much younger wife Juno, a former heroin addict whose life was turned around thanks to the drugs the Ushers peddle, while Rahul Kohli, Henry Thomas and Kate Siegel each take on a dastardly member of the Usher brood. Alongside his favoured players is Mark Hamill as an unfeeling lawyer/fixer for the Usher family who sounds as if he gargles a pint of nails every morning. But as we know from the start, there’s no point in getting overly attached to them, as grisly fates are assured for all. It’s not so much the “what” as the “why” that the audience and Dupin need to be answered.
Admittedly, there was a spectacular segment in an early Treehouse of Horror Simpsons Halloween special, but with The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan proves just as adept as Matt Groening or Corman at bringing Poe to the screen. The government has struggled for years to topple the metaphorical house of Usher, led by the crusading C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), but thanks to Usher family attorney and general fixer Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), nothing sticks. After the disastrous launch of her Goldbug company, Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) returns home to see visions of Verna (dressed as her doppelgänger) reflected back at her in every mirror of her house.
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