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The two scrappy Ushers, who came into the world together, would leave the world together, atop a hill of riches, excess… and bodies. In 2002, Ken Russell produced a horror comedy version titles The Fall of the Louse of Usher. In 1956, NBC Matinee Theater on US television broadcast The Fall of the House of Usher starring Marshall Thompson and Tom Tryon for episode 197. In 1950, a British film version of The Fall of the House of Usher was produced starring Gwen Watford, Kay Tendeter and Irving Steen. La Chute de la maison Usher is a 1928 silent French horror film directed by Jean Epstein starring Marguerite Gance, Jean Debucourt, and Charles Lamy. Like Madeline, Roderick is connected to the mansion, the titular House of Usher.
Film Credits
Problematically, Flanagan tends to conflate queerness with depravity and sexual fluidity is punished here with an unnerving flourish. But the show remembers to be actually scary, with truly inspired uses of chimps, mirrors and sprinkler systems. There’s no question that The Fall of the House of Usher ranks among Flanagan’s finest works. Flanagan has form with making tributes to some of horror’s most beloved oeuvres. He took on Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House (which was fabulous), Henry James in The Haunting of Bly Manor (spooky but saccharine) and Christopher Pike in The Midnight Club (meh).
Frederick Usher
Thankfully, Flanagan and Poe’s sensibilities prove a winning pairing, staying on the edge of terror without cascading into jump scares and sentimentality. Guilt permeates every frame of Flanagan’s Poe universe, and buys into not so much the horror as the terror. The feeling that something awful is imminent makes for an engaging watch. Whatever level you’re at, it’s a formula for a series of moment-to-moment effectiveness, with some cleverness and much playful horror. But in its wish-fulfillment approach to a very real tragedy, the haunting here is more fleeting and less marrow-deep than Flanagan’s best work.
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He believes the mansion is sentient and responsible, in part, for his deteriorating mental health and melancholy. Despite this admission, Usher remains in the mansion and composes art containing the Usher mansion or similar haunted mansions. His mental health deteriorates faster as he begins to hear Madeline's attempts to escape the underground vault she was buried in, and he eventually meets his death out of fear in a manner similar to the House of Usher's cracking and sinking. Roderick and Madeline are twins and the two share an incommunicable connection that critics conclude may be either incestuous or metaphysical,[7] as two individuals in an extra-sensory relationship embodying a single entity. To that end, Roderick's deteriorating condition speeds his own torment and eventual death.
The Masque of the Red Death
I trust you see what Flanagan, who wrote or co-wrote nearly every episode and directed much of the series, is doing there? If you don’t, key details get repeated multiple times, especially in the first couple of episodes. Half creative writing project tied to a freshman seminar on Edgar Allan Poe, half horror-filled karmic catharsis, Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a bluntly entertaining exercise. It’s easily the most specifically topical of Flanagan’s Netflix minis, fueled by an often palpable anger. But that anger frequently gets in the way of the thematic richness that gave The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass their mournful charge.
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He offers to lay out the truth about his family’s criminal, violent history. All of these nightmarish visions are attached to the family drama that Usher offers up for Dupin, giving the season a clever episodic structure in that each chapter intertwines a different Poe source into the overall saga of the Ushers. Roderick has come from a miserable childhood with a puritanical, sickly mother who believes that “pain and suffering are the kiss of Jesus”. As a parent himself, Roderick doesn’t fare much better, having six children by five different women who range from obnoxious hedonists (Napoleon and Prospero Usher) to despicable creeps (Frederick, Tamerlane and Victoria) to obnoxious, despicable hedonist creeps (Camille).
Episodes8
“There is a fantastical supernatural element to the story, and she is the manifestation of that,” she added. As these first look photos and posters reveal, Verna isn’t one to be played with. “You could say she’s the executor of fate or the executor of karma,” said Gugino. She possessed the warmth and moral compass of Annabel Lee, he thought, the “best of her without a broken heart.” She’s the one who called 911 and saved her mom from her father’s brutality.
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It is revealed that Roderick's sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances. Roderick and Madeline are the only remaining members of the Usher family. Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) attends a joint funeral for a number of his adult children, and in a montage of press coverage, we see how a series of “freak accidents” has wiped out his entire bloodline.
The Black Cat
But Poe’s version of Roderick is that of a recluse instead of a powerful billionaire. Much of the series’ lack of nuance is tied to Flanagan’s difficulties handling Dupin (played by Malcolm Goodwin in flashbacks). On the page, in stories including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the character is the wily progenitor of every fictional detective to follow, but on the screen he’s a passive receiver of information.
She chases after Verna with a fire poker and smashes nearly all of the mirrors, ultimately hitting the mirrored ceiling above her bed as she cries about messing everything up. Shards fall down and stab her to the eternal sleep that Verna knows she desperately needs. Camille (Kate Siegel) couldn’t let her animosity toward her half-sister, Victorine LaFourcade (T’Nia Miller), rest, so she goes to Vic’s research facility to dig up more dirt on her unethical experiments. One selfish choice seals the Usher family’s fates forever when twins Roderick (Zach Gilford) and Madeline Usher (Willa Fitzgerald) meet an omnipotent harbinger of fate, Verna (Carla Gugino), at a bar on New Year’s Eve 1979 in Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick and Mary McDonnell as an elderly Madeline. Loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name—as well as other works by the legendary author—House of Usher begins as the aging CEO of a shady pharmaceutical company, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), mourns the deaths of his six children under bizarre circumstances. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), an assistant district attorney who’s been trying to hold the Usher family accountable for decades, to his dilapidated childhood home for a long-overdue confession. Tying all of these threads together is Verna (Carla Gugino), a mysterious figure whose appearance precedes every calamity that befalls the family.
His shows have become the streaming service’s best offerings for spooky season, and it is hard to imagine how that void will be filled. It’s not perfect – the order in which the Poe family meet their fates is a case of diminishing returns, as its most intriguing members are dispatched too quickly. Some of the CGI, particularly one scene involving bodies falling from the sky, is unintentionally funny.
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Near the end of Poe’s House of Usher, Madeline is described as cataleptic and prone to trances and seizures. The narrator, who is the audience’s window into the unfolding drama, barely interacts with her and believes Roderick when he announces that Madeline has died, helping his friend entomb his sister despite noticing her rosy cheeks. It turns out Madeline is not dead and she takes revenge by attacking her brother, scaring him to death (literally) before dying herself. Here are the biggest differences in Flanagan’s adaptation, but be aware of spoilers ahead.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” updates the work of Edgar Allan Poe for the era of Big Pharma, turning his most famous tales into a sprawling story of the decline of a wealthy American family. It’s “Succession” meets The Tell-Tale Heart, a story of vengeance, power, betrayal, and bloody parts. Loosely based on various works by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the firm's genius COO, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children.
We discover in the final episode, when she appears as a vision to Roderick, that she literally could not live without them. Annabel Lee reveals that she’d tell people “he’s rich” when they’d ask how he stole her kids away. But now she only sees poverty in Roderick, as he starved their children of love. After she turns her back on him, we learn that she died by suicide. The Haunting of Hill House goes back and forth between two timelines, following five adult siblings.
After Roderick gives Auguste his final confession, Madeline bursts through the door of the basement and strangles her brother to death — the same way their mother killed their father. Auguste stands outside in horror, as Verna stands atop the wreckage. Roderick and Madeline sold their souls the night they killed Fortunato CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) — the same night they met Verna, on New Year’s Eve 1979. Using Griswold as a fall guy to begin Roderick’s takeover, the twins drugged him on the night of the company holiday party. When Griswold woke, he found that they’re sealing him behind a brick wall in the basement of the new Fortunato building he’s constructing. His cries for help were useless, because the holidays meant no one would be back in the building for days.
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