Warning: The following contains major spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher and the works of Edgar Allen Poe.
In recent years, Mike Flanagan has become known for emotional adaptations of classic horror literature. After a series of original films, Flanagan brought Stephen King’s famously unfilmable novel Gerald’s Game to life then set his sights on the work of Shirley Jackson. His Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House dramatically expanded the legendary story and brought us all to tears with an intimate examination of parenting through the years. Flanagan followed this with The Haunting of Bly Manor, a mind-bending take on The Turn of the Screw, and The Midnight Club, a spooky mashup of Christopher Pike’s YA bibliography.
For his latest Netflix series, Flanagan tackles the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Following the wealthy Usher family, the director takes some of his trademark liberties to tell a larger story about greed, power, and pain. The Fall of the House of Usher may be named for a singular story, but this eight-episode series expertly weaves together the gothic poet’s most popular titles. For viewers enthralled by this devious family and their spectacular destruction, the following thirteen stories, poems, and novel will shed further light on the Usher house’s sinister origins.
Poe’s classic story follows an unnamed narrator who receives a letter from his childhood friend Roderick, summoning him to the Usher family’s notorious home. Having fallen into decay, the narrator notes a sinister aura permeating the place as well as a giant crack on the house’s façade. Fearing the imminent death of his twin sister Madeline, Usher languishes for days trying to find comfort in this visit with an old friend. When she finally passes away, the two men entomb her in the family crypt only to later realize they may have buried her alive. Madeline’s undead apparition bursts forth from the grave in the midst of a nightmarish thunderstorm and frightens her brother to death as the house collapses around them.
Flanagan uses the bones of this story to frame his series. The first episode sees his mother Eliza (Annabeth Gish), named for Poe’s mother, crawl out of her own grave during a thunderstorm, but it’s Madeline’s (Mary McDonnell) reanimation that brings both an end to her brother’s life and the destruction of the Usher home. Rather than childless twins, Flanagan’s House of Usher is a dynasty with six children and one grandchild vying to carry on the family name. At the end of his life, Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) summons an old frenemy C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) to his similarly decrepit childhood home. Over priceless drinks he recounts the devilish bargain he made to secure wealth and power.
Auguste Dupin is one of Poe’s recurring characters and widely considered to be the first literary detective. Though first introduced by “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” another story may be more adept at capturing the essence of his modern equivalent. Dupin’s third outing involves the case of a letter stolen from French royalty. The ingenious detective finds the paper hiding in plain sight by mimicking the mannerisms of the unknown thief. He then concocts an elaborate scheme to retrieve the document from under the nose of the guilty party.
Flanagan’s Dupin (Malcolm Goodwin) meets Roderick (Zach Gilford) as a young man, but eventually becomes the pharmaceutical tycoon’s most prominent foe. Initially working together, Dupin works out a scheme to steal forged documents from Fortunato, the company built by Roderick’s absentee father. Unfortunately, it seems Roderick has been playing Dupin and betrays him at a critical moment, forever casting them on opposing sides of the moral dial. While finally prosecuting the Ushers in the present day, Dupin attempts to think like Roderick and suggests that a member of the Usher family has handed over sensitive information. But Dupin is ultimately unable to sustain the ruse, proving himself to be a decent man through and through.
In one of Poe’s most prescient allegories, Prince Prospero attempts to use his enormous wealth to insulate his household from a deadly plague known as the Red Death. He throws a lavish masquerade ball for his powerful friends, squandering his resources on luxury while ignoring the disease-ridden world outside the abbey walls. As the night wears on, an ominous clock chimes at every hour, causing the revelors to pause and consider the passage of time. Meanwhile a mysterious figure wanders through the party, hidden by a blood-stained robe that could be a funeral shroud. This sinister guest is eventually revealed to be a manifestation of the Red Death itself, infiltrating the party and thwarting Prosepro’s attempts to outsmart disease and death.
Flanagan uses this famous tale to kick off the Usher family bloodbath. Prospero “Perry” Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota) is Roderick’s youngest son desperate for his father’s stamp of approval and the loan that will secure his place in the family dynasty. When Roderick refuses to fund a luxurious night club proposal, Perry plans a drug-fueled party in one of the family’s condemned buildings. Unfortunately he has been ignoring his father’s misdeeds, only concerned with the Usher family wealth. As the expensive party rages on, a mysterious woman in a red cloak wanders from room to room. She warns him about the consequences of his actions, summarizing the heart of Poe’s story as well as Flanagan’s larger thesis. Perry showers his dancing guests with what he believes to be water, but accidentally douses them with acidic chemicals. Mimicking the symptoms of Poe’s plague, every member of the party begins to melt as the corrosive liquid unleashes its bloody red death upon them all.
Regarded as the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” introduces Dupin as he investigates the grisly deaths of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Camille. After alerting their neighbors with screams in the night, the two women are found gruesomely murdered in a room locked from the inside. Thinking outside the box, Dupin eventually reveals the culprit to be an orangutan who has recently escaped from the nearby docks.
Flanagan’s Camille L’Espanaya (Kate Siegel) is Roderick’s youngest daughter and a media mogul adept at spinning any story to her advantage. Harboring an irrational hatred for her older sister Victorine (T’Nia Miller), Camille directs her assistants to dig up information on her sister’s clinical trials. The ostensibly benevolent doctor has spent a tremendous amount of Usher money developing a revolutionary heart mesh device at a facility cheekily called the R.U.E Morgue due to the upsetting practice of testing on chimps. Like Dupin, Camille is a skilled detective and discovers that Victorine has been doctoring her clinical records. Barging into the lab in the dead of night, Camille suffers the same fate as her literary counterpart and dies at the hands of an angry primate.
One of the more disturbing stories in Poe’s catalog is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of addiction. An unnamed narrator awaits execution and tells his story beginning with a fondness for a black cat named Pluto. As his drinking increases, the narrator finds himself compelled to torture the poor cat, eventually gouging out its eye and hanging it by the neck from a tree. Seemingly punished for this cruelty, the narrator’s house soon burns down and he falls into poverty. He later adopts another cat that bears a striking resemblance to Pluto save for a mocking white mark on the animal’s chest. When his wife stops him from killing the cat, the narrator murders her instead and hides the body in the walls of his home. The curious black cat alerts police to her location by meowing from inside the walls while sitting on the head of the decomposing corpse.
Flanagan uses this tale to destroy Roderick’s fourth child Napoleon (Rahul Kohli). During a blackout drunk, “Leo” kills his boyfriend’s cat Pluto then frantically scours the city looking for a replacement. This sinister feline begins to torment Leo, scratching his eye and leaving the bloody bodies of its prey around the apartment. Like Poe’s narrator, Leo’s life begins to spin out of control and he retreats into drugs as the bodies of his siblings accumulate along with the disemboweled vermin littering his home. After a particularly vicious scratch, the cat disappears into the walls and Leo destroys his apartment with a sledgehammer, hoping to find and kill the sinister feline. Fortunately, Leo’s boyfriend escapes the fate of the narrator’s wife, but Leo falls to his death after recklessly chasing the cat over the balcony ledge.
One of Poe’s most popular tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” has come to symbolize debilitating guilt and paranoia. This short story follows an unstable young man who decides to murder his elderly neighbor to destroy his unnerving pale blue eye. After stalking this kindly acquaintance for a week, the narrator kills and dismembers the man, burying his body under the floorboards. When police interview him about a scream heard in the night, the narrator becomes consumed with the sound of his victim’s heart beating from within the floor, tormenting him with its loud pulses until he is driven to confess.
With her experiment failing, Victorine attempts to save face by rushing into human trials. With a calculated coldness, she fakes test results and manipulates data, putting countless lives in danger to seek her father’s approval. When her girlfriend refuses to go along with this fraud, Victorine accidentally bludgeons her with a heavy bookend, then attempts to revive the dying woman with the proprietary device. As the days wear on, Victorine begins to hear the subtle squeak of the heart mesh taunting her from an unknown source. She tries to drown this noise out with loud music, but Roderick eventually finds the corpse of his daughter’s girlfriend, her crudely opened chest pulsing with a bloody heart and the failed medical device.
Though Flanagan’s sixth episode is titled for Poe’s story “The Gold-Bug,” it bears closer resemblance to the eerie story of “William Wilson.” The titular nobleman meets a childhood classmate with the same name, appearance, and birthday as himself, resenting this doppelgänger as he seems to overshadow William’s life. Only able to speak in a whisper, this double inspires reckless behavior and thwarts his attempts to gain power and position in society. Tormented for years, William finally confronts the double in a mirrored room and kills the man with a sword, only to realize he has actually impaled himself.
An allegory for insecurity, this story perfectly shows Roderick’s second child’s struggle to find acceptance in a ruthless family. Named Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) after Poe’s poem about a man who ignores his true love to build a kingdom, Flanagan’s Tammy pushes away a compassionate husband in order to lead a program she hopes will rebuild her family’s negative image. Obsessed with the launch of a lifestyle brand called Goldbug, a nod to Poe’s story about cryptic obsession, she begins to encounter a double of herself who seems poised to replace her and right the course of her rapidly spiraling life. After this double sabotages Tammy’s much anticipated event, she hunts the mysterious woman down with a fire poker and winds up impaling herself on shattered mirror glass in her own bedroom.
One of Poe’s most harrowing stories recounts the trials of an unnamed narrator thrown into a notorious prison of the Spanish Inquisition. After awakening in a pitch-black cell, the frightened man discovers a pit in the center of the floor that would send him plummeting to his death. Sometime later, the narrator finds himself strapped to a table with a bladed pendulum swinging above him. With each swipe growing closer to his heart, the narrator is rescued in the nick of time by the French Army who immediately shut down the deadly facility.
Flanagan uses this story to tear apart Usher’s oldest child. Freddy (Henry Thomas) has long been seen as the heir apparent, though his father withholds the unconditional love he truly craves. When Freddy’s wife is maimed at Prospero’s deadly party, Freddy becomes consumed with discovering what other secrets she may be hiding. He conducts his own inquisition by torturing her at home with a paralytic drug. The abusive husband eventually removes her teeth with pliers, a nod to Poe’s disturbing and controversial story “Berenice.” Undone by his own cruelty, Freddy accidentally snorts the paralytic and finds himself trapped inside a condemned building during demolition. A massive piece of debris swings back and forth above him as the roof collapses, eventually cutting his torso in two.
Poe’s only completed novel follows a Nantucket man who goes on a globe-trotting adventure. As a young man, Arthur Gordon Pym finds himself caught in a storm after a drunken attempt to steal a dinghy. This begins a sea-faring journey in which the intrepid young man sneaks aboard a ship called the Grampus, surviving mutinies and attacks before eventually finding a passageway to the center of the Earth. The story ends somewhat abruptly as Pym views a mysterious figure rising from the planet’s hollow center, hinting at a race of beings who live outside the laws of time and humanity.
Flanagan’s Pym is another type of sailor. As the Usher family’s sole lawyer, Pym navigates the treacherous legal waters constantly threatening to drown his felonious clients. As a young man, Pym maneuvered his way onto the Trans-Globe Expedition, an adventure similar to that of his literary counterpart. Usher implies that he may have participated in atrocities and tasted human flesh. However, there is one part of the journey Pym refuses to divulge, mirroring the vague ending of Poe’s novel. Flanagan posits that the figure he saw rising from the Earth’s core is the same being now determined to end the Usher family line.
One of Poe’s darkest stories proves to be the lynchpin of Flanagan’s series. “The Cask of Amontillado” follows a nobleman named Montresor who vows revenge against Fortunato, an arrogant acquaintance with a taste for wine. As punishment for a grievous insult, Montresor plays on the man’s ego and lures him down into his family’s cellar with the promise of a particular brand of sherry called Amontillado. Once the drunken man has entered the catacombs, Montresor chains him in place then slowly builds a brick wall around the raving man. Wearing the silk costume of a court jester, Fortunato begs for mercy, but Montresor leaves him there to die, his body remaining undisturbed for 50 years.
Flanagan hints at this final story from the opening moments of the series with a snippet of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” In flashbacks we watch Roderick work his way up through the Fortunato ranks by manipulating the current CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco). After a particularly devious court victory, Roderick and Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald) lure Rufus to the basement then wall him into the foundation of the future Fortunato headquarters. Placing his belled jester’s hat on the dying man’s head, the siblings leave him there to die then scramble to cover their tracks. This murder haunts Roderick for decades and he makes frequent trips down to the basement where he occasionally hears the faint tinkling of a ghostly bell.
One of Poe’s earliest stories follows an unnamed narrator who marries a woman named Ligeia. Entranced with her raven hair and ethereal manner, he falls deeply in love then bitterly mourns when she passes away. The man later enters a loveless marriage with a woman named Rowena though he can’t stop thinking about his first wife. Constantly compared to an impossible standard, Rowena’s anxiety grows. The narrator plies her with opiates and she eventually dies as well. After a hellish cycle of revival and relapse, Rowena returns to life and transforms into the narrator’s lost love Ligeia.
Flanagan uses this story as an allegory for greed and addiction. After watching his mother die in excruciating pain, Roderick builds his fortune on a highly addictive pain-killer called Ligadone. His second wife, Juno (Ruth Codd), a former addict now taking heavy doses of the drug, may resemble Ligeia, but like Rowena, their marriage is loveless. When Juno asks to wean herself off of Ligadone, it becomes perfectly clear that Roderick only loves watching her thrive on his patented drug. An epilogue tells us that Juno eventually clears her system of Ligadone in an excruciating three year withdrawal process, mirroring Rowena’s painful death and eventual transcendence.
Poe’s last completed poem is a heartbreaking story of love and loss. An unnamed narrator falls for a woman named Annabel Lee, but their earthly time together is short. Separated by death, the narrator pines away for his lost love, envisioning her eyes in the stars and laying down next to her tomb by the sea. Believing their romance to be stronger than death itself, the narrator longs for the moon to bring him dreams of his lost love.
Flanagan uses Poe’s gorgeous poem to show the true tragedy of Roderick’s life. We first meet the future entrepreneur as a young husband and father struggling to make ends meet with his wife Annabel Lee (Katie Parker). Though poor, they are happy and Roderick frequently recites poems to his bride, lines from Poe’s own famous verse. However, as Roderick succumbs to greed and ambition, his marriage begins to sour. Annabel leaves him and Flanagan hints that she dies by suicide after her former husband lures their children away with his dazzling wealth. By attempting to avoid the pain of poverty and powerlessness, he has lost the one true love of his life.
Poe’s most famous poem anchors Flanagan’s tale and provides a window into his overall message. This haunting verse follows another unnamed narrator whiling away the lonely hours on a dark and stormy night. A mysterious raven continues to tap at his window then calls to him from above the mantle, endlessly repeating the word “nevermore.” Plagued by painful memories, the narrator longs for his lost love Lenore as the raven reminds him that, like Annabel Lee, she too is forever gone.
Flanagan personifies this raven with the character of Verna (Carla Gugino), a dark-haired woman who seems to stalk the Usher family as they die one by one. In addition to his six children, Roderick has a granddaughter named Lenore (Kyliegh Curran), said to represent the best of the family’s strengths. While talking to Dupin, he repeatedly receives texts from Lenore’s phone, but ignores them. We later learn that Lenore has also died as a result of an agreement Roderick made many years ago, the last of his bloodline gone forever. The texts represent a glitch in Madeline’s AI algorithm, repeatedly texting Roderick the single word, “nevermore.” As his life comes to an end, Verna confronts Roderick with the consequences of his actions. There is no escaping the pain of life and in trying to do so, he has caused immeasurable misery for everyone he loves.
