Table Of Content
- Episode Info
- Is it a worthwhile adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s work?
- The Fall of the House of Usher: Limited Series Teaser - She's Coming
- Where to Watch
- Freaky new Netflix horror series debuts with 95% on Rotten Tomatoes
- Audience Reviews
- Members of Deadliest Catch series who have died since show premiered nearly 20 years ago
However, Flanagan is smart enough to shift the Poe narratives ever so slightly for a modern audience. His version of The Tell-Tale Heart is a modern gem, and “The Gold-Bug” is reimagined as a new brand for the Usher company. But the themes remain the same—guilt, obsession, vengeance, and a supernatural sense of justice. Roderick Usher’s children are getting what they deserve, not merely because they are the fruit of a very poisoned tree but because they have made horrific decisions to stay in the shelter of wealth and privilege. It turns out that almost every branch of the Usher family tree has been cut by violent horror. ” “No, not before,” he replies in one of the show’s many glimpses of Flanagan’s viciously dark sense of humor.
Episode Info
Mike Flanagan takes on the works of Edgar Allan Poe in The Fall of the House of Usher, his final spooky outing at Netflix. The eight-episode series, which premieres to the streamer on Thursday, October 12, follows the bleak, gory, and darkly comedic downfall of pharmaceutical magnate Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and his richly diverse (and richly despicable) family. “It has quite a lot of very dark humor, but also really touches the soul.” In the series, Gugino portrays a shape-shifter named Verna, whose origins can be traced back to a — let’s just say — very famous Poe character.
Is it a worthwhile adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s work?
(Poe had one too.) Roderick has been haunted by all his awful children who have shuffled off this mortal coil, and it’s because it feels like the ghosts are finally coming for him that he is ready to confess. He’s having visions of monstrous ghosts, including the recurring specter of Verna (Carla Gugino), a figure that connects most of these tall tales as a sort of vengeful force of karma, the devil come to take what she’s due from a man who profited off the pain of others. The Fall of the House of Usher is an American gothic horror drama television miniseries created by Mike Flanagan. All eight episodes were released on Netflix on October 12, 2023, each directed by either Flanagan or Michael Fimognari, with the latter also acting as cinematographer for the entire series. 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.
The Fall of the House of Usher: Limited Series Teaser - She's Coming
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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. In this adaptation, the family patriarch is Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company, and the Ushers are a seemingly unshakable crime family. Their grip on the world starts to loosen, though, when a mysterious force begins picking them off one by one – and, because this is a Flanagan joint, you can guess exactly what kind of force that might be. The Fall of the House of Usher is inspired by the 1839 short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, in which an unnamed narrator arrives at the House of Usher after hearing that a mysterious illness has infected its residents.
Where to Watch
Some of the CGI, particularly one scene involving bodies falling from the sky, is unintentionally funny. 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.
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. 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. “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.
Terrifying new horror series on Netflix debuts with 95% on Rotten Tomatoes - UNILAD
Terrifying new horror series on Netflix debuts with 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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There’s no question that The Fall of the House of Usher ranks among Flanagan’s finest works. Late one stormy night, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) invites an investigator named C. 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. Another Mike Flanagan horror drama that excels and perfect to watch for the spooky season. "Usher" is among Flanagan’s best work because of the family dynamic and the well-assembled cast who bring complexity to characters that would otherwise be categorized as two-bit villains in lesser hands.
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. 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. Siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built a pharmaceutical company into an empire of wealth, privilege and power; however, secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty sta...
Members of Deadliest Catch series who have died since show premiered nearly 20 years ago
The Fall of the House of Usher is Flanagan’s take on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story of the same name - but much like we saw with The Haunting of Hill House, Flanagan has added his own ‘fresh, freaky twist on it’. 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). 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. This has everything you want in a terrifying family drama; it features brilliant performances and some impressive scares.
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. 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. English majors will likely know where some of the stories are going just by seeing the episode names. When the young and trendy Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota) decides to host an exclusive sex-and-drugs party at one of dad’s old factories in an abbey, readers of The Masque of the Red Death will know it’s going to be a gruesome scene.
The show lands on the streaming platform on Thursday 12 October - but the early reviews are in - and it's safe to say it’s a hit. Flanagan finishes his Netflix contract on a high, gleefully capturing Poe’s magic, eerie romance and sense of dread. 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.
Dripping with gothic romanticism and boasting astounding performances from the entire ensemble – with a heightened level of unrelenting brutality from the director – it is once again, another Flanagan triumph. For fans of horror and adjacent genres, The Fall of the House of Usher is a delight from beginning to end, proving once again Flanagan’s reputation as a bankable showrunner.
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