Table Of Content
- The Fall Of The House Of Usher review: The guy who does horror with heart takes on the heartless
- ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Finale Recap: Bringing Down the House
- More Stories by Etan
- Vince McMahon Lists Final TKO Shares for Sale
- ‘The King Tide’: An Island Town Rots with Moral Decay in Canadian Folk Horror Fable [Review]
- What's your favorite Mike Flanagan project?
Actually, they may have been doing something a bit more involved than that, as Madeline tells her brother that they want to make sure the cops don’t follow them. A stunning use of Poe’s work as the Cliffs Notes to his own majestic, intricate brand of storytelling, Flanagan’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” showcases what the 1% is willing to sacrifice to remain in high places. However, it’s also a reminder that while the powerful may delay settling a tab, debts must often be paid in blood when collection time comes — whether in one generation or the next.
The Fall Of The House Of Usher review: The guy who does horror with heart takes on the heartless
Mike Flanagan has been one of Netflix’s most dependable showrunners, expertly crafting one horror series after another since The Haunting Of Hill House in 2018. His newest series uses the stories of Edgar Allan Poe to build a tale of a family who built a pharmaceutical powerhouse under somewhat sketchy circumstances, and a patriarch who sees all of his children die in the span of two weeks. Showrunners Flanagan and longtime producing partner Trevor Macy create a narrative structure that follows the Ushers one-by-one to their doom at the hands of the mysterious Verna (Carla Gugino). With the deaths telecast from the outset, the overarching mysteries instead lie within the inciting events that doomed the Usher family in the first place and how the preternatural Verna fits into the equation.
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Finale Recap: Bringing Down the House
Imagine watching Succession and seeing each of the series’ miserable players get what they deserve in the most lethal way possible? That’s the type of delicious schadenfreude that The Fall of the House of Usher offers. We watch on as each victim – Usher or otherwise – makes their proverbial bed despite the grace of the literal warnings offered.
More Stories by Etan
Fans of creator Mike Flanagan know that his entire body of work sits within the horror genre, but this show is more sinister than chilling. As the episodes press forward, an aura of foreboding is infused throughout the scenes. Since the redeemable characters within the series are almost non-existent, watching the demise of the Ushers is nothing to be horrified about, but it is grisly nonetheless. Though the series’ title comes from only a single source, fans will already recognize that this is more of a hodgepodge. There are familiar character names, directly absorbed plotlines, overt and subtle visual nods.
Flanagan weaves them together so that each story feeds into the others, with an ever-changing supernatural figure (Carla Gugino) stalking through them all, testing each child’s morality and finding them wanting. It’s very smartly done, making for a cohesive epic rather than a disconnected anthology. 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 certainly has the similar dark, foreboding feel of Mike Flanagan’s other Netflix series, like The Haunting Of Hill House and The Haunting Of Bly Manor. In Flanagan's version, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and his twin sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell) are the CEO and COO, respectively, of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, a vast corporate empire that the pair ruthlessly built up over 40 years. The keystone of their business is a wildly popular pain-killing drug called Ligodone, which they claim is safe and non-addictive despite many, many deaths over the years resulting from abuse of the drug.
'The Fall of the House of Usher' Review: A Giddy, Gory Exit - Vulture
'The Fall of the House of Usher' Review: A Giddy, Gory Exit.
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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... Like some of Flanagan’s previous work — Hill House is based on a Shirley Jackson novel and Bly Manor a story by Henry James — House of Usher is the kind of adaption that uses the source material as a skeleton to build something entirely new upon. It's not a spoiler to say that all of them are doomed; we learn that much in the first five minutes.
‘The King Tide’: An Island Town Rots with Moral Decay in Canadian Folk Horror Fable [Review]
The narrative shifts away from the motivations and desires of the Usher children, focusing more on Roderick and Madeline as perpetrators of the opioid epidemic. This element of the series was often too on the nose, and much less compelling than the random displays of immorality and wickedness that make the Ushers rotten to the core. Since there are more than a couple of fictional representations of the Saclker family in media, the show would’ve been even stronger had it not leaned so heavily into those story fragments, and remained aligned instead with the “Succession” aspects of the series. Also, the framework of the Usher legacy is most poignant when Flanagan shines a light on the twins’ ambitions, even as teens and young adults, as well as their unbridled loyalty to one another. Broken up into eight chapters, the six middle episodes of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” each named for a terrifying Poe tale, illustrate the death of one of the Usher children.
Flanagan takes a kind of mix-and-match approach to his biggest references that frequently makes their origin stories nearly incidental. For example, the Poe short story “The Black Cat” is originally about a murderous addict who succumbs fully to his violent impulses. But in the House of Usher episode “Black Cat,” that aspect of the focal character is almost entirely absent because we barely spend any time with him before he’s battling his furry demon. Instead, that psychology gets handed to the subject of the “Pit and the Pendulum” episode. As a result, that episode has little in common with its origin source, while “Black Cat” lacks any of the depth and murderous intensity that makes Poe’s story so memorable. Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix series, The Fall of the House of Usher, a loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story, certainly fits in many of the familiar nouns — each episode references one or more familiar Poe works in combinations that can feel like a trip through junior high English class.
The cast is made up of Flanagan regulars who make up for a delightfully despicable group of asshole millionaires. We don’t get an even picture of all the Usher kids in the first episode, but we get enough to satisfy our curiosity. Camille is a publicity shark; Frederick is a bit of a doof whom the rest of the family calls “Frauderick”; Tamerlane is very loyal and hates Roderick’s current wife Juno (Ruth Codd). Even so, we know that they all have their own issues despite what looks like unwavering family loyalty.
The series unfolds as a string of morality tales in which the sins of the father are visited upon the equally corrupt heads of the offspring. Usher answers some of those questions far more satisfyingly than others; its argument against unchecked affluence and corporate monopolization are both clearer than its explanation of Poe, whom it would rather maintain as a specter than analyze as a man. While that degree of social commentary might feel new for Flanagan, it’s not that far removed from how he criticized the misuse of religion as a divisive force in Hill House and Midnight Mass. There’s a giddy fuck-it quality to Usher’s venomous barbs, a sense that Flanagan is taking big swings as he backs out of Netflix’s doors.
After all, hubris, like any of the fine products from the Roderick-run Fortunato, is a hell of a drug. The story explicitly ties the physical House of Usher to the Usher lineage, stating that the peasants in that domain use the phrase “House of Usher” for both. However, the connection between the house and the family runs deeper than linguistic shorthand. The narrator observes the house as having an almost human-like quality, describing its windows as “eye-like.” Just as Roderick appears to radiate his own melancholy, so too does the house have a depressing air.
When Dupin gets to Roderick’s house, the same one he grew up in, the senior Usher tells him that he’s ready to admit to all of it. He means the fraud and other charges that Dupin has brought against him and his company, Fortunado Pharmaceuticals. But he also wants to tell him about who killed all six of his children over the past two weeks. He had his six children — Frederick (Henry Thomas), Camille (Kate Siegel), Napoleon aka “Leo” (Rahul Kohli), Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), Victorine (T’Nia Miller) and Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) with five different women. But because of the way he was brought up, in a family of exclusion, they’re all welcome, if they keep the family’s secrets in the family. One of the most intriguing components of life is the realization that we all have a tab, and at one point or another, a bill will come due.
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. 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.
