Review: The Fall of the House of Usher is a gloriously Gothic horror delight

Halloween approacheth yet again, and that means it's time for another classic horror miniseries from Mike Flanagan and Netflix, the partnership that brought us The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. For his final (sob!) project with Netflix, Flanagan has gifted us with The Fall of the House of Usher. To say it's an adaption of the famous short story by Edgar Allan Poe wouldn't be doing the miniseries justice. What Flanagan has done is something quite extraordinary: it's more an inventive remix of the best of Poe's oeuvre, creating something that's entirely Flanagan's own while still channeling the very essence of Poe.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

In Poe's original short story, an unnamed narrator visits his old friend Roderick Usher, who has fallen ill along with his twin sister Madeline—the last surviving members of a once prominent family. The nature of their illness is never disclosed, but Roderick appears to be going mad, convinced his fate is tied to the Usher house—and there is an ominous crack starting from the roof running down the front of the house. Roderick accidentally entombs Madeline alive, believing she has died, and one dark stormy night, she re-emerges and attacks him in revenge. As the twins expire and the narrator flees in terror, the entire house splits in two and sinks into a nearby lake. It's pure Gothic horror, a genre that inspired Poe's many short stories and poetry in the early 19th century.

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.

A police investigator named C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) has spent decades trying to nail the siblings on the company's various shady business practices and has finally managed to bring the Ushers to trial. The family is ably defended by their dour lawyer/fixer, Arthur Gordon Pym (Mark Hamill), aka the "Pym Reaper," and it looks like they might once again escape any real consequences for their role in the opioid epidemic.

But then Roderick's six grown children start mysteriously dying. The two eldest are Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas) and Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan), both born to Roderick by his first wife, Annabel Lee (Katie Parker). Then there are those the womanizing Roderick fathered with four different mothers: Victorine LaFourcade (T'Nia Miller), Napoleon Usher (Rahul Kohli), Camille L'Espanaye (Kate Siegel), and Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota).

It's not a spoiler to say that all of them are doomed; we learn that much in the first five minutes. The suspense comes from watching them march inevitably toward their respective gruesome fates, each manner of death inspired by one of Poe's short stories. The mystery lies in who, ultimately, is to blame. Are these deaths truly freak accidents, or does it have something to do with dark secrets in Roderick and Madeline's past—perhaps related to their impoverished childhood in a ramshackle old house; their improbable rise to fortune; and a mysterious woman named Verna (Carla Gugino) they met at a bar one New Year's Eve in 1979? Those secrets unfold through a series of flashbacks peppered throughout House of Usher's eight episodes.

Half the fun for diehard Poe fans like me is ferreting out all the hidden Easter eggs and savoring the ingenious ways Flanagan has riffed on the source material. Poe's original Fall of the House of Usher obviously provides the over-arching framework, but Flanagan has woven in elements of several other classic short stories and poems, most notably "The Masque of the Red Death," "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Gold-Bug," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "William Wilson," "The Cask of Amontillado," and of course, "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee." (Sharp-eyed viewers will note that Verna is an anagram of "raven.") Plus there are nods to Poe's lesser-known oeuvre sprinkled throughout.

Pym is a reference to Poe's only finished novel, a seafaring adventure called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Frederick's name comes from "Metzengerstein," while his wife Morelle (Crystal Balint) derives from "Morella." Other names are drawn from short stories: Victorine ("The Premature Burial"), Napoleon ("The Spectacles"), and Napoleon's boyfriend (Daniel Jun), Julius ("The Journal of Julius Rodman"), while Tamerlane is a nod to the poem of the same name. Eliza Usher (Annabeth Gish), mother to Roderick and Madeline, is named after Poe's real mother, while young Roderick's (Zach Gilford) boss at Fortunato, Rufus Wilmot Griswold (Michael Trucco), is an homage to one of Poe's literary rivals. Portions of Poe's poems "The City in the Sea" and "Spirits of the Dead" (among others) also show up in the script.

Flanagan's Bly Manor took a similar approach, adapting elements of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and several other of the author's short stories. I loved Bly Manor, but that effort never quite achieved the feel of a seamless whole—perhaps not helped by James' detached, cerebral, psychologically "interior" style. One would never accuse Poe of being detached; his prose is all blood and guts and sinew and raw emotion, as befits a master of Gothic horror. The interior lives of his characters are mirrored in the world around them as events unfold. And there are very distinct recurrent themes that run through Poe's work that help tie the material together: madness, guilt, disease, opium, family, omens, doppelgängers, fears of being buried alive, resurrections, and of course, the tragic death of a beautiful young woman. Flanagan taps into all of them.

Both Hill House and Bly Manor featured rather leisurely pacing, focusing on character development, setting, and the intricate relationships of those characters as the stories unfolded. By contrast, House of Usher is a veritable juggernaut, with eight intense, jam-packed episodes compared to its predecessors' 10. It still takes time to establish character, tone, and a sense of place, but there's no padding whatsoever; it's very much in the vein of Poe's famous "totality" approach to his writing, in which no element or detail is superfluous.

Flanagan has collected a gifted stable of regular cast members over his career, many of whom appear here along with a few new faces, and all give exceptional performances. The strength of Flanagan's approach to horror is that he never sacrifices the human factor. There is ominous foreshadowing, well-timed jump scares, and plenty of gore to satisfy horror fans, but there's also pathos and heartbreak, even for the most unlikeable characters. (Roderick Usher raised a very dysfunctional family.)

And Flanagan sticks the landing, even if it's a bit wobbly, thanks to a finale peppered with preachy monologues and heavy-handed moralizing about consequences and bills coming due. It's a bit too on the nose at times. But even that overt didacticism is pure Poe and thus suits the overall tenor of the miniseries. The showrunner has likened Hill House to a string quartet and Bly Manor to "this delicate, kind of beautiful piece of classical music," but he described House of Usher as being akin to "heavy metal." It's an apt analogy for a miniseries that tonally runs the gamut from bombastic wailing guitars and throbbing bass riffs to plaintive power ballads.

Anyone familiar with Poe's collected works will likely see many of the plot developments coming well before the final reveals, and it's very much to Flanagan's credit that such prior knowledge enhances rather than detracts from the pleasure of watching it all unfold. He once again demonstrates that he is the reigning master of reinventing classic horror stories for a modern audience. As Flanagan and Netflix go their separate ways, one mourns the end of one fruitful partnership while looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

The Fall of the House of Usher is now streaming on Netflix.

Trailer for The Fall of the House of Usher.

Listing image: Netflix

Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer

Jennifer is a senior reporter at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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