Every year since THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE dropped on Netflix in 2018, I look forward to writer/director Mike Flanagan’s next horror series. MIDNIGHT MASS has been my second favorite after HILL HOUSE but THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER stands on equal ground with MASS. Depending on your enjoyment or familiarity with Edgar Allan Poe’s works, your mileage may vary.
USHER takes its title from Poe’s 1939 short story of the same name. Some character names and settings match, but Flanagan’s series reaches far beyond just this one Poe tale for inspiration. Each episode is named after something in Poe’s works, blending 19th-century gothic literature with a modern takedown of toxic corporations and billionaires. As I watched the series I thought: What if the Roy family from SUCCESSION was cursed by something not of this world?
E1, A MIDNIGHT DREARY, takes its title from the opening line in Poe’s THE RAVEN. It’s a perfect starter, a set-up of what’s to come, introducing us to the Usher patriarch, Rodrick, twin-sister Madeline, his six children, his lawyer Arthur Pym, and C. Auguste Dupin, a US Attorney who has spent his career investigating Rodrick’s company, Fortunato. The story bounces back and forth between Roderick & Madeline’s life as children and the present day. Bruce Greenwood and Mary McDonnell play the older versions of Rodrick and Madeline respectively. Greenwood is no stranger to Flanagan’s work, having starred in GERALD’S GAME, with supporting roles in DOCTOR SLEEP and HILL HOUSE. This is McDonnell’s first outing with team Flanagan, but she fits in perfectly with his many regulars including wife Kate Siegal, Rahul Kohli, and Henry Thomas, who play Rodrick’s children. Zach Gilford plays a younger Rodrick who works for Michael Trucco’s character, and Carla Cugino plays a mysterious person from the twins’ past. Carl Lumbly as Dupin and Mark Hamill as Pym round out the main cast. For those of us who watched Flanagan’s 2022 Netflix series THE MIDNIGHT CLUB, Ruth Codd returns as Rodrick’s much younger second wife and Sauriyan Sapkota portrays the youngest Usher child.
As A MIDNIGHT DREARY lays the groundwork, E2, THE MASK OF THE RED DEATH wastes no time in getting down to what this series is all about: Watching the destruction of the Usher family play out in often violent, and always strange ways. If you’ve read or even heard of Poe’s short story of the same name, you may know where this story is going. RED DEATH follows Perry (Sapkota), short for Prospero, who sets out to throw the most exclusive of club nights in hopes of impressing his father enough to fund his career as a club promoter for the rich and famous. RED DEATH is one of the creepiest of the episodes, but after Sapkota portrayed a child a year ago in THE MIDNIGHT CLUB, I still found him too childlike to be the sexy lothario he wanted to be. Perhaps that was Flanagan’s point, that Prospero was always too immature and too selfish to ever have a chance of succeeding.
Each episode focuses on one Usher child and one story from Poe’s works while sprinkling in Poe references from across his writing career. Each story also tells how Rodrick and Madeline came to be who they are in the present day, often jumping back to the 1970s to show us their younger versions (portrayed by Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald) and how they came to live in such a modern-day tragedy.
E3, MURDER IN THE RUE MORGUE, quickly disposes of a Flanagan favorite. Narratively I understand why this episode came early in the series, but I’d hoped that this performer and their character would stick around a bit longer. E4, THE BLACK CAT, is an episode I regard as weaker than several others plot-wise, but it was a thrill to me as a lifelong black cat owner. It also features Flanagan regular Kohli, as Usher’s son Leo and I’m a big fan of his work. It’s an unhinged mash-up of a cat video and a spooky Poe yarn, that perfectly encapsulates the eccentricities of an addict tech-bro driven to madness.
THE TELL-TALE HEART is one of Poe’s most famous works and also the title of E5. As we’ve seen previously in the series, Rodrick’s daughter Victorine (T’Nia Miller), a gifted surgeon, is using shady and dangerous tactics to try to get the heart monitor she developed through her father’s company into human trials. It is, perhaps, the most ‘over the head’ of all the Poe-inspired tales here, especially if you’re familiar with the original. I am a huge fan of this Poe story, but unfortunately, the adaptation here is just too on the nose for me. Where E5 has its best work is during the flashbacks where Rodrick and Madeline start inching toward the place we see them in the present day.
E6, GOLDBUG had high highs and low lows. The tale of Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), the eldest Usher daughter, is both strife with tired tropes and features some incredibly gorgeous filmed sequences. Not a single Usher child is likable. They’re all self-indulgent brats who have never wanted for anything, except their father’s love and attention. “Tammy” and her elder brother Frederick are the worst, so saving their stories for last does give us the audience the payoff we’ve waited for. She isn’t young and immature like Perry. Nor is she a drug addict like Leo. She’s also not an illegitimate child like all of her siblings are, save for Frederick either. Out of all the Usher children, she feels most like her character could have been plucked from SUCCESSION. She’s Shiv Roy but with an even more sinister side. Her relationship with her husband throughout the series induced multiple eye-rolls from me. But Tammy’s story is the best showcase of Verna thus far. Verna (Cugino) is a character I haven’t mentioned yet. She’s the enigma that this entire series is set around. She comes in and out of all of our characters’ lives. For the Usher children featured early in the series, we mostly only get quick scenes with her before we move on, but she’s been in Tammy’s story since the beginning. Verna is needling into Tammy’s psyche, bit by bit. It is only we, the viewers, who know the inevitable outcome. When we get to that moment, it’s glorious – a triumph of photography and special effects that seriously delivers on the “fall” in the title.
Last, but certainly not least in the tales of the Usher children is Frederick, the eldest son and heir to his father’s fortune and company. Since E1, we’ve watched Frederick go from a misunderstood spoiled child to an absolute monster. He’s been stumbling toward the inescapable since E1. He and his sister Tammy are the only true legitimate children of Rodrick, born to his first wife Annabel (Katie Parker), whose modern absence is conspicuous and yet untold. THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM is a near-perfect penultimate episode. We, the viewers, know exactly what is going to happen this far in, but it doesn’t make it any less fulfilling when we watch it play out. Frederick is also the only Usher child with a spouse and child. And it is exactly this relationship with his wife and daughter that brings forth who Frederick really is – his father’s son. So hellbent on being #1 that he’ll sacrifice everyone and anything that stands in his way.
As the series wraps up with THE RAVEN, named after Poe’s most famous work, I would be remiss not to mention some things observed along the way. HOUSE OF USHER is Flanagan’s most LBGTQ-friendly series yet. He’s had plenty of characters on the spectrum in previous works, but almost every character in USHER is gay or bisexual, while some of these characters and others are also polyamorous. The inclusion is wonderful, yet having so many LBGTQ characters invites a series like this to the “bury your gays” trope. USHER is filled with death and destruction, and absolutely no one is safe. As I mentioned early on, the entire series is also an intense takedown of billionaire culture and dangerous corporations. USHER never hides who it’s going after, naming real-world people many of us despise. Some of these moments took me out of the gothic tale and hit me with a reality that’s nice to escape from sometimes. While I appreciate Flanagan’s critique, I didn’t think it always needed to literally name some of the real world’s most evil people. The analogies along the way were strong enough for me.
THE RAVEN borrows thematically from its source material as Rodrick and Madeline’s past comes to collect. For me as a viewer, I’d long suspected what’s told in this episode, but I also found deep satisfaction upon having my suspicions come true. When evil people get their comeuppance, there is almost always collateral damage, and perhaps that is the true horror here. Through endless money, greed, and corporate malfeasance, real lives are affected and innocent people are diminished to a statistic. Flanagan’s take on the works of Edgar Allan Poe succeeds at bringing 19th-century macabre to a new audience with modern-day relevance. If only Poe could have known when he passed that we’d still be celebrating his works almost 200 years later.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER is streaming on Netflix.
