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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. After all, hubris, like any of the fine products from the Roderick-run Fortunato, is a hell of a drug.
[DISCUSSION] The Fall of the House of Usher - worth your time
The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar. Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace", then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it. Further, Roderick believes that his fate is connected to the family mansion. What Flanagan and his team of writers did wasn’t just develop individual odes to “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and more – they married them together to create what is one of the most impeccable shows in recent memory. What makes this House of Usher decidedly not an anthology is the way that the writers intricately weave the main players’ stories throughout each episode.
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On the page, in stories including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the character is the wily progenitor of every fictional detective to follow, but on the screen he’s a passive receiver of information. The character never evinces the necessary internal conflict of a man who yearned for legal recourse against the Ushers — not the Rube Goldberg meat-grinding machine version of justice being meted out in a fashion closer to the Final Destination movies than Poe’s more elegant prose. Well, that’s surely a reference to Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” if there ever was one. And, we feel there will be many more Poe Easter eggs for us to uncover.
Spoilers.
On the other hand, there are plenty of strange things about the Usher family. For one, “the entire family lay in the direct line of descent,” meaning that only one son from each generation survived and reproduced. Poe implies incestuous relations sustained the genetic line and that Roderick and Madeline are the products of extensive intermarriage within the Usher family. The Fall of the House of Usher, supernatural horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839 and issued in Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Maddy and Roddy are supposed to be these genius business people, but they can't see his drop about a mole (no I'm sorry, an informant)? Even if they were driven to work against each other, they were driven against the world first.
We do get some fabulous creative moments, like Flanagan’s gleeful edit of an opening montage that introduces us to all members of the Usher family through witty cross-cuts and overlapping dialogue. If what you came for were eight cycles of impending doom counting down to their garish conclusions, you’re in luck. Trucco’s character is Rufus Griswold, a name shared with the 19th century scribe whose reflections on Poe after the latter’s death helped shape our possibly incorrect perception of the author as an opioid-addicted madman, which adds a layer of irony to Flanagan’s Sackler-esque prism.
Cast and characters
The second belongs to Henry Thomas as Freddie, the maligned eldest child who channels his familial resentment and insecurity into malevolent domestic abuse as his siblings start dying, culminating in a classic, shall we say, stroke of irony. Twin siblings Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) Usher are sitting atop the Fortunato pharmaceutical company. For decades, they’ve made billions off an opioid called Ligodone, a painkiller marketed as non-addictive, even though its actual addictive properties have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Entitled “Meet the Ushers,” this scene around the family’s massive banquet table introduces the entire cast. The family’s lawyer, Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), whom they call “The Pym Reaper,” hands out contracts for everyone to sign. If any of the signees later reveal themselves to be snitches, they’ll get more than stitches.
The bedroom door is then blown open to reveal Madeline, bloodied from her arduous escape from the tomb. In a final fit of rage, she attacks her brother, scaring him to death as she herself expires. The narrator then runs from the house, and, as he does, he notices a flash of moonlight behind him. He turns back in time to see the Moon shining through the suddenly widened crack in the house. As he watches, the House of Usher splits in two and the fragments sink away into the lake.
It is revealed that Roderick's sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances. Roderick and Madeline are the only remaining members of the Usher family. In bringing Poe’s fables to the contemporary world, Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher centers on some of today’s greatest evils. Fortunato – the Usher’s pharmaceutical company and a name plucked from Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” – is the core driver behind all of Roderick and Madeline Usher’s actions. Meanwhile, the latter’s obsession with immortality is constantly playing on the fringes, only brought to the forefront to appropriately mock AI and any place it has in storytelling or the human experience as a whole. Whatever level you’re at, it’s a formula for a series of moment-to-moment effectiveness, with some cleverness and much playful horror.
In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he deliberately subverts convention by rejecting the typical practices of preaching or moralizing and instead focusing on affect and unity of atmosphere. The partners didn't do as much as they should have to take care of their people, considering their circumstances. But it broke my engagement when I couldn't help but think these people should've shown more concern and love.
"It's quiet, subtle, and extremely effective." Flanagan hid dozens of ghosts in the background of scenes in "The Haunting of Hill House," so fans of his work have been taught to keep one eye on the shadows. Whether the reader is trapped by the house or by its inhabitants is unclear. Poe uses the term house to describe both the physical structure and the family. On the one hand, the house itself appears to be actually sentient, just as Roderick claims. Its windows are described as “eye-like,” and its interior is compared to a living body.
In 1956, NBC Matinee Theater on US television broadcast The Fall of the House of Usher starring Marshall Thompson and Tom Tryon for episode 197. In 1950, a British film version of The Fall of the House of Usher was produced starring Gwen Watford, Kay Tendeter and Irving Steen. As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, he and Roderick hear cracking and ripping sounds from somewhere in the house. When the dragon's death cries are described, a real shriek is heard, again within the house.
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