Upon learning Mike Flanagan, director of such well-regarded Netflix series as The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, was adapting the works of Edgar Allan Poe, I was, of course, rapturous. We here at The Raven Post, fairly or otherwise, consider ourselves spiritual descendants of Poe and relative experts in his work, and as such, we readily consume any and all media based upon his ageless fiction. Perhaps because we are so devoted to Poe’s oeuvre, we are admittedly hard to please; the 2022 film The Pale Blue Eye, for example, while serviceable, did little to earn our special favor. Flanagan, however, has managed, even at the protracted length of eight hours, to creep his way into our good graces.
The Fall of the House of Usher, released on October 12, 2023 (but one day shy of what, I would argue, would have made a more ominous and, thus, thematically appropriate date, Friday the 13th), performs its due diligence not simply as an adaptation of its title work, but as a sufficiently comprehensive, thematically cohesive overview of Poe’s extended catalog. What did strike me, your Editor-in-Chief, as particularly noteworthy (and which is something I might have anticipated given Flanagan’s past offerings), is that the director is unconcerned with period pieces. His adaptive works, regardless of their progenitors’ original eras, will invariably take place in the nebulous present, if not specifically the year in which each adaptation is released (save for The Haunting of Bly Manor, the majority of which takes place during 1980s antiquity). As such, Flanagan’s Usher is set in 2023, albeit interrupted by periodic flashbacks to the childhood and young adulthood of its central figures, Roderick and Madeline Usher.
My primary revelation upon completing the series was that Flanagan’s Usher, perhaps more so than any Poe adaptation preceding it, transforms Poe’s works, Grimm-like, from mere historic literature into classic fables, drawing upon the public’s wealth of first, second, or thirdhand knowledge of Poe’s bibliography to create a world and ethos determined by untamable madness, unspeakable horror, and unyielding fate. Perhaps most impressively, if not out of necessity, the series accomplishes this without ever naming or acknowledging Poe, his writings, or the Gothic fiction genre throughout its runtime. Such is the language of adaptation, but whereas Hill House largely borrowed singular names and incidents from Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, Usher may draw from countless stories and poems, and it collates them into a freestanding narrative that is, through and through, of Poe.
Of course, nothing is free of flaws (at least as far as The Raven Post is concerned), and Flanagan’s Usher is no exception. If pressed to single out one element with which I took issue, I would point to the series’ monologue-heavy, commerce-centric writing, the former of which is a particular hallmark of the director’s work. While this can certainly be excused—the Ushers could not have achieved their level of exorbitant wealth and power without engaging in unethical business practices, which the series would be remiss to leave unexplained; and, besides, who is more eager to speak than the ultra wealthy?—by the series’ midpoint, the episodes seemed more concerned with explaining pharmaceutical fraud and corporate bureaucracy than creating a Gothic, Poe-inspired atmosphere. That said, in sum, foreboding atmosphere there was aplenty, and Flanagan’s creative choices in amalgamating Poe’s poignant twists of fate and implausible death traps into a singular, hours-long work were nothing short of captivating.
Perhaps, dear reader, the most fruitful and comprehensive means of summarizing this sensation is to address each episode individually, and so I aim to do.
EPISODE 1
“A Midnight Dreary”
The first episode’s title not only informs the audience of the series’ broad scope—rest assured, far more than just “The Fall of the House of Usher” will be addressed here—but it likewise forms a bookend of sorts with the final episode’s title: simply, “The Raven.” This hint at the series’ aims (let alone the series’ title itself) alerts Poe-minded viewers to the impending climax: Someone has—or will—die (famously, “The Raven” is told from the perspective of someone bemoaning the loss of a loved one, the enigmatic Lenore), and the Ushers—siblings Roderick and Madeline, in particular—will be one another’s undoing.
The episode, which begins in media res, presents Roderick Usher at his lowest point; the Usher house’s “fall” has already occurred—nay, is presently occurring. Arguably, as this episode demonstrates, this “fall” may have begun with Roderick and Madeline’s premature (and unsuccessful) burial of their mother, Eliza, herself named after Poe’s own mother and her death a foreshadowing of the family’s impending fate. The framing device, recurring throughout all eight episodes, replaces the original story’s nameless narrator with Poe’s infamous investigator, C. Auguste Dupin, whom Roderick Usher has summoned to his and Madeline’s derelict childhood home. This recasting serves to ground the story in the world of criminal justice and modern-day corporate politics (rather than allowing it to wallow in madness and terror as Poe’s stories so often do) while also beginning to weave the folkloric web of Poe’s wide—and heretofore unconnected—cast of characters.
EPISODE 2
“The Masque of the Red Death”
As the series’ lens widens, we learn that Roderick Usher’s children, most of whom were born of different mothers, are each named after (or are otherwise inspired by) one of Poe’s central characters. The persona on which this episode centers is twenty-six-year-old Prospero, nicknamed “Perry,” who wants his father, Roderick, and aunt, Madeline, to fund his first major entrepreneurial endeavor: an ultra-exclusive, entirely anonymous, and particularly debaucherous nightclub. Those familiar with Poe’s original story will, of course, anticipate this tale’s end—even before Perry’s mutilated spirit appears to Roderick as the patriarch explains his youngest son’s fate to a bemused Dupin.
This particular rendition of the tale, rather than merely replicating the flippant, reckless ignorance and excess of Poe’s Prospero, includes those elements while reinforcing the Usher family’s hereditary obsession with entrepreneurship, ambition, and uncompromising success: Perry, while undeniably reckless and hedonistic, bolsters these traits (or, perhaps, excuses them) by appealing to his family’s ruthless, near-unattainable expectations. When Perry and all but one of the guests of his warehouse bacchanal perish following a shower of chemical waste that spews from the building’s sprinklers—a result of his family’s ecological negligence and Perry’s seemingly inherited folly, as he failed to check the water tanks’ contents before connecting them to the sprinkler line—the audience is assured not just of the family’s destructive (and now fatal) habits, but of the ageless applicability of Poe’s commentary. Perry’s fatal flaw, while similar to that of his inspiration, mythologizes Poe’s tale by expanding its scope of inference: The ultra wealthy are reckless, vain, and wasteful, not just in their ignorance of that which affects common people—say, for example, a plague—but in their active destruction of the earth and its resources.
EPISODE 3
“Murder in the Rue Morgue”
Poe’s original tale from which this episode draws inspiration, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is an early and seminal work of detective fiction and includes the first appearance of the author’s fictional investigator, Dupin. The story itself is one of Poe’s lengthiest and, for several pages, pontificates about the nature of deductive reasoning, a subject with which Flanagan’s adaptation is entirely unconcerned. In fact, the only noteworthy connections between the two are the victim’s name, Camille L’Espanaye—another of Roderick Usher’s power-hungry children—and the identity of the culprit, a chimpanzee (though Poe’s tale reveals the killer to be an orangutan).
The only notable deductions made relating to Flanagan’s “Rue Morgue” aren’t posited until the following episode, in which Roderick and Madeline Usher, aided by their lawyer, Arthur Pym (a reference to the title character of Poe’s only published novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket), attempt to identify Verna, Flanagan’s enigmatic embodiment of fate (or, perhaps, death) who took the place of a security guard at the lab where Camille was killed. Even so, this investigation largely occurs off-screen and is only a small incident within a larger effort to determine Verna’s identity. The episode as a whole is entirely Flanagan’s creation and merely applies a distilled knowledge of the original story’s twist to create tension and a sense of fatalistic inevitability within the broader narrative.
In a more thematic sense, the impact of Camille’s death at the chimpanzee’s hands is twofold: It is not only comeuppance for her cold, cutthroat behavior throughout the series thus far; it is also nature’s—and, more specifically, a primate’s—reaction against the recurring threat of the Usher family, a clan that is “unnatural” in their destruction, their exorbitant wealth, and their apathy toward the interests of both animals and humans.
EPISODE 4
“The Black Cat”
The fourth episode of Flanagan’s Usher is, like its brethren, a cautionary tale of sorts warning against excess. Rather than the original narrator‘s alcoholism, though, and his resulting violence, Roderick Usher’s fourth child, Napoleon (a reference to one of Poe’s comedy stories, “The Spectacles”), nicknamed “Leo,” is addicted to any number of substances. While he fortunately doesn’t physically abuse his partner as Poe’s narrator admits to doing, he does viciously kill that partner’s black cat, Pluto, which he shortly replaces with a seemingly vindictive doppelgänger.
Like “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” this tale emphasizes the inherent cruelty of the Ushers’ excess—and nature’s opposition to it. While Poe’s narrator feels remorse for his cruelty toward the black cat, his accidental murder of his wife is cemented as his primary crime. Flanagan’s Leo, in contrast, accidentally throws himself from a balcony while trying to attack the cat he purchased as a replacement. Part of this difference, I can only presume, can be attributed to modern society’s increased awareness and disavowal of domestic abuse and animal cruelty; by eliminating the murder of the narrator’s partner, however, Flanagan maintains the story’s focus on the Ushers’ inherently destructive nature—rather than destroying someone he ostensibly loves, Leo pursues his own flaws to his own doom. Much of Poe’s work centers on the horrific if mundane existence of villainous figures, and as if crafting a type of fairy tale, Flanagan distributes to these villains their comeuppance, cautioning the viewer against emulating their actions or motives.
EPISODE 5
“The Tell-Tale Heart”
Perhaps the most jarring and even show-stopping episode of Flanagan’s Usher, “The Tell-Tale Heart” lends a gruesome, science-fiction twist to one of Poe’s best-known stories. Victorine, or “Vic” (named after the subject of a case mentioned in another Poe tale, “The Premature Burial“), is perhaps the most sympathetic of Roderick Usher’s children, though Camille, prior to her death, is revealed to resent Vic for hiding her equally cruel opportunism more adeptly. This grayness of character comes to a head in the series’ fifth episode, in which Vic not only fatally wounds her girlfriend, Ali, in a blind rage, but then waits for her life to drain completely before prying open her chest cavity and placing her own controversial pacemaker device over Ali’s heart, prolonging its pumping in the center of her dead, mangled frame.
Much like Leo in the previous episode, Vic’s callousness and obsession become her own undoing, as she stabs herself upon realizing Ali’s heart is too dead to prove her device’s capabilities. Her hallucinatory madness just prior to this act incorporates the delusion of Poe’s original narrator, though rather than his targeting of the innocent old man to whom he was seemingly a companion or caretaker, Vic’s crime—at least, one of many—is at the expense of her life partner, who had threatened to abandon their joint study into the device’s viability. The spontaneity of the act starkly contrasts the pre-meditated nature of the original narrator’s crime; perhaps Vic was kinder or more empathetic than her siblings, if only on the surface, but her self-inflicted fate attests to the fact that the Ushers’ existence and success are rife with contingencies. Every person—family or otherwise—is, by necessity, collateral, a reality reinforced by what viewers eventually learn is the progenitor of the clan’s downfall: a deal Roderick and Madeline made with Verna on New Year’s Eve of 1980, guaranteeing them success while also assuring that their family line will die with them.
This attitude toward self-fulfilling prophecies, self-contained destruction, and the inevitability of an indifferent, self-inflicted fate ring true to Poe’s own ethos; the moment Poe’s narrator decides he must kill his elderly companion, he has already set in stone the ensuing sequence of madness and misery.
EPISODE 6
“Goldbug”
The sixth episode in Flanagan’s series is perhaps the most removed from its source material. This is certainly not to its detriment, however, as it provides some of the series’ most intense, haunting, and heart-stopping moments; rather, it extrapolates Poe’s work through theme and reference, if not literal incident.
Tamerlane Usher, Roderick’s second child (named for Poe’s poem about a power-hungry conqueror), is one of the most ruthless and, thus, is the one upon whom the family’s legacy rests after the deaths of her four younger siblings. The lifestyle brand she plans to launch alongside her husband, Bill—named “Goldbug”—markets itself as a holistic solution for all of life’s miseries—and the solution for the Ushers’ floundering reputation. Similarly, William Legrand, one of the central figures of Poe’s tale, is convinced a mysterious bug he found on the South Carolina coast, the carapace of which bears resemblance to a human skull, will bring him great fortune. In the end, it does; “The Gold-Bug” is one of Poe’s less-common adventure tales, and while modern readers may begin its rather lengthy text expecting some cruel twist of fate, instead they will find cryptograms, logic puzzles, and ultimately a buried treasure that both rewards and validates Legrand’s obsession.
In contrast, Flanagan’s “Goldbug” weaves a tale of pride, vanity, and malice that borrows Poe’s iconography (and the inspiration for Tamerlane’s namesake) to reinforce the futility of the Ushers’ already-crumbling empire. For them, fate is merely an unrealized, foregone conclusion; at any moment, anyone within their ranks could choose to become more selfless or charitable, but they repeatedly refuse to do so. Tamerlane, in particular—nicknamed “Tammy”—is convinced not only that Goldbug will return her family name to its former glory but also that she herself is solely responsible for that anticipated success. To achieve it, she sacrifices sleep and sends her husband away, only to be targeted by Verna appearing as a lookalike of the Usher heiress herself. Her own worst fears—that she will lose her all-important control over her own sense of self and ruin her one chance at independent success—are realized, and she, like the countless mirrors she breaks in a frenzy to escape her own doppelgänger, shatters entirely.
EPISODE 7
“The Pit and the Pendulum”
Frederick, Roderick Usher’s eldest child, is also the least remarkable throughout much of the series. What is remarkable, however, are the names of his wife and daughter: Morella and Lenore, respectively. Those familiar with Poe’s bibliography will likely manage to anticipate the latter’s fate, if only abstractly.
In Morella’s eponymous tale, she dies in childbirth, and her grieving husband fails to give their daughter a name. As the child ages, she begins to increasingly resemble her departed mother, and at her baptism, when asked the child’s name, her father replies, “Morella.” At this, the ten-year-old child cries out, “I’m here!” and promptly dies. Strangely, Flanagan’s character more closely reflects that of Berenice, the ill-fated protagonist of another eponymous Poe tale. In this story, the narrator, Egaeus, fueled by obsession and madness, removes all of his cousin, Berenice’s teeth. Lastly, Lenore is, of course, the lost love for whom the narrator of “The Raven” weeps. As neither of Flanagan’s characters are particularly pivotal to the overarching story (at least upon first glance), viewers might at first wonder if their names are nothing more than empty references, placed for the benefit of those astute enough to recognize Poe’s extended cast of characters. By the series’ final few episodes, however, their respective fates are thrown into sharp, horrifying relief, and Frederick’s ultimate fate, as foreshadowed by the episode’s title, becomes increasingly—if implausibly—apparent.
In Poe’s original story, the unnamed narrator is trapped in a torture chamber during the Spanish Inquisition and is eventually strapped to a table above which a large metal pendulum swings, its blade slowly descending ever nearer to the prisoner’s chest. Such an outlandish and sadistic scenario, while one of Poe’s most famous, would surely feel out of place if recreated literally in Flanagan’s grounded, present-day world of cell phones, subpoenas, and big pharma litigation; still, the director manages to weave together the show’s already-established themes of drug abuse, fate, and human folly in a hauntingly horrific scenario that once again mythologizes Poe’s tales in order to illuminate modern truths.
In the show’s penultimate episode, Frederick, after removing his recovering wife’s teeth in a drug-addled rage as punishment for her attendance of Perry’s would-be orgy—of which she was the sole survivor—visits the warehouse where the party took place in order to find Morella’s wedding ring before the condemned building is obliterated. Having accidentally ingested some of the paralytic he had been administering to his bedridden wife, he collapses in the warehouse just before the destruction begins. At length, he lies prostrate beneath a large beam, to the end of which is attached a sharp, blade-like object which swings ever closer toward his helpless form. Unlike Poe’s protagonist, who manages to escape moments before the pendulum makes contact, Frederick is not so fortunate and must endure multiple swipes of the blade before the building mercifully crumbles upon him.
This adaptation, somehow one of Flanagan’s most literal renditions of Poe’s work, enforces the series’ brutal, unflinching sense of justice through Verna’s portrayal of a conniving (if not reasonable) fate. With Frederick’s death, the house of Usher has but three bricks left to crumble.
EPISODE 8
“The Raven”
And so the final episode of Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher may commence. Roderick Usher’s six children have died, a mutilated Morella has been rescued, and the life of her rescuer, the young Lenore, has been mercifully snatched away by an apologetic but duty-bound fate. This same fate, the mysterious Verna, has met with attorney Arthur Pym, who (after attempting to kill her at the Ushers’ behest) relays to her the strange, nigh-unbelievable events of a journey he took years before—an embellished retelling of Poe’s only published novel. Roderick has revealed to Dupin the truth of what occurred on New Year’s Eve of 1980: He and Madeline, in order to reclaim what was rightfully theirs as the illegitimate children of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals’ former leader, lured the company’s corrupt and lecherous CEO into the company’s basement, chained him behind a half-constructed wall, and bricked him up inside.
Those curious as to the motivations of Poe’s unfeeling narrator, Montresor, who hails from the author’s seminal work, “The Cask of Amontillado,” now finally have an answer, if only unofficially—and in disregard of Poe’s original point: that perhaps Montresor’s apathy in refusing to explain his heinous actions makes him all the more vile. (Interestingly, if unrelated to the matter at hand, “Amontillado” was, at least in part, a vehicle through which the author could respond to slander from a literary rival.) This reimagining of Poe’s tale not only adapts or changes but expands upon the narrative, adjusting its players and molding the setting into a new fable entirely. Many of Poe’s stories, including others discussed here, provide little (if any) context for their unbelievable contents; Montresor never describes the ironically named Fortunato’s offenses against him, nor does the unnamed narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” enumerate the crimes for which he is sent to the titular pit. Not even the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” talkative as he may be, fully explains his exact relationship to the old man whose milky eye so vexes him. Flanagan, in uniting these tales and fortifying the invisible threads between them, not only provides unofficial answers for infamous (though superficial) gaps in Poe’s stories; he creates a mythos that just may convince the viewer that Poe’s works are but puzzle pieces, and Flanagan has, perhaps, fulfilled their heretofore unseen purpose.
Near the end of the final episode, Roderick Usher, devastated at the loss of his granddaughter, Lenore, recites what is likely the series’ lengthiest direct quote from Poe himself. These passages of “The Raven,” shot with dizzying cinematography and accentuated by dark shadows, bewildering flashes of lightning, and unfocused glimpses of Lenore’s departed spirit, return the series to its point of inception: A timeless elegy of nightmarish grief and longing overshadowed by a nameless raven’s haunting call. (On a personal note, while I must say I’m pleased with Flanagan’s efforts, I would have been more than happy to provide the ill-fated phrase myself had he merely inquired.)
All that is left, then, is the much-foreshadowed culmination promised by the series’ title. The Usher house and lineage, such as they were, have fallen with the swiftness of a fortnight, but as has become pattern for Flanagan’s Poe-inspired web of nightmarish fables, viewers well-acquainted with the author’s oeuvre know that the final, climactic blow has yet to fall.
Throughout the series, Dupin, cautiously invested in Roderick Usher’s story, has taken note of strange sounds emanating from the house’s basement—thumps and bumps of such intensity, the attorney bade Roderick halt his retelling on several occasions to inquire what was causing the commotion. In reply, Roderick merely explains that Madeline is behind the sounds, claiming she’s working on some kind of experiment. Not until the final minutes of the series’ last episode do we learn the bizarre truth of his words.
Just as Roderick at last relays the events of that fateful New Year’s Eve and the siblings’ seemingly supernatural bargain with the mysterious bartender, Verna, and just as the sounds from the basement reach a fever pitch, Roderick reveals the horrific truth he has hidden away below. In order to fulfill the siblings’ agreement with fate, and knowing Madeline would never do so of her own volition, Roderick poisoned his sister, removed her eyes and tongue, and entombed her with all the regality of a queen from antiquity. As was the case for their mother in the first episode, however, he left his work unfinished, and a mutilated Madeline ascends the stairs, blind and groaning but entirely alive. Dupin flees as Madeline attacks Roderick and the structure of their ancient house cracks. The attorney looks on as the house crumbles, fatally trapping the two siblings beneath the rubble.
In his bombastic conclusion, Flanagan manages to expand Poe’s original tale, in which a woman is tortured by means of premature entombment, and instead frames the Ushers’ fate as one of mutually assured destruction cemented by a shared lifetime of treachery, deceit, and poisonous ambition. This addition of agency transforms this literary horror classic into a truly modern cautionary tale, though throughout each twist and turn, Flanagan retains and, in fact, memorializes Poe’s frequently revisited ethos: Tragic irony and gruesome justice will, invariably, be dispensed by a waiting and ever-watchful fate.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
– E. A. Poe
As always,
Your humble Editor-in-Chief
The Raven Post 