Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher review: Carla Gugino's horror drama is a delight for Edgar Allan Poe fans

Mike Flanagan is on a hot streak, isn’t he? Over the course of the last six years, he has now delivered no less than five high-quality horror series — beginning with 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House, a Shirley Jackson adaptation. His latest, The Fall of the House of the Usher, is loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous short story, but it really is a composite adaptation of multiple well-known Poe short stories, a career showcase if you will. And it might just be Flanagan’s crowning achievement, a collection of eight interlinked horror stories, each extracting the narrative core of their respective Poe originals and building a believable, 21^st century world around ‘em.

Twins Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood, with Graham Verchere playing the character as a young man) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell, with Willa Fitzgerald) are the super-powerful billionaire spearheads of the Usher conglomerate, which has its fingers in a lot of pies but primarily sells addictive opioids, for which it has landed up in legal trouble with the US government. This part, ie the ‘Fortunato Pharma Corporation’ is clearly modelled on the real-life Sackler family, which manufactured Oxycontin, an addictive opioid at the centre of America’s prescription drugs crisis. Right at the beginning of the show, we are told that Roderick’s six adult children (including illegitimate ones, constantly referred to as “the bastards”) have all died tragic deaths over the last couple of weeks, and a mysterious woman named Verna (Carla Gugino) is spotted by Roderick at the memorial service organised for his children.

‘Verna’, of course, is an anagram for ‘Raven’, which is to say the bird from Edgar Allan Poe’s supremely creepy poem The Raven, in which the bird is seen as a harbinger of death. The show then kicks into flashback gear, as we learn how Roderick came to make a deal with the devil, so to speak. Little by little, we are shown how that initial compromise Roderick made sealed his future children’s fate—that, and of course, the innate greed and thoughtlessness that comes with being an Usher. The Fall of the House of Usher, then, becomes an indictment of ‘super-greed’, a curiously lionized and extremely American attitude towards life and business.

Among other things, this show marks the latest example of the continuing relevance of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. Creators across the spectrum are adapting his works, or borrowing certain recognizable elements, or featuring fictionalized versions of the man himself. The recall value of Poe’s stories and the universal nature of his plot resolutions are big factors in this. But it’s also the aura of mystery and intrigue that Poe built up around himself. Storytellers love good urban legends and perhaps more than any other writer, Poe in death has become a kind of metonym for all things dark and mysterious.

Poe in the golden era of TV

Between 2013 and 2018, Fox aired three seasons of the crime thriller series The Following, starring Hollywood A-lister Kevin Bacon as an FBI agent hot on the trail of a charismatic serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy). In the show, Carroll is a professor of literature and he leads a cult of killers inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The Following wasn’t really the most consistent of shows and it kind of fell off the rails by its concluding season. But at its best it showed a distilled understanding of Poe’s key themes and a certain flair for visualizing the goriest and most blood-curdling scenes of violence and bloodshed from the author’s oeuvre. It didn’t hurt that Purefoy in particular turned in a bravura performance and it really brought us into the mind of someone for whom a literary obsession becomes so much more.

Last year, the Christian Bale-Harry Melling Netflix movie The Pale Blue Eye delivered an even more interesting angle on the Poe canon. Based on a murder mystery novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, the film followed veteran cop Augustus Landor (Bale) as he investigates a series of murders at the US Military Academy—alongside a young military cadet, Edgar Allan Poe (Melling). As the investigation proceeds, motifs and images from Poe’s future works (a raven, a black cat, a morgue with mysterious, mutilated corpses) keep popping up in their lives. This is a bit of a coming-of-age tale for the young Poe and Melling (who also played Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter films) does an ace job of playing a young man afraid to poke the demons inside him.

Personally, though, the Poe tribute I have enjoyed most over the last few years of TV and streaming was the live-action Addams Family spinoff Wednesday, created by Tim Burton, who also directed a few episodes of the Netflix series. Burton’s cherished Gothic aesthetic is the perfect vehicle for Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega), a precocious teenager at Nevermore, a special school for ‘outcasts’—werewolves, sirens, seers and so on, teenagers with supernatural powers. Burton imbues the narrative with themes from the Edgar Allan Poe catalogue—starting with the name ‘Nevermore’ itself which refers to a line from ‘The Raven’ (“She shall press, ah, nevermore!”). We are told that Poe himself was once a Nevermore student and besides, while he was there he set up a secret society. The annual sports competition at the school is called the Poe cup, and the competing teams style themselves after a Poe story apiece—so you have ‘The Goldbugs’, ‘The Black Cats’ and so on.

More broadly, Wednesday herself is the embodiment of ‘The Raven’, a powerful seer, someone who can see dark visions from the future. There’s much to enjoy about this show, but for me one of the biggest draws was how easily and how elegantly it incorporated Edgar Allan Poe’s works into what is essentially a high school dramedy.

The Usher siblings, the Poe canon

In The Fall of the House of Usher, every one of the six Usher siblings receive an episode apiece dedicated to their demise. The really neat thing about this is that in each case, Flanagan uses a classic Poe short story and marries it to the central plot. Also, Flanagan’s usual in-house repertory of actors, led by the remarkable Kate Siegel (who he’s also married to), is on top form. Siegel’s character Camille is one of the Usher bastards, and her razor-sharp tongue serves her well in her day job—as the head of public relations at Fortunato Pharma, the Ushers’ headlining business. She basically cleans up the family’s messes and over the years, has become bloody good at it.

Rahul Kohli, another Flanagan regular, plays Napoleon “Leo” Usher, another bastard, who distances himself from the family business and owns a video game firm. His death is depicted in the episode called ‘The Black Cat’, perhaps my favourite in the show. For those unfamiliar with the Poe story, this narrative sees the protagonist being haunted by the spectre of a black cat, a pet who his wife has a soft spot for. It’s a portrayal of a guilty conscience, and Kohli does an excellent job of playing Leo — who is not really an evil pantomime figure like the rest of his family, but has several issues nevertheless, including a serious drug problem.

The widespread appeal and applicability of Poe stories is utilised very well by Flanagan, to attain a larger narrative goal. You see, the Usher siblings represent the worst of 21^st century capitalism and their characters portray this in different ways. Leo represents greed, guilt and avarice. Camille represents the rank dishonesty of corporate-owned media, while the heir to the throne, Frederick represents cowardice.

Also, it’s worth noting what the billionaire lifestyle has done to these kids. None of them are in healthy relationships. In fact, their whole lives are all about strict, unyielding hierarchies—in the boardroom as well as the bedroom. All of them treat their romantic partners poorly. Some of them cheat on their partners, others chip away their self-esteem steadily. Camille is equally ruthless while dealing with her assistants—both of whom are also expected to service her sexually after work hours, something which she does not see as wrong or even slightly atypical at all. This is the entitlement on display, this is how deeply entrenched into the ‘1% lifestyle’ Camille is.

For fans of horror and adjacent genres, The Fall of the House of Usher is a delight from beginning to end, proving once again Flanagan’s reputation as a bankable showrunner. And if you, like me, grew up reading Edgar Allan Poe stories, you simply cannot afford to miss this.