WARNING: Spoilers for Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher below.
Mike Flanagan has gifted horror fans chilling adaptations and beautifully moving originals on Netflix for half a decade but his final masterpiece — for this streamer at least — is a deliciously macabre ode to the father of Gothic literature: Edgar Allan Poe.
In The Fall of the House of Usher — a title borrowed in name and theme from one of Poe’s most lauded short stories — Flanagan wields the poet’s Victorian-era symbolism and prose to spin a dark, twisted tale of greed, moral decay, and the absolute corruption of absolute power.
Its cast — a lineup of Flanagan regulars including Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, and Henry Thomas paired with fresh additions like Mark Hamill, Bruce Greenwood, and Mary McDonnell — serves as walking cautionary tales, garbed in Fendi bodysuits and Gucci loafers, and equipped with the kind of self-aggrandizing God complexes to justify the gleeful anticipation of their imminent, very painful, demises. Roderick Usher (Greenwood), the family patriarch and CEO of a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company, narrates his family’s fall from grace, skipping back in time to relive each of his children’s gruesome deaths in order to build up an even more sinister central mystery surrounding his success and that of his sister, Madeline (McDonnell).
The end result: an episode-by-episode amalgamation of Poe’s best-known works viewed through the prism of modernity. Flanagan touches on everything from AI to the opioid epidemic, splattering his morbid parables with Poe Easter Eggs that feel most satisfying when they’re discovered before the bodies begin dropping. To that end, we’ve done a bit of detective work to spot some of the most important references to Poe’s works in Netflix’s latest horror hit that make watching the show so much more interesting.
The Fall of the House of Usher
This short story written by Poe in 1839 is the frame Flanagan used to build his ghastly tale. In it, an unnamed narrator visits an ailing friend named Roderick Usher who recounts the decline of his health and sanity. His twin sister Madeline, also suffers from an affliction, which the siblings blame on the house itself, and his tale ends with their violent deaths and the destruction of the family legacy holding them hostage. Though Flanagan has expanded on Poe’s work — adding family members and narratives beyond the original — the story of two siblings effectively destroying their bloodline and themselves is pretty central to the Netflix series. In having Roderick narrate the downfall of his house to his old frenemy, Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumby) — a nod to a brilliant French detective Poe often featured in his writings — Flanagan starts fans at the finish line, running them back through generational traumas and tragedies before ultimately arriving at where this terrible tale truly began.
The Raven
The Raven is likely Poe’s most famous work of poetry and that ominous feathered harbinger pops up plenty in The Fall of the House of Usher. He’s often gleefully cawing at Roderick’s mounting misfortune with the Usher patriarch even reciting bits of Poe’s poem to him as the creature perches on a ballast and stares blankly in the face of his misery. Lenore — Roderick’s granddaughter and the only child he seems to love — borrows her name from the woman at the center of this poem, whose death the narrator mourns. The name of Gugino’s character — Verna — is an anagram of Raven, which seems to hint that the seemingly supernatural figure might somehow be a stand-in for concepts like death and fate.
The Pit and the Pendulum
One of the more grisly deaths doled out to the Usher kids thanks to their father’s misdeeds belongs to Frederick Usher (Thomas) the bumbling, coked-up first-born son whose erratic behavior only becomes more disturbing as the show goes on. After his wife’s accident, Frederick spirals, taking control of her medical care at home in an attempt to torture the truth from her. His preferred method of abuse is to drug her and pull out her teeth — a callback to Poe’s Berenice in which a man plagued by obsession keeps his wife’s molars in a tin can — but he faces his own harrowing end when a building demolition goes haywire. In Poe’s short story, a prisoner of the afterlife narrowly escapes death by tricking rats into chewing through his bindings before a giant swinging axe can cut him in two. In Flanagan’s version, Frederick isn’t so lucky.
Masque of The Red Death
Another Usher sibling doomed to die a particularly nasty death is young Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), a 20-something playboy interested in positing his father’s fortune into a nightclub empire. In Poe’s short story, Prospero is a Prince who holds a carnival-like masquerade for his wealthy friends as a terrible plague sweeps through the countryside. A red-robed figure in a death masque wanders the party as his guests begin dropping like flies. The same happens in Flanagan’s version, although Prospero throws his bash in an abandoned pharmaceutical lab with hazardous chemicals stored in the water reserves. Instead of turning the sprinklers on to signal the start of a massive orgy, acid rains down on his guests, burning through skin and fat until only charred bodies remain. Sounds like a party Poe would love, tbh.
The Pym Reaper
It must be said: Pym Reaper is a terrific name for a character in a Gothic horror story based on Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. And, while much of the man’s backstory remains a mystery, he’s based in part on the author’s only finished novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In the book, Arthur Pym was an explorer who sailed the world, adventuring to remote territories and surviving terrible tragedies. Mark Hamill’s Pym probably did the same, which is why when Verna comes to him with a deal, he’s the only member of the Usher circle who has the courage to simply walk away.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Poe’s fictitious detective Auguste Dupin investigates the brutal, bloody murders of a woman and her young daughter in this Gothic whodunnit that also serves as inspiration for the show’s third episode. Siegel’s Camille L’Espanaye borrows her name from one of the victims and while the setting for her gruesome end is different — she heads to her family’s lab hoping to prove her sister’s science experiments have failed — the culprit is the same. In Poe’s original, Camille and her mother were killed by an orangutan brought back from Borneo by a sailor hoping to sell him on the black market. In Flanagan’s retelling, the chimps Victorine (T’Nia Miller) has been testing her heart device on are the ones who, well, go apesh*t.
The Black Cat
Ravens weren’t the only supernaturally-touched animal Poe loved to spin a yarn about. In another short story, he wrote about a man who killed his cat, only to buy another before going mad with guilt. The same happens to Kohli’s Napolean in The Fall of the House of Usher — albeit in a luxury high-rise apartment with a balcony that’s just a bit too easy to topple over.
The Tell-Tale Heart
Another renowned Poe masterpiece, The Tell-Tale Heart recounts the ramblings of a madman who, after harboring an obsession with an old man’s eye, kills him and stuffs his body beneath the floorboards. When the police come looking, it’s his own thumping heart that drives him to confess. In Netflix’s version, Victorine — a name pulled from yet another Poe writing — accidentally kills her partner and is plagued by a similar beating sound that eventually costs her her sanity.
Cask of Amontillado
One of the more satisfying deaths in The Fall of the House of Usher belonged to Fortunato CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco). The smarmy, greed-driven exec tried to blackmail a young Roderick and Madeline before meeting his end thanks to a bottle of sherry, some masonry tools, and a dangerous delusion of his own invincibility. Poe’s tale sported those same themes, telling the story of Montresor, a man who swears revenge on a man named Fortunato after repeated insults. During a carnival, he lures his enemy to the catacombs with the promise of better sherry before changing him up and entombing him in his family’s crypt as the bells on his cap jingle. Another fun fact? Rufus Griswold was a literary critic whom Poe had a long-standing feud with so he’d undoubtedly appreciate the changes Flanagan made to this one.
Tamerlane
Tamerlane is the title of another Poe poem, this one about an ambitious man willing to sacrifice love and happiness for power and prosperity. Samantha Sloyan’s character does the same on the show, spurning her himbo husband Bill (Matt Biedel) — a name nod to another real-life Poe enemy, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — to see her Goop-inspired empire Gold Bug to fruition. The name Gold Bug is an Easter Egg tied to a short story about treasure hunting in South Carolina, but Tamerlane’s terrible end on the show pulls inspiration from William Wilson, a story about a man tormented by his doppelganger via the use of mirrors.
Netflix’s ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ is currently streaming.
