The Fall of the House of Usher Review: Very Human Horror

Table Of Content

• ‘Good Times’ Boss Defends Animated Reboot, Telling Viewers: “I Understand If This Is Jolting”
• Mike Leigh to Receive Inaugural Career Honor From Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival
• Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher lacks the passionate weirdness of Poe
• THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER Trailer Delivers a Poe-rrific Chilling Time
• Ripley Review: Andrew Scott Captivates in Gorgeous if Slow Netflix Adaptation
• Character descriptions

As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a hollow metallic reverberation can be heard throughout the house. At first, the narrator ignores the noises, but Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical. Roderick eventually declares that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and that they are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed. There’s not a moment where The Fall of the House of Usher doesn’t shine, whether it’s in the gloss of Louboutins or the pools of blood. From Susan Davis’ costume department to the extensive visual effects team, each crew came together to deliver their absolute A-game. The new entry into the Mike Flanagan pantheon is always firing on all cylinders, and it’s sure to join many a fan’s annual rotation of spooky time traditions.

‘Good Times’ Boss Defends Animated Reboot, Telling Viewers: “I Understand If This Is Jolting”

When the young and trendy Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota) decides to host an exclusive sex-and-drugs party at one of dad’s old factories in an abbey, readers of The Masque of the Red Death will know it’s going to be a gruesome scene. However, Flanagan is smart enough to shift the Poe narratives ever so slightly for a modern audience. His version of The Tell-Tale Heart is a modern gem, and “The Gold-Bug” is reimagined as a new brand for the Usher company.

Mike Leigh to Receive Inaugural Career Honor From Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival

Each captures the chaotic conflict of a tortured violent psyche, and each works because the show takes the time to establish their characters and then lets us see their gradual mental collapse and demise. The first win belongs to T’Nia Miller as Victorine, the heart research scientist whose pursuit of a miracle medical technology drives her into complete psychosis. When it does, the result is a wondrously bloody, pitch-perfect display of the macabre.

Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher lacks the passionate weirdness of Poe

Fall Of The House Of Usher's 7 Deadly Sins Theory Reveals Genius Meaning Behind Family's Fates - imdb

Fall Of The House Of Usher's 7 Deadly Sins Theory Reveals Genius Meaning Behind Family's Fates.

Posted: Sun, 29 Oct 2023 09:16:56 GMT [source]

Many of the celestial-themed jewels were conceived by famed designer Jean Schlumberger, whose tenure with Tiffany & Co. began in 1956 and lasted until his death in 1987. His talent was so prolific, the high-jewelry workshops in the jeweler’s Fifth Avenue Landmark building continue to produce new pieces based on his archived sketches, many featuring signature elements that range from nature motifs to artful settings that mix yellow gold and platinum. In 1979, Italian state channel RAI loosely adapted the short story, together with other Poe's works, in the series I racconti fantastici di Edgar Allan Poe.[33] It was directed by Daniele D'Anza, with Roderick Usher played by Philippe Leroy; music was composed by pop band Pooh. Of course, that tragedy is more for the patriarch than it is for us, and their deaths, while instrumental to the story, aren’t really what it’s about. Though their respective demises come in varying degrees and patterns of awful, almost every member of the House of Usher is despicable in their own way.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER Trailer Delivers a Poe-rrific Chilling Time

(Poe probably wasn’t even an opium addict.) Perhaps that’s because a part of Flanagan would rather be writing his own stories. House of Usher contains many moments of pure, undiluted horror, stylish and masterful. But the show drowns in its uneven grasp of the source material, when it needn’t have relied on source material at all. The key to the ideal Flanagan series likely lies not with more cherry-picked adaptations, but with more stories that are entirely Flanagan’s own.

Samatha Sloyan’s Tamerlane Usher is one of Roderick’s children, who starts a health and wellness company of her own in an attempt to step out of her father’s shadow. Despite being the natural heir to the company, he’s described as the least capable person to take over the business out of all his siblings. Carla Gugino’s Verna is a shape-shifting demon, who made a deal with twins Roderick and Madeline when they were younger. Decades later, she returns at the height of Fortunato’s power to massacre the heirs to the Usher fortune. And this The Fall of the House of Usher trailer shows us exactly why.

Series & Book Cover.

His mental health deteriorates faster as he begins to hear Madeline's attempts to escape the underground vault she was buried in, and he eventually meets his death out of fear in a manner similar to the House of Usher's cracking and sinking. Roderick and Madeline are twins and the two share an incommunicable connection that critics conclude may be either incestuous or metaphysical,[7] as two individuals in an extra-sensory relationship embodying a single entity. To that end, Roderick's deteriorating condition speeds his own torment and eventual death. During one sleepless night, the narrator reads aloud to Usher as eerie sounds are heard throughout the mansion. He witnesses Madeline's reemergence and the subsequent, simultaneous death of the twins. The narrator is the only character to escape the House of Usher, which he views as it cracks and sinks into the mountain lake.

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8 Horror Stories From R/NoSleep To Keep You Up At Night.

Posted: Wed, 31 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

But that anger frequently gets in the way of the thematic richness that gave The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass their mournful charge. For eight hours, instead of rooting for people, you’re rooting for payback, leading to a satisfying, but surface-level experience. The horror auteur uses his familiar acting troupe and the works of Edgar Allan Poe as the backdrop for an eight-episode takedown of an opioid-pushing family that somewhat resembles the Sacklers.

Character descriptions

Most of the flashbacks to a young Usher and Dupin are thin, especially compared to the wicked fun on display in the fates of the Usher children. It feels like padding to get episodes to a full hour when Flanagan and company could have leaned even more into the episodic structure that highlights a single Poe per chapter. However, it's an incredibly easy show to enjoy on an episode-by-episode basis, largely because Flanagan’s direction is sharp throughout, including excellent use of music and tight editing—some scenes are too underlit, but that’s just the Netflix brand nowadays, and I’m done fighting it. English majors will likely know where some of the stories are going just by seeing the episode names.

Loosely based on various works by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the firm's genius COO, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick and Mary McDonnell as an elderly Madeline. “The Fall of the House of Usher” updates the work of Edgar Allan Poe for the era of Big Pharma, turning his most famous tales into a sprawling story of the decline of a wealthy American family. It’s “Succession” meets The Tell-Tale Heart, a story of vengeance, power, betrayal, and bloody parts. The eight-episode mini-series reimagines eight of Edgar Allen Poe’s most recognizable tales and features countless references to some of his other works.

Classic tales marry with modern commentary in a limited series that delivers at every turn. You’ll scream, you’ll cry, and once it’s over you might just start it all over from the beginning again. The Haunting of Hill House set the bar for scares in Flanagan’s filmography, and The Fall of the Usher meets those expectations with ease thanks to the work of cinematographer Michael Fimognari (Flanagan and Fimognari have enjoyed a long partnership, dating back to 2013’s Oculus). Like Hill House before it, House of Usher features a good blend of slow, spooky scares and outright shrieks as Roderick recounts his complicated tale to Auguste in the musty carcass of his childhood home. Both the past and present timelines are filled with the kind of horrors you’ve come to expect from Flanagan, but he really flexes in the methodology of murder as tragedy barrels its way through the Usher family. What’s more, the underlying reason for these deaths — the reason we spend eight episodes watching Usher and his family be stalked by Gugino’s Lady Death — turns out to be essentially Faustian, with everything spelled out and conveniently moralistic.

The narrator and Roderick place her in a tomb despite her flushed, lively appearance. In the tale's conclusion, Madeline escapes from the tomb and returns to Roderick, scaring him to death. From his arrival, the narrator notes the family's isolationist tendencies, as well as the cryptic and special connection between Madeline and Roderick, the final living members of the Usher family. Throughout the tale and her varying states of consciousness, Madeline completely ignores the narrator's presence.

Costumes and hair, incidentally, are a huge part of the characterizations in this show, from Greenwood’s mustache to Thomas’ disturbing man-bun. Production design, oddly, is less central, and this is the first of the Flanagan shows not to be a tour de force in that department. The show generally doesn’t look cheap and there are evocative images aplenty, but despite “house” being right there in the title, the domestic locations, however ostensibly opulent, are never memorable. Sauriyan Sapkota’s Perry Usher is the youngest of the Usher children. Rather than inventing new medical tools or running the family empire, he wants to make life one big party.