[ Netflix’s resident horror auteur is back with his take on
Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. You’ll have a
good time — even if some of the nods to “sociopolitical
relevance” might send your eyes rolling.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MIKE FLANAGAN’S THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER IS BINGEABLE
HALLOWEEN VIEWING  
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EILEEN JONES
October 20, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Netflix’s resident horror auteur is back with his take on Edgar
Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. You’ll have a good
time — even if some of the nods to “sociopolitical relevance”
might send your eyes rolling. _

A still from The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan's new
Netflix horror series. , (Netflix / Youtube)

 

There’s a lurid Gothic melodrama playing on Netflix and getting a
lot of critical attention, called _The Fall of the House of Usher_.
It’s an eight-episode series by Mike Flanagan, the director of such
horror films as _Oculus_ (2013), _Gerald’s Game_ (2017),
and _Doctor Sleep_ (2019), all of them praised by legends like
Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, and the late William Friedkin.

Flanagan’s claim to widespread popularity also includes the Netflix
series _The Haunting of Hill House_ (2018), which was loosely
adapted from Shirley Jackson’s famous novel, and _The Haunting of
Bly Manor_ (2020), based on Henry James’s _The Turn of the
Screw_ and _Midnight Mass_ (2021). Flanagan seems to specialize in
taking on classic literary horror stories — updating them and using
them as springboards for vastly expanded narratives of present-day
life.

In the case of _The Fall of the House of Usher_, Flanagan ranges
through the eerie tales of Edgar Allen Poe, pulling a creepy character
here and a ghastly plot point there to adorn his story of the vile
Usher clan. Poe’s desiccated aristocrat Roderick Usher, the last of
his line and incestuously obsessed with his late sister Madeleine —
who turns out to be interred but not actually dead — is nowhere to
be found here. Instead, we have the ruthless billionaire twin siblings
Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeleine (Mary McDonnell), heads of a
dysfunctional extended family and a business dynasty founded on the
Fortunato pharmaceutical empire that flooded the market with a new and
dangerously addictive opioid pill.

They represent yet another version of the sordid Sackler family, which
raises the question—what is the deal with Hollywood and the Sacklers
and the endless TV series about their
misdeeds? _Dopesick_,_ Painkiller_, the upcoming _Pain Hustlers_,
all of them Sackler-based tales. Sure, the Sacklers are horrible
ghouls, but there are other foul rich people, y’know. _House of
Usher_ even features a photo montage of some of them in one episode,
including shots of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Mitch McConnell,
indicating that each of these grotesques might have succeeded by
making a deal with the devil at some point in their early lives.

Anyway, we begin the series at the funeral for three of Roderick
Usher’s children in one go. The main conceit is that someone or
something is killing off the many Usher offspring, legitimate and
illegitimate, at so rapid a pace and in such a variety of ways, it
begins to look like a supernatural vendetta. Why is the same
mysterious woman (Carla Gugino) turning up in photos with the
deceased? And how can she possibly look so much like the attractive
bartender young Roderick and Madeleine (Zach Gilford and Willa
Fitzgerald) met one fateful New Year’s Eve way back in the 1970s?

The frame story for the series, which proceeds in a flashback
structure, is Roderick Usher’s “confession” to his frenemy, the
investigator and lawyer C. Auguste Dupin (played by Carl Lumbly as an
old man and Malcolm Goodwin as a young one). This takes place in the
moldering, abandoned childhood home of Roderick, Madeleine, and their
late mother Eliza (Annabeth Gish). It’s filled with rackety ghosts,
whether they exist in reality or in Roderick Usher’s increasingly
unbalanced mind.

Chapter titles for the episodes are helpful indicators of what Poe
story or poem is being looted for each one: “The Masque of the Red
Death,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” “The
Tell-tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Raven,”
and so on. There’s a lot of grisly violence, tempestuous family
fighting, lowdown skulduggery, and ominous paranormal high jinks, all
depicted via top-notch production values.

The cast is loaded with Flanagan favorites including Bruce Greenwood
and Zach Gilford as older and younger Roderick; Carla Gugino as the
demonic Verna (an anagram for “Raven”); Henry Thomas as Frederick,
Roderick’s hapless son and the Fortunato heir; Samantha Sloyan as
Tamarlane, Roderick’s driven eldest daughter and an aspiring
wellness industry entrepreneur; Rahul Kohli as Napoleon, one of
Roderick’s illegitimate children and a humorously ranting
drug-addict; and Flanagan’s wife Kate Siegel as another of
Roderick’s illegitimate children, Camille, who’s the spiky head of
PR at Fortunato. They all bring a lot of vim to their roles, but the
most enjoyable casting is probably Mark Hamill doing a delightful job
as the short, hunched, shady family lawyer Arthur Pym, who stares
owlishly through his spectacles, growls cryptic maxims, and exudes a
vague sense of menace.

It all makes for fairly entertaining Halloween viewing, full of
unsubtly spooky distractions in keeping with the season. But I must
admit, I’m at a loss to explain Flanagan’s big rep. I remember one
very scary moment in _The Haunting of Hill House _— the family’s
escape from the house pursued by the mother, with the father running
away, yelling at his teenage son, “That’s _not_ your mother!”
— but in general I don’t tend to find Flanagan’s stuff all that
gripping. It’s bingeable for all the usual reasons — tons of
sensationalist plot, many cliffhangers, talented actors who really
throw themselves into their colorful roles. But it’s also noisy,
lurid, and obvious.

And the political commentary in the show seems part of a trend in many
TV series toward a familiar crude progressivism, gloating over the
evils of monstrous billionaires. It’s preferable to fawning over the
rich, of course — but it’s not likely to have much effect in the
world.

And the amount of portentous speechifying only increases as the series
wears on, until it reaches absurd points of excess in the last two
episodes. Madeleine Usher gives a convoluted oration, for example,
that takes in such social ills as mindless consumer culture, attacks
on feminism, the absurd amount of money spent on scientific research
to address male impotence as opposed to many other pressing health
issues, and I don’t know what else. But since it’s all in the
service of her twisted rationalization of her own crimes against
humanity, it’s hard to know how to take it.

Ultimately this series isn’t likely to invade your nightmares like
the more brilliantly insidious horror works of Poe, James, or Jackson
that Flanagan draws upon. It’s not going to make you uneasy in dark
hallways or shadowy cellars. You won’t feel the impulse to sleep
with the lights on because of Mike Flanagan’s carnival of horrors.

Which is too bad — even with the horror genre’s ongoing cinematic
and TV renaissance, there’s still not enough of the good stuff being
made.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
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