The Fall of the House of Flanagan

Netflix's Horror King Goes Out with a Crash

This review will have mild spoilers for “The Fall of the House of Usher,” now streaming on Netflix.

This past Thursday marked the final launch in Mike Flanagan’s horror series on Netflix. Flanagan has consistently been putting out the highest quality work on the streaming service, his lowest reviewed series being Midnight Club at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. He also turned out two well regarded movies in Gerald’s Game and Hush.

While Ari Aster and Robert Eggers get most of the attention at the forefront of the “prestige horror” movement, I think Flanagan’s work on Netflix has to lead to some of the most compelling works of the new century. While Midnight Club did fall under the cancellation axe that the corporate overlords at Netflix wield wantonly, he’s mostly been able to do as he pleases.

With Amazon poaching one of the few consistently great talents from the crumbling king of streaming, “The Fall of the House of Usher” was an appropriate swan song. Lured away with the promise of adapting Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower,” Flanagan first needed to tackle one of the pillars of the modern horror world. Much as his Hill House and Bly Manor works were spiritual adaptations of landmarks of gothic horror, Usher walks the line between influenced by and adaptation. The show is also a reflection on the artists (both Poe and Flanagan) and a black comedy/satire of American life.

Adaptation

The show tackles some of Poe’s most famous works - “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven” most prominently, but every episode save the first tells us how each of the Usher Children will meet their grisly fate. “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Gold-Bug” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are all brought into a modern tale of greed and nepotism. The show itself works more as a black comedy commentary than a straight horror drama, but it also features some of his most gruesome scenes.

The show weaves disparate threads to varying degrees of success, how much you enjoy it will largely depend on the lens you view it through. If you’re looking for a straight up adaptation, you’ll be sorely disappointed. “Usher” does pull more directly from the source material than his previous shows have. Some work better than others. Two stand outs for me were “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Both managed to bring Poe’s work into the modern era while still nailing the tone of Poe’s work. “Rue Morgue” and “Black Cat” fell flatter, the former failing at an air of mystery and the latter lacking the creeping madness.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” features a clever spin on one of Poe’s biggest works. While I also found the creeping dread and the slow descent into madness lacked in the episode, how they modernized the story felt authentic and made sense. “The Gold-Bug” was most alien to the source material, drawing more inspiration from Poe’s poem “Tamerlane” (also the POV character’s namesake) than the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.” The episode did have the best example of a descent into madness, though. The main character’s insomnia, their slowly weakening grip on reality and how it manifests bring to the forefront what made Poe’s work so compelling.

“The Cask of the Amontillado,” “The Premature Burial,” “Lenore” and “Annabel Lee” also are adapted with a measure of faithfulness as well, interspersed throughout the series. The stories are often times pulled apart and reassigned to different characters to help shape a cohesive narrative, but it was cool to see how Flanagan and his partner in crime Trevor Macy weaved so many important story notes into the series.

Inspired By

As a devout Poe reader in my youth, I appreciated how Flanagan weaved Poe’s mythos into the show. Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), the subject of Poe’s lone published novel, tells us what would have happened had Pym survived his ill-fated journey. Hamill is fantastic as the stoic Pym, bringing equal parts unease and mystery to the Usher family’s only legal representation. Hamill speaks rarely and reacts even less, but every movement feels intentional and he kept me engaged the entire show.

Carl Lumbly’s C. Auguste Dupin pulls double duty as the famed investigator and the recipient of Roderick Usher’s (Bruce Greenwood) story. While he does a fantastic job in the role, the best parts come from hearing Roderick’s tale of woe. He is appropriately aghast at the stories unfolding before him, an equal measure of skepticism and fascination playing out silently on his face. I wish more time had been spent developing the detective aspect of his character. Mysteries are laid out in front of him and we rarely see his keen powers of deduction on display. This is the character that inspired Sherlock Holmes after all.

Carla Gugino’s Verna, an anagram of Raven, drives the unreliable narrator aspect of the series. Every time she shows us, the POV character is shown to have an untenable grasp on reality. She is a central figure throughout the show, telling Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) that she is consequence. She is also a big part of tying the satire to the horror.

It was hard for me not to see Crystal Balint’s Morella as anything but the titular Mummy from Poe’s “Some Words from a Mummy,” although that might just be my take on the situation. Many of his poems are recited as original works by characters in the show, the most prominent and best executed being “Annabel Lee.”

The Art and the Artist

While “Usher” occasionally stumbles in execution, forgivable given the scope of the project, it soars when it turns its critical lens on both Flanagan and Poe. The show pulls heavily from Edgar Allan Poe’s real life - show villains William Longfellow and Rufus Griswold were inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Rufus Wilmot Griswold respectively. Eliza was the name of Roderick and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) Usher's mother and also Poe himself. Both lost her early in life as well. Judge John Neal (Nicholas Lea) is named after a critic who was instrumental in Poe’s popularity after death.

Poe, in life, was known as a literary critic. The show’s criticism of America is unrelenting. Flanagan also takes shots at himself and the criticism of his work, monologues in particular. Fitting, of course, because of the propensity of monologues in Poe’s works. One character’s fate was to be a broke poet, in a different timeline.

Juno(Ruth Codd), Roderick’s young wife, seems to be a stand-in for Poe’s child bride Virginia Clemm. Poe was an opiate addict and the Usher family built their fortune on the back of a “non-addictive” opioid, Ligodone. The drug itself draws its name from a short story called “Ligeria” about an opiate addict.

Flanagan also pens a love letter to the power of the written word. He is a talented storyteller and an evocative writer, which lends a credence to the scenes that would feel hokey in the hands of a less adept writer. Poe was, at his heart, a romantic and this show leans so far into it at times I feared it would tip over. Ultimately, that affection led to some of my favorite scenes and helped me connect with a story filled with characters I could not connect to.

This is Satire

On that same note, this work leaves little room for interpretation on what Mike Flanagan is saying about America. I haven’t seen a show so angry in a very long time. He wages war on the rich, the exploitation of ideals and people, propaganda and so many other pillars of American culture.

I struggled with this aspect of the show. Not because I didn’t agree, in fact my wife has been subjected to many of those ranting monologues almost word for word, but more because it detracted from the timelessness of his work. I do wonder if it was a reaction to people not understanding what he was saying in previous works, he did not want people to finish the show without knowing where he stood and for that I can’t discredit the work.

I think a lot of what he is saying is important for people to see an acknowledge, so I appreciate it. The show is about having choices and how we use our platforms and I suspect on some level it would feel hypocritical to pull punches. I admire it, especially in this politically charged climate. Racism, sexism and class warfare are at the very front of this story.

Flanagan wages war on American institutions - health care, media, politicians. The jewelry industry is taken down in savage form with a lemon metaphor, one of the highest points of the show. He tries to show a path forward for the rich, a way to salvage the wasteland they have created for the entire world. American exceptionalism comes under attack and a parallel to British colonialism is used to highlight our negative impact on the world. The bodies literally rain from the sky at one point.

That said, his works are better with a singular/narrower focus. The show topples under the weight of so much, akin to the titular house. It also exists in a post-“Midnight Mass” world, and is unfairly held to a standard most works will fail to attain. I enjoyed my time with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but I walked away wishing for more. An apt metaphor for Flanagan and Netflix and even the author himself.