My love for Mike Flanagan is well established. He is my favorite working horror director, and close to being my favorite director period. Even his worst is leagues above the cesspool of drek littering the landscape and I am overjoyed to report, The Fall of the House of Usher is excellent.
An easy pitch for this series would be ‘Edgar Allen Poe’ meets ‘Succession’, as various plots revolve around the family dynamics and individual motives within a modern dynastic empire. The Usher family is presented amongst the 1% of the 1%, head of a far-reaching pharmaceutical corporation with enough hidden skeletons to populate multiple nations. In the span of two weeks, the empire will crumble with the bloodline severed, and there will be nothing that remains other than an empty emperor sitting on a throne of bones in a crumbling house, literal and metaphorical. Throughout these events, a mysterious figure haunts, seemingly to reap the lives and fortune of each family member, a shadow and memory of promises made and a toll come due. This is all relayed by a potentially unreliable narrator in the oldest framework, telling a tale before a flickering fire.
Like with Bly Manor and Hill House, Flanagan amalgamates numerous stories from Edgar Allen Poe into a singular tale using ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as his framing narrative. Each episode adapts a specific story, but includes plentiful callouts and easter eggs to the entire body of work. Flanagan finds the sweet-spot in an adaptation, not adhering slavishly to the source, but maintaining tone and themes while adding his own personal flourish, telling his own tales and unafraid to expand and embellish. And this is masterful, because he manages not simply to reskin and update core visuals, framework and ideas, but he dives deep into the thematic undertones that comprise the throughlines and motifs for all Poe’s work. These are tales of hubris and ego, hedonism and indulgence, sorrow, madness, guilt, and of course: Consequence. ‘No one really gets away with anything’ states the patriarch Usher. ‘There are always consequences’, affirms the reaper, ‘tonight you are consequential’.
The writing, production values, acting, framing, setup, are all exceptional. Regular viewers will recognize many of the faces from Flanagan’s regular stable of actors, along with some excellent new additions. Each member of the House of Usher exists in a state of privilege and hubris, not understanding the dues that are owed. Pacts made and checks written to seize the day, but owed to the future. These themes are reflected in each story and tale, with every doomed family member seeking their own ticket to fame, success and immortality, without understanding the pendulum swinging inexorably towards them. The sins of the fathers merging with the sins of the moment, and the price that is owed to those that follow. There is no escape from consequence, especially staring in the dark mirror.
This is far from a 1:1 direct adaptation of Poe, yet somehow a fitting and a near perfect translation. It is gory and lurid, excessively dramatic, flamboyant, verbose and theatrical. It is dark and morbid, ironic and twisted, at times goofy and excessive, yet little feels untrue to the source, even while bringing modern sensibilities and contemporary issues into the fray. What is surprising is how darkly funny this show is. Many of the lines are laugh-out-loud and there are some exceptional monologues and performances. As the episodes pass and the body count rises, much of the initial humor begins to dissipate, but it never vanishes completely. The horrific components are truly gruesome, far gorier and vivid than Flanagan’s previous works. More true to Poe, there’s far less emphasis on supernatural elements, as the horrors and atrocities are of purely human design. There are certainly specters and characters that are haunted, but they are more projections of guilt and remorse, madness and lament. Where the show does stumble is when it goes into some ham-fisted screeds about the horrors of the pharmaceutical industry and capitalism, and while parallels can be found in Poe’s writing, it feels a bit too much like the creator’s soapbox than thematically inline. Regardless, Mike Flanagan once again delivers the highest tier of October treats, his last huzzah for Netflix before moving on to greener amazonian pastures, and a Dark Tower.