Mike Flanagan rates among my favorite horror directors… were it not for the existence of Guillermo del Toro, he would be my very favorite. Of course, in my waking life, I’m a professor of Gothic literature, so it may also be that Mike Flanagan’s work often feels like it’s pitched directly at me. Three out of his five series for Netflix are spiritual adaptations of a horror author’s entire body of work with thoughtful commentary on why each is considered a master of the genre. He has previously taken on Shirley Jackson (in The Haunting of Hill House) and Henry James (in The Haunting of Bly Manor, which I wrote about here).
Now Flanagan comes for the author of so many original American horror stories in the form of The Fall of the House of Usher, an Edgar Allan Poe omnibus. Tor.com already published an excellent review of the series by fellow Flanagan aficionado Leah Schnelbach, so consider this essay as more of a deep dive into what works and doesn’t work about the series, and how Flanagan finds (and sometimes fail to find) common ground with Poe’s writing.
[Spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher (as well as for other Mike Flanagan series) abound below.]
Poe’s Tell-Tale Heartlessness
Horror is often a small-c conservative genre whose rules betray a narrow, monstrous view of humanity. Classic slasher films are often predicated on reaching an audience who is morbidly fascinated with and titillated by gore. They attempt to soften the cruelty of that project by making many of their victims unlikable–showing us the violent, punitive comeuppance that its victims theoretically deserve. The marquis villains are useful outsiders. The audience might root for the slasher to rack up a body count, but they are also expected to cheer at their defeat because they are, after all, not truly worthy of our empathy. And who are they? Trans people, people with mental illnesses, shut-ins, people with facial or limb differences, and sure, the occasional leprechaun. All of this is to say that there is a large body of literature on the participatory cruelty of much of the horror genre. And, to be clear, I am not condemning horror fans—that same body of literature also tends to remind us that bloody spectacle is a cathartic, pressure release valve.
But, personally, I really don’t like cruelty or mean-spiritedness on the part of the creator in my media and that’s part of why I typically enjoy Flanagan’s work so much. He pauses to reflect on the human cost of what the genre wants us to buy into. His work consciously avoids the chauvinistic moralism that defines so much of the horror genre without blunting the grotesqueries that it promises. Victoria Pedretti’s Nell Crain in Flanagan’s (uniformly excellent) Haunting of Hill House leads a stunningly tragic life from birth to death. The audience is not spared a visceral and horrifying look into what she endures. But the show never asks us to revel in it. Part of the horror, in Flanagan’s films and tv shows, is that the people who go through it don’t deserve what they get.
That’s why Fall of the House of Usher doesn’t sit entirely right with me… For a creator who has built a career injecting radical empathy into his stories, this series is an exploration of people who cannot be empathized with. The titular family is presented as the cruel scions of a pharmaceutical company—modeled on the real-life Sackler clan—and similarly positioned, in this series, as the architects of the opioid epidemic. They are monstrous and brazen and selfish, and the series takes delight in subjecting all of them to the kind of intricate psychological and physical torture that Poe was so obsessed with. While the Ushers are all detestable to varying degrees, the series feels like a bit of a departure from Flanagan’s typical thoughtful reserve. The show wants to present you with a ghoulish spectacle that you can walk away from more or less unperturbed; justice has been gruesomely served, and isn’t that satisfying?
I can’t say that I disagree with the contempt that Flanagan displays for the wealthy and powerful in this story. Fitzgerald famously tells us, in the opening lines of The Great Gatsby that “the very rich…are different from you and me” and Flanagan dresses Roderick (played, in different eras by Bruce Greenwood and Zach Gilford) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell and Willa Fitzgerald) as Daisy and Gatsby at the fateful New Year’s Eve party where they make their Faustian Bargain. But there is something disconcerting about a Flanagan show that only engages with humanity’s moral rot. As a result, the series feels like it’s missing just a bit of what makes his other shows so edifying and special. Then again, given the perennial appeal of the slasher film, perhaps I am in the minority when it comes to watching monsters get their just deserts.
That tendency towards delivering just deserts is central to Poe. Revenge, especially grotesque, poetically justified revenge, is as much a theme of Poe’s short fiction as obsessive passion and tragic love. There is a fundamental nastiness to Poe’s work that Flanagan does not shy away from.
Take his 1850 short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” which Flanagan uses as the basis for his second episode. In the original, the wealthy hedonist Prince Prospero throws a lush and depraved masquerade for his wealthy friends as a distraction from the plague that is ravaging the countryside—the titular Red Death. The miasma of Prospero’s pleasure den is described in detail before a stranger dressed as the Red Death enters, bringing the plague with them and dooming Prospero and his guests to an agonizing death. It’s the work of Poe’s that most closely fits the overall theme of Flanagan’s series—a story of the careless rich attempting to cheat death at the expense of the poor, only to be made to suffer the same fate.
Flanagan’s interpretation of the tale in episode two hits an uncomfortable halfway point between Poe’s cruelty and Flanagan’s empathetic leanings. Prospero “Perry” Usher (Midnight Club’s Sauriyan Sapkota), the youngest son of Roderick Usher, is presented as an immoral and callous playboy whose masquerade is an exclusive orgy that serves as a front for blackmailing his rich and famous invitees. But Flanagan can’t help but work to humanize Prospero just enough—making him desperate for the approval of his father and aunt, ridiculed and derided by his elder siblings for being illegitimate. Furthermore, he meets his end alongside his various romantic partners, who clearly live in fear of his temper. The scene of his demise is breathtakingly, operatically grotesque; he is horrifically dissolved by corrosive medical runoff as it explodes from the orgy’s sprinkler system—a ghastly image that lingers in the mind long after it leaves the screen. It is peak Poe (and probably a bravura moment for fans of body horror), but it is intermingled with Flanagan’s desire to show you the suffering of Prospero’s guests and lovers whose culpability and innocence are far more difficult to parse. The story moves on to the rest of the Usher family and the guests are never mentioned again. It’s standard for a lot of horror, but feels like a strange omission for Flanagan, who is usually so careful to treat his characters as people rather than mere objects of mutilation. It may be a certain version of wicked fun, but it also feels like something of a letdown after the elevated masterclasses Flanagan provided on empathy and sensitivity in his previous series.
Ultimately, this disappointment is predicated on a mismatch between Flanagan’s values and Poe’s. With Bly Manor, Flanagan was able to tap into the deep well of sympathetic loneliness and sorrow that pervades Henry James’ work, and with Hill House, Flanagan was able to take a direct swipe at Shirley Jackson’s penchant for curmudgeonly misanthropy, providing a remedy to the antisocial bitterness that pervades her oeuvre. Here, Poe’s aptitude for cruelty gets absorbed by Flanagan, while what is tender in Poe’s work—his obsessive love, his capacity for deep sentiment—does not square with Flanagan’s vision of the world.
The Flanagan Treatment
That doesn’t mean that Flanagan doesn’t give it his all: As is typical with his series, the allusions are capacious, and run the gamut from groan-inducing to thoughtful and fascinating. Each of six episodes dealing with the death of an Usher child parallels a classic Poe story to varying degrees. Though some—the aforementioned “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”—are faithful recreations of the source material, presented along with a certain amount of commentary, others—“Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “Goldbug,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” ultimately only mine a specific image or lonely thematic element. “Goldbug,” for example, has a couple of references to Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” but mostly follows the plot of “William Wilson,” with a version of the protagonist drawn from his 1827 poem “Tamerlane.” “The Pit and the Pendulum” uses the titular torture device in its gruesome climax but is a blend of characters and plot points from “Metzengerstein,” “Berenice,” and “Morella.”
But, as with any Flanagan horror omnibus, there are also subtler, more thoughtful references that serve either to comment on or offer a rebuke the original. It would take far too long to detail them all, but here are a few examples worth remarking upon:
- Ligodone, the Usher family “miracle drug” that roughly corresponds to the Sackler’s OxyContin, is a clear reference to Poe’s short story “Ligeia.” Flanagan likely uses the name because the story makes mention of the titular maiden having “the radiance of an opium-dream.” Furthermore, “Ligeia” repurposes Poe’s poem “The Conqueror Worm”—a meditation on the inevitability and ugliness of death.
- Roderick Usher’s obsession with the immortality of ancient Pharaohs and Egyptian artifacts—including the sapphire eyes that he eventually places in the face of his eyeless sister—references Poe’s 1845 “Some Words with a Mummy” which, though relatively light-hearted and satirical compared to most of his works, still touches on the arrogance of Western civilization, obsession with legacy, and the desire to live on past one’s death.
- Beyond “Ligeia,” much of Poe’s poetry gets repurposed throughout the series. Verna (whose name is, of course, an anagram of “Raven”) recites the elegiac “The City in the Sea” to a flailing, despondent Madeline. The priest who presides over the funerals of the Usher children eulogizes them with the somewhat disturbing “Spirits of the Dead.” And Roderick Usher uses Poe’s famous lament for his dead wife, “Annabel Lee,” as a simplistic encapsulation of his love for his wife, despite their failing marriage.
- Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco), Roderick Usher’s loathsome boss at Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, is named, somewhat surprisingly, for Poe’s real-life literary rival. Griswold ended up writing an absolutely blistering eulogy for his fallen foe after Poe’s death.
- Lastly, Flanagan probably does his best work in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where he replicates the madness born from guilt over a covered-up murder but reverses all the pieces of the puzzle. Where the unnamed narrator of the original story hears the phantom beating of his victim’s heart, finally confessing to the murder when his guilt-fueled psychosis gets the better of him, Victorine LaFourcade (T’Nia Miller, taking on the role with a name borrowed from “The Premature Burial”) assumes that she is going mad because she can hear a phantom heart beating—it turns out to be her very real experimental heart-mesh that she has placed in her murdered lover’s chest. Rather than confess her crimes, she cannot comprehend that she’s committed them, and the imagined heartbeat from Poe’s original story turns out to be quite audible to everyone in the home, in this version.
Flanagan also finds ways to turn a spotlight on some of the more difficult and distasteful aspects of Poe’s legacy, continuing a vital process of thoughtful adaptation that connects all of his series to date. For example, Juno (Ruth Codd), Roderick Usher’s much younger wife, is likely intended as a race-bent, gender-flipped version of Jupiter, manservant of the protagonist of “The Gold-Bug,” now widely acknowledged as a cringingly uncomfortable stereotype of a servile Black servant. Flanagan avoids an explicit conversation about race, but pushes back on Juno/Jupiter’s servility and eagerness to please by making her a beleaguered outsider who not only outlives her monstrous stepchildren, but inherits a sizable share of the Usher fortune. The character is also probably meant as a reflection of Poe’s uncomfortable relationships with much younger women, including his thirteen-year-old cousin. Flanagan is thoughtful enough to make sure that Juno and Roderick’s relationship is presented as a twisted, psychologically-devastating power play that, like so many “romances” where there is such a drastic difference in age and experience between partners, is an uncomfortable expression of patriarchal abuse.
Flanagan, even in a series that doesn’t show off his best work, still proves to be a careful and thoughtful adapter of great works of the horror canon.
The Reverberating Heart
Poe begins his 1839 “Fall of the House of Usher” with an epigraph paraphrased from the song “Le Rufus” by the French poet and chansionnier, Pierre-Jean de Béranger: “Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne”—roughly translated, “his heart is a suspended lute; as soon as it is touched, it resonates.” The Roderick Usher of the short story is a recluse who suffers from an overabundance of sympathetic feeling. Poe describes his illness as some combination of synesthesia and anxious overstimulation—he cannot abide light, or color, or flavor, or any sort of intensity without falling into fits. It is ostensibly Roderick’s heart that is the suspended lute of the epigraph, poetically transfiguring his illness into a sort of beautiful echo chamber; anything that he experiences resonates and reverberates, becoming exponentially more powerful.
The Roderick Usher of Flanagan’s series is neither reclusive nor overwhelmed with feeling, but his ego and temperament do resonate throughout the world of the show. Portrayed (as in the source material) as meeker and less callous than his sister, Madeline, Flanagan makes him a curious blank. When asked about the limits of his desire for power and wealth by the show’s Mephistopheles, Verna (played, with relish, by one of Flanagan’s ever-present muses, Carla Gugino), Roderick Usher says he simply doesn’t have any. The show makes good on that declaration, watching him sit idly by, passively reaping the benefits of his Faustian bargain and almost never betraying a hint of remorse for the millions his greed has killed, even when all his children number among them. Flanagan paints a figure who is the antithesis of a Poe character—cool-headed, rarely ruffled, deeply unromantic—but gives that lack of outward passion the same infectious power as the suspended lute. A paucity of feeling spreads through the Usher clan and their associates.
And this brings us to what I actually think might be the series’ masterstroke: the lack of an incestuous relationship. In Poe’s short story, the unnamed narrator, an old friend of Roderick’s, witnesses two equally vile horrors: the unintentional live burial of Madeline Usher, who eventually breaks free of her tomb to murder her brother, and the revelation that Roderick and Madeline have been involved in an incestuous relationship. The Roderick and Madeline of Flanagan’s series are inseparable and, up until their last night alive, of one mind about how to run their business empire. But they are not lovers. Many reviews (and a lot of my friends) felt this was a glaring omission: a missed opportunity to showcase yet another level of depravity in the Usher family.
But I do think that Flanagan plays out a more subtle, more interesting version of Poe’s plot. In many ways, the mere fact of the incest is not what Poe finds objectionable in his short story. We are, of course, speaking of a man who, at age twenty-six, jumped through numerous bureaucratic hoops and burned a number of bridges in order to marry his thirteen-year-old cousin. Rather, there is an uneasy sense that the ruin brought upon the House of Usher comes about because the incestuous relationship between Roderick and Madeline produces no children, no heirs. When they die they pull the whole house (physical and metaphorical) down with them. It is, in part, about the senseless loss that isolation, of which incest is symbolic, brings to once-great families.
Flanagan turns this thematic through-line into a meditation on the short-sighted carelessness of the rich. When Verna makes her offer to the Usher twins, she rejects the notion that she wants their souls, saying “the price is deferred. Let the next generation foot the bill […] when that curtain falls, everyone takes a bow together.” It literalizes the language so often used to discuss the refusal to act on climate change or curb wealth inequality. Flanagan has never been subtle about his politics, and he steers Poe’s lament on the death of aristocracy towards something more egalitarian; the Ushers, the Sacklers, and all plutocrats like them embody the solipsistic downfall, not just of their own great houses, but of humanity itself.
One of the last images in the final episode is of Roderick Usher staring out from the boardroom and seeing millions of bodies fall from the sky—a stunning visual depiction of his monstrous legacy. Flanagan knows how to strategically deploy a powerful, macabre image and, moreover, he knows how to deploy it in service of something heartfelt and heartbreaking. Poe’s fiction may not have been the same perfect creative fit that Henry James’ was, and may not have provided the perfect foil he found in Shirley Jackson, but even an imperfect Mike Flanagan show is still something worth watching and ruminating on, and what Fall of the House of Usher lacks in heart, it makes up for in pure, horrifying spectacle.
Tyler Dean is a professor of Victorian Gothic Literature. He holds a doctorate from the University of California Irvine and teaches at a handful of Southern California colleges. He is the author of “Distended Youth: Arrested Development in the Victorian Novel” and his article “Exhuming M. Paul: Carmen Maria Machado and Creating Space for Pedagogical Discomfort” appears in the Winter 2022 issue of Victorian Studies. He is one half of the Lincoln & Welles podcast available on iTunes or through your favorite podcatcher. His fantastical bestiary can be found on Facebook at @presumptivebestiary.
