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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. Feast your eyes on a new clip above and learn more about the limited series below.
The Fall of the House of Usher review – a gleefully terrifying take on Edgar Allan Poe
She appears near the narrator, but never acknowledges his presence. 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.
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He turns back in time to see the Moon shining through the suddenly widened crack in the house. As he watches, the House of Usher splits in two and the fragments sink away into the lake. Flanagan’s version of Roderick Usher is a power-hungry and money-hungry CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, a company that can be compared to Purdue Pharma in both its wealth and its development of destructive, addictive drugs.
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(Poe had one too.) Roderick has been haunted by all his awful children who have shuffled off this mortal coil, and it’s because it feels like the ghosts are finally coming for him that he is ready to confess. He’s having visions of monstrous ghosts, including the recurring specter of Verna (Carla Gugino), a figure that connects most of these tall tales as a sort of vengeful force of karma, the devil come to take what she’s due from a man who profited off the pain of others. Just like the other characters that make up the world of the Netflix series, Flanagan puts a Poe character from another story central to the show’s narration, though Roderick himself is the show’s true narrator. Auguste Dupin, a character from Poe’s detective fiction stories, has been circling Roderick for years related to the pharmaceutical company the Ushers run. Roderick beckons Dupin to the house for one last conversation where he recounts the deaths of each of his children before revealing the deal that he and Madeline made with The Raven in their youth. Siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built a pharmaceutical company into an empire of wealth, privilege and power; however, secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty sta...
Throwing a bookend at Alessandra’s head “was not out of spite or cruelty,” said Miller. Unlike other people in this episode, her death wasn’t about that. She truly wanted to save everyone.” Yeah, well, so much for that. They’ll get the whole world — running Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, making more money than they could ever imagine, literally getting away with murder — all sans consequences. “When you’re done, at the end of it all… just before you would have died anyway, your bloodline dies with you,” Verna offers them.
Netflix's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' tackles Edgar Allan Poe stories - USA TODAY
Netflix's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' tackles Edgar Allan Poe stories.
Posted: Tue, 10 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The narrator also notes that Madeline's body has rosy cheeks, which sometimes happens after death. Over the next week, both Roderick and the narrator find themselves increasingly agitated. When the narrator arrives at the house of Usher in Poe’s story, Roderick and his sister Madeline are the only surviving members of the family, similar to how Flanagan sets up his adaptation. But Poe’s story doesn’t explicitly mention the other members of the Usher family, including children, or the manner in which the other members of the family perished—something that Flanagan’s series focuses its entire run explaining. English majors will likely know where some of the stories are going just by seeing the episode names. 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.
Verna isn’t a character in Poe’s works, but her reveal as The Raven references Poe’s famous poem of the same name.
We see what those are in the past, as well as the present day to see what caused the family to flee and leave their mansion behind. It ran for one season and is part of The Haunting anthology series. Just like Poe’s narrator, Detective Dupin manages to escape the house in the series and both characters watch as the House of Usher cracks and collapses to the ground, realizing that the Usher family was nevermore. Poe’s story doesn’t mention what the Ushers do for a living, though they do come from money that afforded them a family mansion.
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After all, he’s the creator of some of the best horror content on the streamer. And he’s the one behind bringing The Fall of the House of Usher to life from page to screen. But it’s all thanks to iconic poet and author Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name that we’re getting the television adaptation. The twins that were thick as thieves end up being each other’s downfall in both versions of the story.
Cast and characters
The character never evinces the necessary internal conflict of a man who yearned for legal recourse against the Ushers — not the Rube Goldberg meat-grinding machine version of justice being meted out in a fashion closer to the Final Destination movies than Poe’s more elegant prose. “It’s batshit crazy in the best possible way,” Carla Gugino told Netflix during production. “It has quite a lot of very dark humor, but also really touches the soul.” In the series, Gugino portrays a shape-shifter named Verna, whose origins can be traced back to a — let’s just say — very famous Poe character.
Basically, imagine if a bunch of amoral 1-percenters were caught in a Final Destination death loop. To secure their fortune — and future — two ruthless siblings build a family dynasty that begins to crumble when their heirs mysteriously die, one by one. Mike Flanagan’s latest limited series, The Fall of the House of Usher, based on the short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, is now on Netflix. It turns out that almost every branch of the Usher family tree has been cut by violent horror. ” “No, not before,” he replies in one of the show’s many glimpses of Flanagan’s viciously dark sense of humor.
The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 collection of stories by Ray Bradbury, contains a novella called "Usher II," a homage to Poe. Its main character, William Stendahl, builds a house based on the specifications from Poe's story to murder his enemies. 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. 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.
But he wouldn’t last the night anyway — Madeline poisoned him with cyanide. After Leo (Rahul Kohli) wakes up from a bender with bloodstained hands to find his boyfriend Julius’ (Daniel Jun) cat stabbed to death in their living room, he knows he’s in trouble. But then he starts experiencing disturbing and violent visions — attacks from the cat, dead animals — to the point where he uses Thor’s hammer (a gift from Chris Hemsworth, naturally) to tear his apartment apart looking for the cat. Thinking he sees the feline out on his balcony, he chases after it in a rage… and falls off the ledge to his death on the street below. The first two episodes of The Fall of the House of Usher premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2023 before the Netflix release the following month, being viewed more than 13 million times in its first two weeks. It was met with positive reviews, with critics praising its production values, directing, and performances (in particular from Gugino, Greenwood and Mark Hamill), although they were divided on its narrative, notably in relation to the source materials.
All advice, including picks and predictions, is based on individual commentators’ opinions and not that of Minute Media or its related brands. No one should expect to make money from the picks and predictions discussed on this website. In the original Poe story, an unnamed narrator arrives at the Usher home and the only detail we know about him is that he is Roderick’s “best and only friend” who has traveled across the country after receiving a letter complaining of an illness. The narrator observes Roderick’s peculiar behavior and even takes part in some of his harebrained ideas, including entombing his sister Madeline for two weeks before burying her. Flanagan finishes his Netflix contract on a high, gleefully capturing Poe’s magic, eerie romance and sense of dread.
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. But the themes remain the same—guilt, obsession, vengeance, and a supernatural sense of justice. Roderick Usher’s children are getting what they deserve, not merely because they are the fruit of a very poisoned tree but because they have made horrific decisions to stay in the shelter of wealth and privilege. Late one stormy night, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) invites an investigator named C.
Though the series’ title comes from only a single source, fans will already recognize that this is more of a hodgepodge. There are familiar character names, directly absorbed plotlines, overt and subtle visual nods. In November 2023, Roderick Usher, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, loses all six of his children within two weeks. Auguste Dupin, an Assistant United States Attorney who dedicated his career to exposing Fortunato's corruption, to his childhood home, where he tells the true story of his family and unveils the Ushers' darkest secrets. Fearing that her body will be exhumed for medical study, Roderick insists that she be entombed for two weeks in the family tomb located in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helps Roderick put Madeline's body in the tomb, whereupon the narrator realizes that Madeline and Roderick are twins.
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