What do Gothic horror and capitalism have in common? Mike Flanagan explores this in his final contracted Netflix show, The Fall of the House of Usher, which aired in October 2023.

​

The show is the third in a series of modern retellings of classic Gothic horror novels, which includes The Haunting of Hill House (based on the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson) and The Haunting of Bly Manor (based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw). Like its predecessors, The Fall of the House of Usher feels both familiar and fresh, filled with Easter eggs for those who know the source material, while remaining accessible and gripping for those who don’t.

​

Unlike the other two, however, The Fall of the House of Usher takes inspiration from multiple works, all from the literary canon of Edgar Allan Poe. The framing device of the show is based on the short story of the same name, where an ailing Roderick Usher recounts the downfall of his family to a nameless narrator, in this case, reimagined as the attorney Auguste Dupin.

​

In this version of the story, Roderick is the CEO of a multimillion-dollar pharmaceutical company called Fortunato, which he built alongside his ruthless, brilliant sister Madeline, and which is currently under trial. Roderick has six children from five different women, all equally spoilt and greedy: weak-willed heir Frederick, entrepreneur Tamerlane, surgeon Victorine, spin doctor Camille, video game developer Napoleon, and hedonistic party boy Prospero.

​

Through a series of horrific and seemingly coincidental accidents, the Usher siblings all begin dying in gruesome ways. This isn’t a spoiler — the show opens with their funerals and the newspaper headlines reporting their deaths. The mystery isn’t what happened to them, but why. The answer is revealed to us slowly and cleverly, through Roderick’s confession to Dupin in the dilapidated ruins of his childhood home, woven with flashbacks to how he and Madeline clawed their way out of poverty and took over Fortunato. Threaded throughout the narrative is the spectre of a mysterious woman called Verna who appears to be haunting — and hunting — the family.

​

This reimagining of the Ushers running a corrupt pharmaceutical empire that peddles an addictive drug called Ligodone calls to mind the real-life Sackler family, who were responsible for the OxyContin epidemic. Through this, the show explores the evils of capitalism and wealth. The Ushers’ greed and their conviction that their money makes them untouchable becomes the crux of their downfall — and also makes it satisfyingly cathartic to watch. “I reached through time and ripped the eyes out of a goddess with my pocketbook and some patience,” Roderick muses, showing off a pair of sapphires he smuggled out of Egypt. “Does that make me a god?”(Episode 06: “Goldbug”)

​

Not only do these themes evoke a modern horror beyond otherworldly entities and blood-splattered ghosts, but they also feel startlingly relevant to Poe’s works — where human evil and sin sometimes take monstrous forms, and characters find themselves punished in painful and karmic ways. Verna, whose true nature is never revealed, describes herself as ‘consequence’, and appears before each Usher’s death to offer them a way out, setting her up as the spectre of karmic justice.

​

In keeping with the Gothic tradition, the show relies heavily on a sense of dread to evoke horror — the knowledge of the deaths to come leaves viewers in a constant state of nervous anticipation. The deaths themselves are almost poetically grotesque, with Prospero’s being the most nauseating. In true Flanagan form, we also have the occasional jump scares, in the form of blood-splattered corpses that appear to Roderick as he relays his story. Interplayed with this is some beautifully macabre cinematography, which creates a dark, moody atmosphere that feels very Poe.

​

As a reader of Poe, I loved how the show was peppered with many sly nods to his works. Each episode title references a different short story and therefore hints at how each sibling will die. Each character shares a name with one of Poe’s characters, from Roderick’s tragic first wife Annabel Lee to Dupin, whose named after Poe’s iconic detective. Fortunato references a character in The Cask of Amontillado and The Gold-Bug. Tamerlane’s wellness start-up references The Gold-Bug, where the narrator becomes fixated on a golden bug that he sees as the key to his fortune. The word ‘nevermore’, evoking Poe’s most famous poem, The Raven, who becomes a character in her own right, is repeated throughout the last episode. Themes and motifs that recur in Poe’s works pop up throughout, such as the idea of being buried alive. These careful details and the amount of research that went into them ultimately make the show feel like a love letter to Poe while standing in its own right as a modern story.

​

The Usher family — with the exception of the only granddaughter Lenore, Frederick’s ill-fated wife Morella, and Roderick’s young second wife Juno — are all morally repugnant and entirely detestable, but with an outrageous lack of self-awareness that borders on the comical. An unexpected show-stealer was Mark Hamill’s Arthur Pym, the Ushers’ fixer, nicknamed the Pym Reaper for his willingness to get blood on his hands, who remains grim-faced and unfazed even as he confronts the supernatural. Verna, or the Raven, played by Carla Gugino, dominates every scene she is in — terrifyingly otherworldly, even in her mannerisms, alternating between playful and vindictive. The ambiguity of what she is, and what motivates her, makes her all the more sinister.

​

But despite that, the real evil at the heart of the show is not Verna, or the supernatural, but humanity itself. “We’re a virus, I think,” Pym reflects (Episode 08: “The Raven”). The monstrous becomes an allegory for the corruption that exists in the mundane, and that is what makes The Fall of the House of Usher truly a horror story.

​

- Shehrazade Zafar-Arif