2023-10-13 12:07:41
Movie “Fall of the House of Usher”
Edgar Allan Poe’s collected horror
As of: 12:07 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Recognized? Mark Hamill as Arthur Pym
Source: EIKE SCHROTER/NETFLIX
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Netflix’s horror specialist Mike Flanagan has arrived at the grandfather of horror: In his new series “The Fall of the House of Usher” he has filmed almost the entire Edgar Allan Poe. All the blood, the raw meat and the psychoses simply become a minor matter.
It’s sheer horror; Mike Flanagan is turning literature into films in quick succession. With “The Haunting of Hill House” (2018, based on the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson) he achieved something of a street sweeper. Two years later he worked on Henry James’ classic novella “The Turn of the Screw” and the series was called “The Haunting of Bly Manor”. “Midnight Mass” (2021), probably Flanagan’s best piece to date, came without a literary source, apart from the Bible; “Goosebumps at Midnight” (2022, for a younger audience) was again based on a young adult book by Christopher Pikes.
This is how a horror series was created in a very short time, which is now coming to an end with a flourish. Before Flanagan moves to competitor Amazon for his next project, he ventured into the grandfather of horror for Netflix. Flanagan’s new series “The Fall of the House of Usher” is less an Edgar Allan Poe film adaptation than an Edgar Allan Poe potpourri. All the blood, the raw meat, the ghosts, the psychoses and the grim death aside, not the slightest attraction of the eight episodes is to find Poe in the potpourri, even if sometimes little more than a mere name remains from the original .
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For example, the tragically loyal wife here is called Annabell Lee (after a famous Poe poem), the ruthless lawyer, played by ex-Skywalker Mark Hamill, is named Arthur Pym by Flanagan after Poe’s only novel, and the role of the investigator is a given Poe’s proto-Sherlock Holmes C. Auguste Dupin gets – even if the famous detective is the prosecutor here and he is addressed rather obtrusively as “Augie”.
The horror of the family
Flanagan uses the “Fall of the House of Usher,” one of the most famous Poe stories of all, primarily as a framework. Where in Poe it is a nameless old childhood friend who visits the apparently mentally ill Roderick Usher in his haunted castle, here it is Dupin, whom the pharmaceutical billionaire Usher calls to the decaying house of his childhood, where he finally wants to make a confession after decades. But the opioid crisis remains a background motif; As in “The Haunting of Hill House,” it is the horror of the family that particularly interests Flanagan (it is not for nothing that he shoots his series with the family in an ensemble).
Who needs ghosts when you have a family? The Ushers at the Fall
Source: EIKE SCHROTER/NETFLIX
In Flanagan’s Poe potpourri, Roderick Usher not only has an undead sister named Madeline, whom he buries with Poe in the castle dungeon. In contrast to Poe, he is not the flimsy type at all, but has fathered six children with various women, over whom he rules like a patriarch. While the story develops a bit sluggishly, it looks a lot like “Succession” for a while, but in the end it is convincing as a building principle, because with every Usher offspring comes a Poe classic. And so that everyone recognizes these classics, the episodes are named after them.
Episode number two, “The Mask of the Red Death,” is about an offspring named Prospero (who is not a pestilence-stricken prince of hell, but would just like to have a nightclub); in episode four, “The Black Cat,” the focus is on son Napoleon, a psychotic animal torturer in Poe; Daughter Victorine from “The Tell-Tale Heart” has become an irresponsible cardiologist (because all the Usher children have failed), and Frederick, the eldest, actually owes his episode “The Pit and the Pendulum” to Poe’s foray into the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.
A types of death project
Anyone who knows the story will be on the lookout from minute one for a contemporary device that swings like a pendulum and finally brings the crazy Frederick to death around minute 50. Because it has been clear since the beginning of the story that all of the Usher children die. Naturally and with repeated winks, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a joyfully celebrated type of death project.
What Flanagan makes of brother and sister Usher and their satellites Dupin and Pym is more interesting, more exciting and far less predictable. They go way back in time, to the 1960s and then the 1970s, as they become subservient to the later opioid companies and the Poe references become more subtle. Look out for the raven, the heraldic animal of Poe’s most famous poem, and the woman standing behind the counter on a memorable New Year’s Eve.
And if that’s too much for you: Mike Flanagan will soon be serializing Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” for Amazon. It will never get easier.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is available to watch on Netflix.
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