The Fall of the House of Usher is a rich, engrossing tale of horror

Mike Flanagan always provides my favorite type of horror, and The Fall of the House of Usher is no exception to that rule. Flanagan’s newest (and last) horror series for Netflix is eight episodes of everything we love about his work: Great actors, a clever storyline packed full of Easter Eggs and homages, emotion, plenty of scares and a hefty amount of violence and gore.

The fully engaging story of The Fall of the House of Usher involves Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood, whose performance leads us into the series perfectly) , a very wealthy, very powerful man who owns Fortunato, a drug company that made its name by manufacturing a pill called Ligodone.  Fortunato touts the miracle drug as being completely safe and non-addictive, plus it works really well at its intended purpose of controlling pain. As we know soon enough, Ligodone is not non-addictive; in fact, Roderick’s wife Juno takes massive amounts of the drug, thanks to a horrific accident she was in.

Since we see the funeral in the very beginning, it’s not a spoiler to say that our story opens with the knowledge that all six of Roderick’s adult children have died within a short period of time. Not only did they die, but each of them died in a gruesome manner.

As the eight-episode series moves along, we are introduced to each of these children, none of whom are especially sympathetic characters. Two of them are the offspring of Roderick and his wife Annabelle, while the rest are illegitimate, each born of a different woman. With Roderick and his sister Madeline being rather unlikeable themselves, the saving grace of the entire family is granddaughter Lenore, who is Roderick’s oldest son Frederick’s daughter.

We know from Roderick and Madeline’s back story that they were born out of wedlock and were the illegitimate offspring of their mother, who was a secretary at Fortunato, and her boss, another very wealthy powerful (and married) man.

Maybe that’s why Usher made an effort to acknowledge his illegitimate children – but why did he wait until each was an adult before doing so? And why did he work so hard to pit each of them against the others, forcing them to compete for his wealth? As with Flanagan’s other sprawling stories, we will learn the answers to these questions (and many others) slowly and steadily.

The Fall of the House of Usher is packed with actors we know from Flanagan’s prior films and series, each of them perfectly cast, particularly the siblings. Henry Thomas appears as Frederick (referred to as “Froderick” by his brothers and sisters), Samantha Sloyan is his sister Tamerlane, and the illegitimates are played by Kate Siegal, Rahul Kohli, T’Nia Miller and Sauriyan Sapkota. Mark Hamill puts in a very effective, gravelly-voiced appearance as the Usher’s lawyer Pym, a grim man with a past, Carl Lumbly is Detective Auguste Dupin and Mary McDonnell is Roderick’s sister Madeline.

Another trait of Flanagan’s, particularly when adapting well-known stories, is to give us plenty of references and acknowledgements of the source material, even when he doesn’t follow it to the letter. Though he loosely based The Haunting of Hill House on Shirley Jackson’s novel, he kept many of the names and some of the events. The Haunting of Bly Manor was inspired primarily by Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, but he also included storylines from James’s other works.

He does the same with The Fall of the House of Usher, utilizing character names and snippets of plotlines from the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Obviously, Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is included, but other plot points are taken from The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Gold-Bug, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Annabel Lee…and probably many others that I either missed or haven’t read.

As a fan of Poe, I enjoyed catching all of the ‘Easter eggs’ sprinkled throughout The Fall of the House of Usher.

As the deep, engrossing story is rolled out, we first touch on the mystery of what happened to all of Roderick’s children, but we also get his back-story from childhood on. Who was the mysterious woman he and Madeline encountered at a bar on New Year’s Eve, and how did she help shape the futures of the two? How do Roderick and Detective Auguste Dupin know each other? They have an odd relationship – in many ways, they seem to respect one another, but it is clear from the beginning that Dupin is resentful of Usher.

These and other questions are answered throughout the eight episodes, and the mysteries are satisfactorily solved by the end of the final episode in Flanagan’s  picture-perfect manner: with both horror and heartbreak.