The Fall of the House of Usher review: Mike Flanagans most ambitious horror story yet

Table Of Content

• Here’s Where to Watch the Bruins vs. Maple Leafs NHL Playoff Series Online
• The Old Zoo - Griffith Park
• Haunted and Spooky Locations to Visit in Los Angeles
• Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
• Meet the Cursed Kin of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Cast
• The Fall of the House of Usher review – a gleefully terrifying take on Edgar Allan Poe

It’s not perfect – the order in which the Poe family meet their fates is a case of diminishing returns, as its most intriguing members are dispatched too quickly. Some of the CGI, particularly one scene involving bodies falling from the sky, is unintentionally funny. Problematically, Flanagan tends to conflate queerness with depravity and sexual fluidity is punished here with an unnerving flourish.

Here’s Where to Watch the Bruins vs. Maple Leafs NHL Playoff Series Online

It is hard to imagine one of the oldest cemeteries in Hollywood NOT being haunted. In a final act of unfairness, her reputation was tarnished because of it and witnesses claim to hear crying from her grave. Due to its long, sordid history, many people believe that the Cecil Hotel is a hot spot of paranormal activity and some go as far as to say that the hotel is cursed. Before it closed, ghost hunters and conspiracy theorists would try to sneak into the hotel to see what activity they would experience and the hotel was even the focus of an entire season of American Horror Story. The Cecil Hotel continues to intrigue and terrify people to this day. When it opened in the 1920s, the Cecil Hotel was one of the most opulent hotels in Downtown Los Angeles.

The Old Zoo - Griffith Park

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the setting, diction, and imagery combine to create an overall atmosphere of gloom. The story opens on a “dull, dark, and soundless day” in a “singularly dreary tract of country.” As the narrator notes, it is autumn, the time of year when life begins to give way to old age and death. A mere glimpse of the Usher mansion inspires in the narrator “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.” Upon entering the house, the reader as the narrator navigates through a series of dark passages lined with carvings, tapestries, and armorial trophies. Poe draws heavily on Gothic conventions, using omens and portents, heavy storms, hidden passageways, and shadows to set the reader on edge.

Haunted and Spooky Locations to Visit in Los Angeles

Usher has been reimagined as the head of a massive pharmaceutical company he runs with his twin sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell). Every episode includes flashbacks to a young Roderick (Zach Gilford), Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald), and Annabel Lee (Katie Parker), Roderick’s first wife. These fill in how the Ushers made their fortune, but they’re kind of a narrative drag. It’s important that Roderick and Madeline are cruel, selfish creatures—less so how they got that way. What’s more interesting is to watch how the fallout of their decisions fell on Roderick’s many children, all torn apart by some of Poe’s most memorable creations.

Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

But the show remembers to be actually scary, with truly inspired uses of chimps, mirrors and sprinkler systems. There’s no question that The Fall of the House of Usher ranks among Flanagan’s finest works. Decades later, once it became clear that Verna was the one killing off the Usher children, Madeline tried to sidestep the deal by convincing Roderick to kill himself. But Verna wasn't willing to let him get off that easy and brought him back to face the full extent of his reckoning, the death of his granddaughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran), the only morally good Usher.

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The hotel is located on Hollywood Boulevard and has long been home to some of Hollywood’s most famous celebrities including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Shirley Temple. However, the hotel is most famous for the Hollywood royalty who never actually left and some of the biggest names in Hollywood history are said to still haunt the hotel. Marilyn Monroe is believed to still occupy Suite 1200 where she has appeared as a reflection in mirrors. During its long history, the Cecil Hotel has been part flophouse, part drug den, and was full of unsavory characters who found a safe haven in the hotel’s dingy corridors and rooms. Two of these residents included prolific serial killers, Jack Unterweger and Richard Ramirez, who was known as the “Night Stalker”. Napoleon “Leo” Usher is a video game patron and the closest to a socialite the Usher siblings get.

10 Reasons Why Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher Wasn't Scary - MovieWeb

10 Reasons Why Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher Wasn't Scary.

Posted: Fri, 03 Nov 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Meet the Cursed Kin of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Cast

(When an explanation does arrive, after so many hours of ominous teasing, it proves a little underwhelming.) What Flanagan does most effectively is create an air of dreadful inevitability. There is a satisfying structure to the series, a rhythmic picking-off of characters as they suffer the karmic retribution of their father’s original sin. The streamer has gone to Mike Flanagan, the horror auteur behind The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor (among other projects), and tasked him with telling another sprawling, ornately gothic story about a family gone to ruin.

Is it a worthwhile adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s work?

Moreover, flashbacks into the past, specifically New Year’s Eve 1979, begin to uncover the varied pieces that led to the rise of the Ushers, and what Madeline and Roderick did to solidify the family name in the history books. As the series opens, fans are introduced to Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the graying CEO of Fortunado Industries — a massive pharmaceutical conglomerate with a signature drug that’s equivalent to the highly addictive opioid OxyContin. Though he has everything at his fingertips, Roderick is deeply distressed. From the start of the first episode of The Fall of the House of Usher, we know that all of Roderick Usher's children are dead. It's the how and the why of their deaths that plays out over the course of Mike Flanagan's new horror anthology series, now streaming on Netflix.

The Fall of the House of Usher review – a gleefully terrifying take on Edgar Allan Poe

It’s still the slow-burning human drama fans have come to expect, but this time, it tells a much more complex story that touches on everything from AI to the opioid epidemic, all viewed through the lens of gothic horror. 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. (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. “The Fall of the House of Usher” updates the work of Edgar Allan Poe for the era of Big Pharma, turning his most famous tales into a sprawling story of the decline of a wealthy American family.

The daughter of Frederick and Morella, Lenore is a kind and empathic young woman whose tendencies always lean toward making the conscientious choice, rather than the one that’s best for the family. As the eldest, Frederick Usher is the natural heir to his father’s company, but out of all of his siblings, he’s the least equipped to do so. While his neuroses make him an easy target for his siblings, Freddie’s fiery jealousy and compounding insecurity force him down a path that even those closest to Freddie are shocked to see. For instance, it has sometimes been suggested that Roderick’s relationship with Madeline echoes Poe’s own relationship with his young wife (who was also his cousin), Virginia, who fell ill, as Madeline has. But Virginia did not fall ill until after Poe had written ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ can also be analysed as a deeply telling autobiographical portrait, in which Roderick Usher represents, or reflects, Poe himself.

In the days that follow, the narrator starts to feel more uneasy in the house, and attributes his nervousness to the gloomy furniture in the room where he sleeps. The narrator begins to suspect that Roderick is harbouring some dark secret. The story is narrated by a childhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the Usher mansion. This friend is riding to the house, having been summoned by Roderick Usher, having complained in his letter that he is suffering from some illness and expressing a hope that seeing his old friend will lift his spirits. A stunning use of Poe’s work as the Cliffs Notes to his own majestic, intricate brand of storytelling, Flanagan’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” showcases what the 1% is willing to sacrifice to remain in high places. However, it’s also a reminder that while the powerful may delay settling a tab, debts must often be paid in blood when collection time comes — whether in one generation or the next.

Loosely based on various works by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the firm's genius COO, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick and Mary McDonnell as an elderly Madeline. It's not a spoiler to say that all of them are doomed; we learn that much in the first five minutes.

“You could say she’s the executor of fate or the executor of karma,” said Gugino. One of the most intriguing components of life is the realization that we all have a tab, and at one point or another, a bill will come due. The 1% who hold the majority of the wealth and influence globally typically don’t abide by these same rules. The upper echelons of society move through life seemingly without repercussions by leaching off the powerless. Mike Flanagan‘s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which earns its title from an 1839 Edgar Allen Poe story, showcases the demise of a family who, after being afforded every opportunity, eventually pays the price for their rampant monstrosity. Flanagan is, as ever, enamored of a long and literate monologue, of a gnarly death sequence, of grand emotional brushstrokes.

An abandoned zoo with dozens of empty animal enclosures is even eerier. At the time, it was standard for zoos to have enclosures that resembled jail cells. The small enclosures with iron-style bars didn’t age well, and the zoo came under heavy criticism as Los Angeles grew. City officials developed a budget in 1958 to build a new zoo with better enclosures. By August 1966, the Griffith Zoo was closed and all of its animals were transferred to what is now the Los Angeles Zoo. The zoo’s ruins were left as a community space for Griffith Park visitors to explore.