Is The Fall of The House of Usher Scary? A Horror Guide for Chickens
Photo Courtesy of Netflix
For the past five years, come October, we’ve grown accustomed to receiving a new Mike Flanagan horror series. It also means that, for the past five years, scaredy-cats all over the world have been frantically searching up just how terrifying each of his shows are, and whether or not we’re equipped to handle it.
Netflix’s latest and final collaboration with the horror auteur takes on added layers of suspense. Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name, The Fall of the House of Usher melds together a number of classic Poe tales—such as “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—into one sprawling family tragedy. The Usher family, led by siblings Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) have been untouchable for decades, thanks to their uber-successful and corrupt pharmaceutical empire. But when all six of Roderick’s children die within the span of a week, he invites prosecutor C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) to his desolate childhood home to confess his crimes—including the real reason for why all of his kids are now dead.
It’s an intriguing enough premise on its own, but what makes a Flanagan series so spectacular is how he uses horror as a vehicle for amplifying our emotional fears, rather than just capitalizing off our external ones. The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor are devastating sister-tales about ghosts and familial loss; Midnight Mass is an intimate study on religious trauma; and The Midnight Club explores grief and mortality from a YA lens.
As Paste’s Lacy Baugher Milas wrote in her review, “The Fall of the House of Usher is both a darkly comedic excoriation of the uber-rich and a slow-moving emotional car crash that explores the dysfunction at the heart of a family that’s losing its members one by one […] It is, much like his other works, about so much more than simple jump scares or overt violence. A story of the long tail impact of trauma, it is a darkly funny and emotionally rich tragedy that grounds itself in our universal longing for love and human connection.”
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