The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe has captivated audiences for centuries, his words and imagery still making souls clutch at their collarbones to this day. Bringing an artists work from the the 1800s to life in a modern time isn’t easy, but Mike Flanagan takes the tales of Poe and twists and intertwines them for a whole new generation of horror fans. It’s something deeper, something darker, like an expansion of Poe’s mind bred with modern muses. Though the title suggests the series is only based on one story (famously adapted by Vincent Price as a horror film) it’s actually an algamation of several of Poe’s story, told as previously stated, from a more modern perspective. Each episodes aligns with Poe’s works, and the deaths in the show are all based on actual deaths from Poe’s works.

Mike Flanagan is the man behind this Netflix adaption of a handful of iconic horror moments from the mind of Poe itself. We’ve seen Poe done many times in a past setting, but taking stories often famously set in times like the Spanish Inquisition and bringing them to life in the chaos of our current society is a bold move indeed. The word squelching definitely gets under my skin now thanks to this show and poor unfortunate soul, Prospero. Poe was never light on his words when describing the horrors in his stories and poems. I can still remember how I felt as a teenager reading Pit & the Pendulum for the first time, as if so could feel the rats swarming at me too. I could feel the tiny teeth tear my flesh and watching the series crawled under my skin just the Poe’s nefarious rodents. Poe’s words once were the most horrifying things you could read, scare seekers were startled and haunted by his words. This final paragraph from The Black Cat was once just as terrifying as the Exorcist is to some people even today, “Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!“ Mike Flanagan and crew keep the horrors of Poe burning, and add their own kindle to create a magnificent & horrific roaring fire of a show.

What I like about this series is that it’s easy enough to follow but it also doesn’t spoon feed you. I feel like modern audiences don’t want to have to think anymore and even less call upon their own empathy. Mike Flanagan always does a fantastic job of absolutely terrifying me whilst also causing me to reflect on my own humanity. He doesn’t even need jump scares to make the hair on your neck stand up, he slowly crawls under you skin like a scarab beetle.

Poe himself once wrote, “All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.” And this line perfectly sums up the show itself. It’s heavy with desire, deception and soul sucking depression these characters try to satiate in the worst ways. Each Usher showcases a different layer to the darkness of man, and the depths we go to when we lose respect for everyone, especially ourselves. Humans will go to the most awful extremes just to feel something, even if the feeling isn’t something truly tangible.

As a Poe fan, I could not stop excitedly pointing out references with my wife, a fellow Poe & Flanagan fan. We would pause and discuss our favorite Edgar Allen Poe quotes and moments whilst also taking in how they breathed new life into nearly 200 year old stories, without ruining them. The interpretation of the Tell Tale Heart made me just as uncomfortable as the source material, perhaps even more. Without spoiling too much, I’ll say the heartbeat in the episode is something I think lives in my mind permently, seared to my cerebrum.

If you love clever but also sometimes shocking horror, this series is for you. 200 years ago, the seemingly vanilla words of Edgar Allan Poe were the most horrifying stories a human could read. Sleep with the lights on kind of scares. In current times, we’re so desensitized to horror because reality at times is even more horrifying than scary movies and shows could be. Social media is filled with traumatic events that we just scroll through with no shock. It’s hard to scare, to shock, to thrill a society who has seemingly seen it all. However, even amidst all the shock, screams and scares, there’s a softness and beauty that comes along with Mike Flanagan’s works. Even in the darkest dreariest horror stories, he finds a glimmer of good. Not everyone is evil, not everyone is a monster, just like reality.

The Fall of the House of Usher is available to stream on Netflix now!