Preface

Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a monumental work of horror fiction, made all the more astounding with its fusion of the works of Edgar Allan Poe (rooted in the 19th century) with the contemporary world as we have known it since the late 1950s, culminating all the way into the near-future (the show released in October 2023) of November 2023 in a slaughterhouse of a conclusion.

I am hardly ever completely full of praise for a work of fiction, and I’m particularly jaded with the horror genre (having seen roughly twice as many movies and read as many books in horror as I have any other genre, easily), but here, finally, after almost two decades of searching, is 8 hours of content that sates all the tastes I have been looking for.

The show is densely layered (although not to the extent that you can’t really follow it along the first time, like, say, Tenet), in terms of events, choices, consequences, in terms of visual poetry and character motivations, but of particular note is the dense proliferation of one character’s words coming out of another character’s mouth, often separated by decades in time. Our speech is fundamentally a composite of all we have heard before (and the things that stick the deepest with us don’t always come from the people we want to remember), and nowhere have I seen it put forth as casually as in between the opening and ending of each episode.

Speaking of openings and endings, the first and last episodes of the show form bookends, with the meat of the story interspersed in-between, but even within these episodic blocks of story there are openings and endings. Prospero’s story (more on the characters in a minute) culminates in the sad fate of Frederick; Victorine’s machinations directly impact Camille’s termination. And somewhere in there, there is even symmetry, with Napoleon and Tamerlane both falling victim to the same ailment. And then there is generational symmetry, isn’t there, with Madeline falling the way her mother, Eliza did.

Okay, so, spoiler warning. These people, all of these names, all of them die. The Fall of the House of Usher is ultimately a tragedy; it is a documentary of sorts about the last days of the illustrious Usher family, whose empire spreads broad, deep, wide, in every direction. The house crumbles to dust. There is no suspense here about that; it is heavily advertised in its promotion. It’s in the very name of the show. If you’re mainly into fiction for the “how it ends”, this show leaves almost no mystery. It even spells out the “why it ends the way it ends” to you in pretty much the first episode if you’re paying attention.

This is a show you watch to see the end happen before your very eyes, in expertly crafted, superbly lit, shot, and scored, hour long bouts of storytelling wizardry.

Here’s what happens (and who it’s about).

Synopsis

What Happened Before

The show documents the tragic last days in 2023 of the entire bloodline of the Usher family, while smaller arcs of the events of a time period roughly starting in 1979 and ending in the 1980s add slow, but lovely clarity to the eventual death of the entire Usher gene pool.

Told chronologically (and, long aside, but trust me, half the fun of such stories, which are told non-chronologically, comes from having the past timeline ripple and echo and affect and inform the present. A classic example of this is Stephen King’s IT. The book constantly flips back and forth between 1958 and 1985, and keeps things moving along, while the recent big screen adaptations blow their main horror, and emotional load in Chapter 1 itself, sticking to just one time frame. Chapter 2 suffers heavily because of it; almost no one watched it), the Usher story starts in 1953, where Eliza Usher works for Longfellow, the first owner of Fortunato, to look after her two children, twins Roderick and Madeline Usher. The Ushers live in a modest home close to the house of Longfellow, and it is later revealed that the twins are Longfellow’s illegitimate children.

Eliza succumbs to an unmentioned illness, which sucks the life out of her till she eventually dies in 1962. The Usher kids, teenagers by then, decide to put her in a coffin and bury her in their backyard, because doing it any other way would be against her religion. But it turns out through some rare set of circumstances, Eliza wakes from her grave, claws out, and storms to Longfellow’s house, choking him until they both die.

But that’s not where the show opens. The show opens in 2023, with the much older Roderick Usher (he’s more or less our protagonist for much of the show) sitting in a church, attending the funeral of his three children (Frederick, Tamerlane, and Victorine). Roderick’s granddaughter, Lenore, sits behind him. And behind her, he glimpses the woman we later learn of as Verna.

What follows then is a phone call C. Auguste Dupin, an old Assistant U.S. Attorney gets from Roderick, asking Auguste to meet Roderick at a specific place.

Auguste shows up to that place, and it is that modest Usher house, but now with 70 years of age weighing it down. Auguste finds Roderick inside, sitting by the fireplace. Roderick offers Auguste two things: a drink of one of the world’s most expensive wines (more on that later), and second, a confession. The rest of the story is told this way, with Roderick narrating from time to time, and Auguste punctuating Roderick’s story with questions and incredulity. Also served on the side in this little room with the fireplace are Roderick’s infrequent hallucinations (or perhaps they are more sightings) of all of his dead family members showing up, one by one, just as reminders and shocks.

Anyway, back in 1962, the Usher twins watch, horrified, as their mother dies again, this time taking Longfellow (who, perhaps in 1962, they might not know is their father) with her. They grow up, and Madeline ends up becoming brilliant, and charging into the world of computers and data on the side, while Roderick ends up three things: 1. Married to Annabel Lee, the only woman he ever truly loved, 2. The father of Frederick and Tamerlane, his oldest children, and 3. Employed at Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, his (to him unknown) dead father’s company.

With me so far?

Good. Roderick is eventually contacted by a young Auguste, and they together plot to whistleblow Fortunato’s shady practices. But Roderick and Madeline both double cross Auguste, and Roderick gains favor with Fortunato’s new boss, Rufus Grisworld. The twins have much higher goals than simply making Fortunato suffer for medical crimes.

They, on New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1979, show up at the Fortunato party, dose Rufus’s drink with some kind of paralytic, and bury him alive behind a brick wall (which, in many future episodes from 2023 Roderick stares at for hours at end) in Rufus’s party jester suit. They find their way to another bar, to be seen there as an alibi. But this bar finds them having a conversation with Verna, the bartender. Verna offers them a deal too good to be true: that the twins will get everything they ever wanted, and the price for this will simply be that, near the end of Roderick’s life, Roderick’s entire bloodline will die. She seals the deal not with blood or sacrifice, but with a drink of alcohol, a special vintage, from a special bottle. Henry IV Dudogon Heritage Cognac. (More on that near the very end, and it is one of the most striking examples of a Chekov’s Gun I have ever seen, although no one dies from the drink alone.) Verna says, “You drink this on the best day of your life, or your last night on earth.”

That’s it. That’s why what happens happens. Verna simply comes to collect when the Ushers’s time is up.

But, after that, for the next six episodes, there is a delightful series of cause and effect domino deaths, and purely based on how things happen, it gladdens a horror lover’s heart.

What happens before these deaths in the modern timeline, is pretty barebones: Fortunato climbs the pharmaceutical ranks on the back of a miracle drug called Ligodone, a painkiller. Ligodone’s dark side is miraculously kept under wraps, however, likening it to an opioid epidemic. Roderick ends up having six recognized children, Annabel leaves him (it is implied she shot herself somewhere down the line), and Roderick lures his two oldest kids (Frederick and Tamerlane) to him with his money. He also fathers, in order of decreasing age, Victorine, Napoleon, Camille and Prospero. Parallelly, Madeline becomes the COO of Fortunato and develops a deeper interest in tech, and in the 2020s has been working on artificial intelligence and consciousness mapping.

What’s Happening Now

In late 2023, The Ushers are called into court for another new charge (and it is explained by Auguste in the courtroom that none of the charges ever filed against any of the Ushers ever stick, as if it’s an unnatural, supernatural thing. And it turns out that it is, indeed supernatural. One of Verna’s terms states that the Ushers will be untouchable until the bill comes in due), and later, Auguste (falsely) states that there is now an informant within the Usher family. This leads directly to Roderick and Madeline hosting a family dinner at the Usher mansion, where Usher’s newest wife, Juno (she is more of a trophy, a Ligodone success story; she has recovered from a terrible physical accident because of the drug, and her body somehow doesn’t reject any dose no matter its size of the drug, and Roderick loves her because she is the mascot of the drug for him) prances around, while the Usher twins declare that they will give 50 million dollars to whoever finds the informant within the family.

The next episode, and the first of the deaths, belongs to Prospero, the youngest of Roderick’s progeny (well, that Roderick openly acnowledges anyway). Roderick has six kids from five women, and Prospero is the youngest, and the last.

We’re going to spend very less time with these deaths, because, truly, translating the events leading up to each one as they happen is a worthy exercise, and I have made full, detailed notes of each episode (in case you didn’t figure it out yet, the episode titles are derived from titles of Poe’s stories and poems, and the character names, and each episode’s central stories are too), but the true value here is just watching these things happen. Reading won’t suffice.

So, Prospero. Prospero dies on 9th November 2023. But before that (and as will become clear with each character brief), and leading towards that death in a choice-consequence loop that makes all the sense as does delicious ice-cream in tropical summer, Prospero learns of an abandoned industrial building owned by Ushers scheduled for demolition at a legal meeting with the FBI and him, Frederick and Arthur Pym (who is the Ushers’s enforcer and one-man legal force of nature). Prospero decides to hold an exclusive party there. A grand orgy in the vein of Eyes Wide Shut, but modern. He invites Frederick’s wife, Morelle, to it and gives her a burner phone. She shows up, in secret; her husband and daughter (Lenore) don’t know. He decides the party should end with a sprinkler-based water bonanza. But Verna shows up, whispers into the ears of the guards so that they close the exits, and talks to Prospero, and Prospero fails to heed her words. She also whispers in Morelle’s ear; telling Morelle to leave. But Morelle stays. And Prospero gets the sprinklers turned on. But what pours isn’t water; it’s acid. The participants of this party all burn to their deaths. Except Morelle. She survives. Arthur Pym ends up at the scene much later and collects Morelle’s burner phone. Arthur shows the twins a photo of Verna at Prospero’s party, and they don’t divulge who she is. But it looks like they know. Pym later ends up giving the burner phone to Frederick, setting off his demise (read below).

Camille dies next. 11th November 2023. Camille is the Usher spinner, working her way with the media to ensure the Ushers have their way. She finds out that Victorine (who’s working on a heart device that’ll elongate lifespans by decades) is doing something fishy with her lab tests on chimpanzees, Camille shows up at the RUE morgue, where these tests are being carried out, and sitting at the security desk is Verna. She lets Camille into the main laboratory, where Verna turns up and speaks, before turning into a chimp (or so it seems) and mauling and killing Camille. Later, Pym shows the twins footage of the RUE morgue, and neither twin can recognize Verna. Pym later sends the twins an enhanced image of Verna, and both twins look flabbergasted.

Napoleon, who pays people to make video games and sells them in his name, dies next, on 13th November 2023. He finds that he has murdered his male partner’s cat, Pluto (who has a Gucci collar) in one of his drug fueled slumbers. He finds a replacement cat at a pet shop (Verna is the saleswoman there). The cat bites Napoleon’s hand once they’re home and runs off into the house. He starts finding dead rodents and small animals in his house, loses his mind, and calls Verna the pet shop girl to help him out. She shows up, he shows her the dead animals he has kept in the bathtub because he didn’t know what else to do with them, but Verna is spooky. She tells him the cat is in the walls, and then she becomes the cat. Napoleon starts breaking the walls using (I kid you not) Chris Hemsworth’s Mjolnir, and finding the cat sitting on the balcony railing. He runs swinging at her, missing, and falls to his death. The real Pluto walks on his dying body on the pavement and purrs.

While this is happening, Juno asks Roderick about backing off the Ligodone. Roderick is also diagnosed with CADASIL, a life threatening condition which results in severe hallucinations and other mental episodes in the last stages.

Victorine’s bloody death follows on 15th November 2023. Victorine, it turns out, has been spiking the results of her tests for her miracle heart device on chimpanzees with adrenaline injections. She seems to have found the perfect candidate for human trials (Verna) and convinces her to come on baord. Victorine is also forging the signature of her partner in the project (and romantic partner) Alessandra Ruiz (similar to how Fortunato, back in the 1970s, forged Roderick’s signatures on patient agreement documents) to keep things moving. Alessandra is furious once she finds out, at Victorine’s house, and Victorine accidentally kills her. Victorine tries to resuscitate Alessandra by operating on her and inserting the heart device inside Alessandra. It doesn’t work. Victorine then starts hearing the mechanical chirping sound of the device everywhere. Roderick shows up at Victorine’s house; he is now hoping that the device will work, since that will stop his condition, CADASIL, from killing him. He finds Alessandra with her chest cavity open, and the device chirping. Victorine kills herself by stabbing herself, but it seems she is possessed by Verna while she does it. Verna departs from Victorine moments after the stabbing.

Meanwhile, Pym shows the twins pictures of Verna at each of the previous three deaths, and Madeline claims Verna must be the daughter of the woman they met in the bar in 1979, and authorizes Pym to kill her if required. And to bring Madeline Verna’s eyeballs as a receipt.

Tamerlane, the youngest of Annabel Lee’s children, dies next, on 17th November 2023. While all of her younger siblings were dying, she’s been gearing up for the launch of her lifestyle and care product, Goldbug, and in the process, developing dangerous levels of insomnia, falling asleep in the middle of work involuntarily and losing track of time. But that’s not all. Her company partner and romantic partner, Bill T, has a successful livestream fitness show, upon whose merit the product is to be launched, but she drives him away from her. Because: in a nutshell, Tamerlane invites certain personnel into her and Bill T’s home every now and then, who perform certain discreet services for the couple. These personnel come presumably from a company. One of these turns they send a woman who calls herself Candy, but she’s Verna. After that session, Verna appears in multiple Bill T livestreams (according to Tamerlane), and Tamerlane begins getting increasingly paranoid about her. She has a big argument with Bill about that, and Bill leaves. Tamerlane begins hallucinating, no longer able to tell what is real and what isn’t. The Goldbug launch has a great turnout. Tamerlane goes on stage and while speaking, finds Verna in a green dress sitting behind Juno. She finds herself replaced by Verna on all the LED screens in the creatives. Then the screens start playing Tamerlane, Bill and “Candy’s” private tapes. Tamerlane freaks out, picks up the mic, and destroys the screens. She then runs away from the event.

Meanwhile, Madeline catches Verna at the event and upon reaching out to touch her, finds Verna become soot. Tamerlane goes to her own house, panicked, begins seeing Verna everywhere, picks up a fireplace poker and starts breaking all the mirrors. She ends up in her bed, and upon seeing more of her visions in the ceiling mirror above her bed, breaks it too. Shards of the mirror fall, stab, and kill her.

Parallel to Tamerlane’s last few days, Arthur Pym finds “patient” Verna’s file at Victorine’s residence, and the address on it is the old Usher house. Pym shows Roderick and Madeline pictures in which Verna is seen with many noteworthy figures from history. Roderick believes these are Photoshops. Pym tells him no, they’re authentic.

And then there’s just Frederick left. 18th November 2023 is his last day on earth. He’s been getting increasingly fixated on Morelle’s burner phone, and tries many times to unlock it, using her burnt fingers, her burnt face, but nothing registers on the phone. He’s been snorting cocaine (taken from Napoleon back when Napoleon was in his cat phase instead of being dead). He transfers Morelle from the hospital to his house, covers the walls of her room with photos of their marriage, starts injecting Morelle with the same paralytic that’s been interspersed in the whole story, to ensure she doesn’t recover while he’s busy obsessing about the whole issue. Roderick shouts at his only remaining son about demolishing the building that should have been demolished long before Prospero held his acid burn party there. Frederick calls the demolition guys to do so, but has a moment where he’s blanked out in front of Morelle while on the phone: Verna’s whispering in his ear. In doing so, he ends up mixing the paralytic into his cocaine pouch. He’s about to leave the house for the demolition site when Lenore confronts him regarding her mother’s recovery. He gives her no meaningful answers, and walks out. He ends up at the demolition site, takes one of the radios from the demolition guys, walks in, decides to urinate on the site where Prospero died, and snorts cocaine while he does so. The paralytic takes effect, and he falls to the floor where his urine dries, and Verna shows up, takes the radio, mutters into it in Frederick’s voice, giving the demolition team the go signal, and the team starts tearing the site down with a giant wrecking ball. Frederick dies that way. Crushed in the demolition.

Parallel to this, Madeline shows up at the old Usher house, and Verna’s waiting for her inside. They sit by the fireplace (not lit) where Auguste and Roderick will soon sit, and talk. Verna tells her that Roderick’s been coming to the house often. Madeline asks Verna if they can renegotiate their deal. She snaps Verna’s neck, but Verna cannot be killed. The deal, of course, cannot be changed.

Lenore calls the cops to her house.

Madeline shows up at the basement of the Fortunato building, where Roderick is sitting staring at the wall. She tells him the only way to break the deal is for him to commit suicide. She has him overdose on Ligodone. He dies. But when she leaves, Verna shows up and tells Roderick, “Can’t let you out that easy.” And Roderick wakes up. In a way, it might just be genetic (although it’s never hinted at regarding Roderick at least, hint hint), since his mother, Eliza, similarly rose from the dead. Although, Roderick is completely ambulatory and seems to have good cognition, unlike his mother when she rose. She was practically a fast-moving zombie.

The Last Hours of the House

And that brings us to the day Roderick Usher performed the funeral rites of his three oldest children, where we began the show. He sees the ghost of Annabel Lee and speaks to her, and sees the gunshot wound in the back of her head. He walks out of the chuch, and before getting into his car, sees the jester mask wearing Rufus in there. Roderick falls to the pavement, muttering, “It’s time.”

Later, Arthur Pym hides in the old Usher home, and Verna shows up there. Pym kills her. But she can’t be killed. They have a conversation, where they speak of Pym’s Transglobal Expedition from many years ago, and what Pym saw and did in it that changed him into who he is now. Verna offers him a deal, to escape unscathed once the Usher family falls. Pym refuses.

Lenore sleeps in the Usher mansion, helping Roderick get into his bed. When Lenore heads to her own bed, she finds Verna there. Verna’s come to collect, you see. Lenore, being from the Usher bloodline, must die too. Verna finds no joy in this death, but she kills Lenore after telling her that Lenore is responsible for what comes later: Morelle will recover, Verna says, and form a foundation to help people, helping countless millions eventually. Verna lets Lenore die in peace.

Roderick finds Lenore dead in the bedroom, and in grief, heads to the Fortunato building, to its board room, and finds the ghosts of all his dead children and Lenore sitting there. He looks out the window and Verna is there behind him. He sees a black rain of corpses falling from the sky, which Verna tells him is simply the death count of his Usher empire, all the Ligodone deaths.

He goes to the old Usher home. When Madeline shows up there, he calls her to the basement. They both confess that they knew about Verna the whole time while they were building their empire. He gives her a drink of alcohol from the same bottle that Verna did so many years ago, on that night on New Year’s Eve. Henry IV Dudogon Heritage Cognac. He has spiked her drink with the paralytic. He has decided to bury her as they did Egyptian queens.

Roderick Usher’s Confession

And that’s how we find ourselves set in the final conversation Roderick has with Auguste, by the fireplace. The narrative device framing all these episodes happens here, with Auguste recording Roderick’s confession into his digital recorder. Outside the house, there is rain and thunder; a thunderstorm is brewing.

Roderick tells Auguste that Madeline is downstairs after Auguste hears sounds coming from the basement door. Roderick offers Auguste a drink from the same bottle of alcohol (it is, after all, Roderick’s last night on earth) and drinks plenty himself over the night. Henry IV Dudogon Heritage Cognac. And then, drink in hand, Roderick narrates everything, beginning with Eliza’s death and revival. One by one each Usher child is discussed, and his or her death elaborated upon.

Throughout the conversation, Roderick keeps getting text messages that he tells Auguste are from Lenore, but he never responds to them. When Auguste asks why Roderick won’t respond; Roderick avoids that question.

Throughout the conversation, Roderick keeps hallucinating his dead children showing up, alarming Auguste each time, because Auguste doesn’t see anything.

Auguste tells Roderick that there was never an informant at all. Auguste only planted that seed in the courtroom to cause a breakout from within the Usher family. But he never meant for anyone to die.

They speak about Annabel Lee, the only woman Roderick truly loved. And how he drove her away.

The bangs from downstairs become more pronounced and frequent, and amid all that Roderick tells Auguste about Roderick’s ailment, CADASIL.

After persistent questioning from Auguste, once Roderick reveals that Lenore is dead, Roderick tells him that the messages are from Lenore’s computer simulated version that Madeline released just before Lenore’s death. Roderick calls it the “Lenore bot”. Roderick says the bot is stuck on some nonsense and shows the texts to Auguste. The word “NEVERMORE” is texted over and over. Rod recites the poem, The Raven (by Poe), “Once upon a midnight dreary…” as if in conclusion.

Once his confession is done, Roderick begins to justify what he did with Verna’s deal; he truly changed the world.

Then Madeline storms into the room from the basement, with blue jewels for eyes, and screaming, she chokes Roderick down onto the floor. The house starts falling apart around them as the thunderstorm reaches its peak outside.

Auguste escapes moments before the house falls down. He stands outside, and on top of the rubble where once the house stood, sits Verna. She becomes a raven, and flies over Auguste’s head.

A short coda follows, but it is so beautifully rendered on the screen that I’ll forego any attempts to turn it into expository prose.

Beyond the Plot

Hopefully the sheer length of that synposis alone will give you an idea of the sheer itinerary of events that are mapped through the entire show. And yet, all of that is about half of what we see transpire. What’s absent there are things that can only be conveyed internally, after study and interpretation.

The characters are, for a horror story, far too complicated, especially in the network of their connections with each other. Not a single main character exists just for the sake of a gory death, or a critical plot point. I remember reading a book on writing, called How To Write A Damn Good Novel by James N Frey, in which he reveals that the secret to writing a novel (as opposed to a short story) in the first place, is to have a fair number of characters. Nowhere has this been true than in the episodic tv show medium, but nowhere has it felt as necessary as Usher. Breaking Bad is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest TV shows ever made, and its central characters some of the best ever portrayed. But in my study here, I feel Usher juggles its central characters (much more numerous than Breaking Bad’s) with exceptional finesse. Their connectivity is so prevalent that if you’re paying attention you’ll know when someone is about to recall and recite someone else’s words before it happens. It is easy enough to predict which direction each character’s headed in (they all die, after all), but their mental space is so masterfully exposed, and within the framework of a show that is still expected to deliver jump scares and gross outs, that I feel the horror TV show landscape is now fundamentally altered.

I remember watching Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House a year or so ago, and finding it to be such a refreshing take on a classic story, with one of the most heartwarming endings I have seen in horror, that I knew Usher would be special when it landed in my feed in early October 2023. I also saw The Haunting of Bly Manor with high expectations about six months ago, and upon its end found myself similarly glad that Flanagan wasn’t trying to cheap out and cash in on horror spectacle. Then there was Midnight Mass, which, for my money, is closer to Stoker’s Dracula than Dracula’s own numerous word-for-word adaptations on the big screen. Needless to say, I’ve enjoyed Flanagan’s Netflix episodic content.

So, I went into Usher knowing nothing about it, save that it is a Flanagan show, the same way I pick up every Stephen King book. You expect you’ll be in good hands in its pages.

But I am floored. Awed. Enough to write a 5000 word review (although, I hope it feels more like a convincing endorsement by this point) about the damn thing.

And I’m not even halfway there talking about everything that I found works in it.

Perhaps the greatest achievement I can award the makers of this show is that they managed to pack all of that into about eight hours. None of what’s in here feels like fat that needs trimming; nothing feels out of place. The show is bursting at the seams with dense, layered events and motivations and motifs. The horror beats are all executed with pinpoint precision; the acting is beautifully absurd at times; the score and lighting and framing of almost every scene is a joy to behold.

The infusion of Poe’s works into the titles, in the form of character names, and all the poetry, and the melancholy nature with which Verna (it is an anagram of Raven, in case you didn’t figure that out) goes about collecting her debt, all of it forms a spectacular whole.

And, just in case you need one more final sign that this show is the total package, it opens (and closes, in a way) with Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2), on the night when Roderick and Madeline buried Rufus alive behind a brick wall, with one of the bricks facing Rufus telling him in white chalk: “YOU ARE SO SMALL.”

Talk about taste.

Don’t miss it.