Carla Gugino's Vamping Props Up Mike Flanagan's Fall of the House of Usher

“Language … is musical.” That sentiment — excerpted, naturally, from a longer monologue — comes from Carla Gugino’s character on The Fall of the House of Usher. But it may as well be series creator Mike Flanagan speaking through her. Over the course of five limited series for Netflix, the Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game filmmaker has developed a writing style that’s heavy on florid prose and intense speeches. This is a matter of taste — either you go for heightened, theatrical dialogue, or you don’t. But it’s not what made Flanagan famous.

What made Flanagan famous were terrifying horror sequences, lent an extra macabre punch by a slow build of emotional context. Flanagan’s first Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House, excelled in this department. Ever since, he’s been tinkering with the balance between horror and melodrama, to mixed results. The Fall of the House of Usher is no exception, although the source material — no less than the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe — suits the filmmaker just fine. It gives him somewhere to put his more grandiloquent impulses.

Another major influence on The Fall of the House of Usher is HBO’s Succession, the rare contemporary show so popular that even those who haven’t seen it can recognize its footprint. The Fall of the House of Usher revolves around the eponymous family, reimagined here as the billionaire magnates of a prescription opioid empire. (This isn’t the first veiled reference to the Sackler family and its Oxycontin fortune on TV this year; similar personalities showed up in Amazon’s Dead Ringers reimagining back in April.) Befitting their ill-gotten wealth, the Ushers all embody various shades of narcissism and/or sociopathy — if one of them appears sympathetic, just give them time.

There are six Usher siblings on the series, from five different mothers. Eldest son Frederick (Henry Thomas) and eldest daughter Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) are the legitimate heirs to their father Roderick’s (Bruce Greenwood) empire. Victorine (T’Nia Miller), Camille (Kate Siegel), Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), and Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) are the multiracial half-siblings. (The actors who play them are all also Flanagan regulars.) Roderick was a “bastard” himself, as we learn in flashbacks to a suburban-gothic vision of the late ‘50s and early ’60s early on in the show. So he lavishes wealth — if not affection — on all of his children equally, and they all compete for his attention and approval. Then there’s aunt Madeline (Mary McDonnell), the most ruthless and terrifying of them all.

Our tale is told in three parts, each of them legibly interwoven into the series’s timeline: The past, which jumps between Roderick and Madline’s traumatic childhood and cutthroat rise; the present, in which all six Usher scions meet gruesomely ironic ends; and the storytelling wraparound, in which Roderick lays out his family history to C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), the prosecutor who’s been trying to nab the Ushers for decades. Roderick promises Auguste a confession at the end of his ghoulish tale. He gets that and more, with loads of Halloween atmosphere (think glowing orange fires and white light through boarded-up windows) along the way.

The series’s interpretation of classic Poe tales — “Masque of the Red Death,” “Murder at the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Gold-Bug,” The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Raven” all surface over the course of eight episodes — builds in mood and effectiveness as the story goes along. At first, it all seems kind of silly in a wink-wink “I caught that reference” type of way. But one thing Mike Flanagan does well is commit to a bit, and the self-seriousness of the exercise actually increases the impact once characters start reciting Poe verses at length later on in the story.

Carla Gugino’s turn as Verna, the show’s sexy, bemused Angel of Death, is a big part of what clicks about The Fall of the House of Usher. An immortal being who’s drawn to the Ushers by her admiration of their work — opioids kill thousands every year, keeping psychopomps like her busy — Verna appears in different guises throughout the eight-episode series, each of them tailored to the comeuppance she’s about to deliver. And she throws herself into the physicality of each character, acting dainty in the guise of a black cat and seductive as an uninvited guest at Prospero’s Masque.

By comparison, the series’s straight-shooter boardroom banter sinks under the weight of Flanagan’s wordy writing style. Every character in this series has a photographic memory: Someone doesn’t just mention what kind of car they drive, they run down a full list of specs including horsepower and miles per gallon. Flanagan is not a particularly funny guy, either, and jokes about Trump and cascading lists of pop-cultural references similarly fall flat. Compared to Midnight Mass, however, this series gets leaner and more horror-oriented as it goes along, mitigating its clunkier aspects in the process.

One thing that stands out about The Fall of the House of Usher compared to previous Flanagan limited series is the emphasis on sex and drugs: An orgy scene in the second episode could only happen in the ratings-free context of a streaming service, and Kohli’s character snorts everything but his siblings’ ashes over the course of his arc. These, plus hints of BDSM and overt queerness and polyamory, play much like the Poe references: corny at first, but effective once the show relaxes into its solemn tone later on.

The ghastly visuals also build to a crescendo in The Fall of the House of Usher, starting with unsettling shadows in the corner of the frame and culminating with gruesome tableaus of white-eyed corpses. Goopy, visceral skinned bodies get extra emphasis in this series, but bare feet on broken glass (this one tied to the show’s most visually elegant death, inspired by Dario Argento’s Suspiria) and nightmarish at-home medical experimentation also deliver on shock value. These images are unapologetically dark, and that’s what works about them.

Where The Fall of the House of Usher — and, so far in his career at least, its creator — stumbles is when it loses sight of its strengths in favor of unchecked dramatic monologuing and worn-out “eat the rich” sentiment. Sure, it’s satisfying to see billionaires suffer for their many, many sins. It’s in the lead-up to those moments where things get shaky.

The Fall of the House of Usher premieres October 12 on Netflix. Join the discussion about the show in our forums. 

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and film critic based in Chicago.