I binged most of The Fall of the House of Usher in a single day. I didn’t mean to, but my friends and I had sunken too deep into the couch cushions, only moving for toilet breaks between episodes and to pick at takeaway pasta while still watching the show. It would be easy to assume inertia carried us through seven straight hours on the couch, but more honestly, we were completely enraptured. I’d begged them to watch the new limited series with me, because 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I’m a big Mike Flanagan fan and I wanted to watch his new show as soon as possible. My head hurt by the end, but꧟ it was worth it.
What has always interested me about Flanagan’s work is his love for literature. Much of his work has been adapted from literary horror classics – Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and now The Fall of the House of Usher. Far from making faithful interpretations of these texts, he instead breathes new life into them, reworking them into contemporary retellings of classic tales. The Fall of the House of Usher is a love letter to Edgar Allen Poe’s woꦑrk, each episode titled and inspired by a different quote or story of Poe’s. Each episode portrays a death, and each alludes to a different work.
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This makes the show extremely enjoyable if you’re familiar with Poe’s work. I imagine that the people who cheer every time they see a surprise cameo in a Marvel movie feel the same as I did when ﷺI gasped and pointed like that Leonardo DiCaprio meme at the reveal of a bottle of Amontillado in the show. The moment I saw a Raven, I went, “Ah! Raven!” as if it wasn’t the most obvious, famous Poe reference in the world. I love how Flanagan ties literature into his work at large, and I especially loved it here and how the show wore its inspirations on its sleeve.
But my friends who’d never read Poe’s work found it just as gripping because the show is great fun regardless of🦩 your familiarity with those classics. Part of what makes the show great is how it balances gruesome, gory deaths with humour. It takes the billionaire satire of Succession and turns it up to a hundred, murdering its cast of nepo babies with horrific, over-the-top violence in ways that are sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, and u🐷sually entirely deserved. And with every death, I had my hands clamped over my mouth in horror.
The show is by no means perfect. Some of the dialogue came off as undeniably cheesy: at one point a character g꧒rabs the arm of one of the Usher children and raps ﷽the lyrics of WAP in a gravelly, seductive voice, and I felt everybody on the couch collectively cringe. It’s not the sharpest critique of capitalism that’s ever been created, though it does make a decent swing at portraying the pure hedonism that the ultra-rich descend into when they’ve got nothing else to care about.
But there are moments of surprising clarity, best portrayed when the villains of this story – our protagonists – are 🉐entirely clear that they are fully aware of the evil they’ve done. Poe’s work is all about madness, but what lies just under the surface of Flanagan’s series is greed and emptiness. It reiterates what we all already know: to get that rich, you have to be evil. A deal with a mysterious raven-woman helps, but it’s impossible to look at the Ushers and see them as anything but cruel. Regardless of where they came from, they always had the choice to do something🔯 better, and they never did.
Netflix has been pushing The Fall of the House of Usher hard, and while I usually have serious reservations about the quality of Netflix’s offerings, this series really is worth the watch. My friends actively disliked Flanagan’s work before this, and have since come over to the 🦩light side, where my correct opinions are validated. Besides, it’s spooky season – what better way to celebrate?