I love October, it's my favorite month, and Halloween is my favorite holiday. I like to do special things all month just to savor it, and towards the top of that list is watching scary movies and TV shows. And while horror has plenty of existing media to choose from, it does get a little dull JUST rewatching the classics or trying to find a diamond in the schlock with lesser pieces of work. So it's exciting to get something brand new and watchable at Halloween every year. Mike Flanagan has been a real godsend in this regard, and I've really enjoyed his series on Netflix. They make Netflix worth subscribing to, at least for October, and I hope he keeps at it every year.
So with that said, The Fall of the House of Usher was enjoyable, but not great. It's a love letter to Poe, taking his works and reinterpreting them into one cohesive storyline about a pair of twins who sell the lives of their bloodline to the Devil (a devil, at least). It's a story about an unavoidable conclusion, and lets us know this up front. Six Usher children are dead, and we're going to find out how.
I'll start with the main problem of the show, there's too many children to kill off. I can imagine it in my head, Mike Flanagan is dreaming up this series and he thinks to himself, this year for my horror show I'll do Succession and I'll convert one of Poe's horror stories for each episode! It'll be amazing! But that's not really how it worked out.
Poe's horror stories are weird and self-contained. When they tried to bring them into a storyline they already had planned, everything about them that was "literary" was lost, and they just became ways to kill another character through callbacks to a story the TV audience never read. What does Prospero Usher's story and Prince Prospero's story have in common? There's a big party and a scary guest in a deathly mask. The most surface level elements, props basically. Prospero Usher didn't do anything to deserve to die, he was just a rich stupid kid, and through the wackiest series of misunderstandings possible sprayed himself and all his guests with acid. They did include a little bit about filming it all and using it as blackmail to give him a heel turn, but still. It's not the same story, it's similar set design and costuming.
And it continues on like this. An Usher child gets focused on and then they die horribly. The formulaic nature of it gets somewhat boring at times. And it's made worse because the story doesn't really care about the Usher child about to die, we don't get to know them. We don't get to care about them. We actually have time to do so, but we don't. Instead we keep getting this muddled thing the writers do where these children are doomed to die because of a supernatural deal sealed long ago, but also they did something wicked and get their comeuppance. Or sometimes they don't really, they just have problems, and then get a comeuppance anyway. I think it would have been better to pick a side, they gotta die because they gotta die, or they actually live or die based on their own vices and virtues. Because as it is, it doesn't work that well.
And then because it doesn't work that well, it really gets to be a slog knocking all six children off, plus an intro and finale episode. Four children would have been the ideal number, with six episodes. I know that means less Poe homage, but since the homage is VERY surface level and doesn't translate very well, is that really losing out on so much?
While the second story of the Usher twins' backstory starts off pretty well, in a sort of Tim Burton-esque flashback, the next part about them rising to power at the pharmaceutical company, again, gets overly long. It's not that poorly of a conceived story, it's just not THAT amazing that you're sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to hear how they outsmart Longshot from Battlestar Galactica. And most of it happens off-screen through plot convenience. Somehow tricking the federal government and screwing up their case makes them run the company with just one murder thrown in. Or maybe the Devil made that happen, even though it was their plan all along, and the Devil only showed up after it was done. And then somehow they control and extract all the profits from a publicly traded company they don't own a majority stake in. Oh whatever.
Speaking of the Devil, this show also crosses its feet on just what kind of character this character is. She entices people to sell the lives of their children so they can be big successes as corrupt pharmaceutical heads who get millions of people killed... but she won't stop humble bragging about how she would have just murdered this next Usher child painlessly if only they wouldn't have just done that thing they did that they shouldn'ah done. What? Prospero just wanted to have sprinklers during his party, really. Camille just wanted to take some pictures of chimps who were being abused in a lab. Leo just wanted to replace his boyfriend's cat because he was falsely led to believe he murdered the thing (by the Devil, by the way) even though he didn't. They weren't pure and innocent, but neither was Carlo Gugino acting like some justice delivering archangel. She kept blaming them right before she murdered them using any convenient excuse, often while admitting she was going to murder them anyway. Who is this character supposed to be?
The height of this absurdity is her explaining to Lenore how her mother will start some nonsense charity that will save millions of lives before murdering her too. So the Devil is cool helping history's greatest monsters murder and do evil, but she feels bad about killing Lenore. Does she love murder and evil or not? This show can't decide.
She also has a Maoist rant toward the end about how poverty and hunger and boo-boos and sad puppy dogs could all be SOLVED with just some money from rich people. Just a one time cash payment of a few billion, and famine will be SOLVED! For something that clearly wishes to be a progressive piece of entertainment, I think putting a mathematically illiterate, economically illiterate, sociologically illiterate rant in the mouth of a woman wasn't all that progressive. I can believe the Devil would tell you the world's problems can be solved with a one time cash payment (of other peoples' money), but he wouldn't be uneducated enough to believe it himself. And it's cringy to think an adult in Hollywood is trying to preach to modern youth and tell them society's troubles are just the result of rich people not throwing a little cash money at them. It's insulting to the audience to think they're dumb enough to believe that, and it's a little twisted to think mass media is telling teenagers this is how their world works. As you may well know, you could confiscate all the assets of every billionaire in America and it wouldn't fund the federal government for a whole year. And utopian answers don't exist in the real world, even if the rich did have more money. The world has troubles, but it's not because rich mommies and daddies are just too mean to wave a magic money wand at us plebians and solve them.
Now to the other hand, what did work was all the technical stuff, the filmic stuff. The cinematography was engrossing, the score was great, the sets were great. The atmosphere and the mood were on point, which is huge when you're talking about horror. Things could drag out a little too long (if one could selectively nap through every scene about Tamerlane, would you really miss anything of value or substance?), but on the whole the direction and pacing were good.
And the modern day stuff with Roderick Usher was fun. Bruce Greenwood did a great job, I did wonder where his story was going and what was going through his head, the actor made the character fascinating. Mark Hamill was also fun in this regard. And the frame scenes between him and August Dupine in the haunted house were fun, and did a good job adding interest and mixing the action up. While the children's stories had their boring parts, being able to bounce back to the haunted house helped break that up (which was needed).
And also a special shout-out to 30-something Madeline Usher, because despite that whole late 70s thing taking too long to get anywhere and not really getting anywhere that amazing, she was distractingly hot in every scene she was in and made most of it very easy to watch.
All in all, this is another solid effort by Mike Flanagan and his team, and if you've enjoyed his past work it's easy to recommend. As usual, it's really much less about the destination, and much more about getting some fun, well-made horror on the way there.