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But he wouldn’t last the night anyway — Madeline poisoned him with cyanide. After Leo (Rahul Kohli) wakes up from a bender with bloodstained hands to find his boyfriend Julius’ (Daniel Jun) cat stabbed to death in their living room, he knows he’s in trouble. But then he starts experiencing disturbing and violent visions — attacks from the cat, dead animals — to the point where he uses Thor’s hammer (a gift from Chris Hemsworth, naturally) to tear his apartment apart looking for the cat. Thinking he sees the feline out on his balcony, he chases after it in a rage… and falls off the ledge to his death on the street below. The first two episodes of The Fall of the House of Usher premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2023 before the Netflix release the following month, being viewed more than 13 million times in its first two weeks. It was met with positive reviews, with critics praising its production values, directing, and performances (in particular from Gugino, Greenwood and Mark Hamill), although they were divided on its narrative, notably in relation to the source materials.
Storyline
Though the series’ title comes from only a single source, fans will already recognize that this is more of a hodgepodge. There are familiar character names, directly absorbed plotlines, overt and subtle visual nods. In November 2023, Roderick Usher, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, loses all six of his children within two weeks. Auguste Dupin, an Assistant United States Attorney who dedicated his career to exposing Fortunato's corruption, to his childhood home, where he tells the true story of his family and unveils the Ushers' darkest secrets. Fearing that her body will be exhumed for medical study, Roderick insists that she be entombed for two weeks in the family tomb located in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helps Roderick put Madeline's body in the tomb, whereupon the narrator realizes that Madeline and Roderick are twins.
Sources of inspiration
He turns back in time to see the Moon shining through the suddenly widened crack in the house. As he watches, the House of Usher splits in two and the fragments sink away into the lake. Flanagan’s version of Roderick Usher is a power-hungry and money-hungry CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, a company that can be compared to Purdue Pharma in both its wealth and its development of destructive, addictive drugs.
The Raven
The narrator also notes that Madeline's body has rosy cheeks, which sometimes happens after death. Over the next week, both Roderick and the narrator find themselves increasingly agitated. When the narrator arrives at the house of Usher in Poe’s story, Roderick and his sister Madeline are the only surviving members of the family, similar to how Flanagan sets up his adaptation. But Poe’s story doesn’t explicitly mention the other members of the Usher family, including children, or the manner in which the other members of the family perished—something that Flanagan’s series focuses its entire run explaining. English majors will likely know where some of the stories are going just by seeing the episode names. When the young and trendy Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota) decides to host an exclusive sex-and-drugs party at one of dad’s old factories in an abbey, readers of The Masque of the Red Death will know it’s going to be a gruesome scene.
Mike Flanagan's Fall Of The House Of Usher Isn't Just A Great Netflix Show, But Possibly My New Favorite Horror Series - CinemaBlend
Mike Flanagan's Fall Of The House Of Usher Isn't Just A Great Netflix Show, But Possibly My New Favorite Horror Series.
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All advice, including picks and predictions, is based on individual commentators’ opinions and not that of Minute Media or its related brands. No one should expect to make money from the picks and predictions discussed on this website. In the original Poe story, an unnamed narrator arrives at the Usher home and the only detail we know about him is that he is Roderick’s “best and only friend” who has traveled across the country after receiving a letter complaining of an illness. The narrator observes Roderick’s peculiar behavior and even takes part in some of his harebrained ideas, including entombing his sister Madeline for two weeks before burying her. Flanagan finishes his Netflix contract on a high, gleefully capturing Poe’s magic, eerie romance and sense of dread.
Both the story and its adaptation end with the Usher twins, Roderick and Madeline, at each other’s throats.
The show, specially created for the sizable Dolby Live stage and presented in collaboration with Live Nation and MGM Resorts International, provides audiences with an extraordinary immersive experience through extravagant costumes and cutting-edge lighting, video, and special effects technology. A 20-year collection of smash singles from the multi-talented showman, including “Yeah,” “U Remind Me,” “My Boo,” “Love In This Club,” “OMG,” and “You Make Me Wanna,” fill the exclusive, only-in-Vegas extravaganza. Every visitor receives an up-close-and-personal encounter with the superstar in the new show, which incorporates audience participation and production across the 5,200-seat entertainment arena. A television adaptation was produced by ATV for the ITV network in 1966 for the horror anthology series Mystery and Imagination. In the Roger Corman film from 1960, released in the United States as House of Usher, Vincent Price starred as Roderick Usher, Myrna Fahey as Madeline and Mark Damon as Philip Winthrop, Madeline's fiancé.
Usher Announces Final Dates for His Las Vegas Residency
Basically, imagine if a bunch of amoral 1-percenters were caught in a Final Destination death loop. To secure their fortune — and future — two ruthless siblings build a family dynasty that begins to crumble when their heirs mysteriously die, one by one. Mike Flanagan’s latest limited series, The Fall of the House of Usher, based on the short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, is now on Netflix. It turns out that almost every branch of the Usher family tree has been cut by violent horror. ” “No, not before,” he replies in one of the show’s many glimpses of Flanagan’s viciously dark sense of humor.
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However, Flanagan is smart enough to shift the Poe narratives ever so slightly for a modern audience. His version of The Tell-Tale Heart is a modern gem, and “The Gold-Bug” is reimagined as a new brand for the Usher company. But the themes remain the same—guilt, obsession, vengeance, and a supernatural sense of justice. Roderick Usher’s children are getting what they deserve, not merely because they are the fruit of a very poisoned tree but because they have made horrific decisions to stay in the shelter of wealth and privilege. Late one stormy night, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) invites an investigator named C.
Episodes
She appears near the narrator, but never acknowledges his presence. The narrator and Roderick place her in a tomb despite her flushed, lively appearance. In the tale's conclusion, Madeline escapes from the tomb and returns to Roderick, scaring him to death.
The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 collection of stories by Ray Bradbury, contains a novella called "Usher II," a homage to Poe. Its main character, William Stendahl, builds a house based on the specifications from Poe's story to murder his enemies. In 1979, Italian state channel RAI loosely adapted the short story, together with other Poe's works, in the series I racconti fantastici di Edgar Allan Poe.[33] It was directed by Daniele D'Anza, with Roderick Usher played by Philippe Leroy; music was composed by pop band Pooh. During one sleepless night, the narrator reads aloud to Usher as eerie sounds are heard throughout the mansion. He witnesses Madeline's reemergence and the subsequent, simultaneous death of the twins. The narrator is the only character to escape the House of Usher, which he views as it cracks and sinks into the mountain lake.
Her death brings Verna no joy, but she does tell Lenore about all the good her mother does in the future thanks to Lenore’s heroic choice to save her — before allowing the youngest and kindest Usher to die peacefully. Roderick and Madeline’s trauma begins when their devout mother, Eliza (Annabeth Gish), dies at home, and the twins bury her in a homemade coffin in the backyard. Eliza claws her way out and exacts vengeance on William Longfellow (Robert Longstreet) — her married boss, CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, and Madeline and Roderick’s neglectful father. The Fall of the House of Usher is an American gothic horror drama television miniseries created by Mike Flanagan. All eight episodes were released on Netflix on October 12, 2023, each directed by either Flanagan or Michael Fimognari, with the latter also acting as cinematographer for the entire series.
For eight hours, instead of rooting for people, you’re rooting for payback, leading to a satisfying, but surface-level experience. The horror auteur uses his familiar acting troupe and the works of Edgar Allan Poe as the backdrop for an eight-episode takedown of an opioid-pushing family that somewhat resembles the Sacklers. Feast your eyes on a new clip above and learn more about the limited series below.
(Poe had one too.) Roderick has been haunted by all his awful children who have shuffled off this mortal coil, and it’s because it feels like the ghosts are finally coming for him that he is ready to confess. He’s having visions of monstrous ghosts, including the recurring specter of Verna (Carla Gugino), a figure that connects most of these tall tales as a sort of vengeful force of karma, the devil come to take what she’s due from a man who profited off the pain of others. Just like the other characters that make up the world of the Netflix series, Flanagan puts a Poe character from another story central to the show’s narration, though Roderick himself is the show’s true narrator. Auguste Dupin, a character from Poe’s detective fiction stories, has been circling Roderick for years related to the pharmaceutical company the Ushers run. Roderick beckons Dupin to the house for one last conversation where he recounts the deaths of each of his children before revealing the deal that he and Madeline made with The Raven in their youth. Siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built a pharmaceutical company into an empire of wealth, privilege and power; however, secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty sta...
Throwing a bookend at Alessandra’s head “was not out of spite or cruelty,” said Miller. Unlike other people in this episode, her death wasn’t about that. She truly wanted to save everyone.” Yeah, well, so much for that. They’ll get the whole world — running Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, making more money than they could ever imagine, literally getting away with murder — all sans consequences. “When you’re done, at the end of it all… just before you would have died anyway, your bloodline dies with you,” Verna offers them.
After all, he’s the creator of some of the best horror content on the streamer. And he’s the one behind bringing The Fall of the House of Usher to life from page to screen. But it’s all thanks to iconic poet and author Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name that we’re getting the television adaptation. The twins that were thick as thieves end up being each other’s downfall in both versions of the story.
She also inherits a fortune when Fortunato collapses, and she gives most of it away to domestic violence and abuse charities. But she keeps enough to start a nonprofit, setting up chapters all over the world. She calls it the Lenore Foundation after her daughter, and in a decade alone, she saves millions of lives. That [denial] sort of seeps in more and more and more,” Miller said.
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