You might know Flanagan from such works as The Haunting of Hill House, Dr. Sleep, Ouija: Origin of Evil, or half a dozen other things I’m not going to list out here because I’m on my iPad.
Now on Netflix he’s taking on Poe’s Usher couple, and initial reviews are very good.
I am intrigued because it’s Flanagan, otherwise, I might not take a look at something that looks like Succession or White Lotus, but with monsters. Still, it premieres tomorrow night I think, and has a very interesting cast, and I’ll definitely check it out.
Here’s a trailer that gives away too much. I’ve added an extra T to the prefix because I’m too stupid to embed YouTube videos on the site.
htttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvuAWVzP6wI
I may have to watch. Many years ago the Dryden theater at Eastman House in Rochester NY ran a series of films and remakes. They ran all versions of any one film in a single night, so you got to see them back-to-back. Usually there were only two versions, but for The Fall of the House of Usher there were several. Most of them were pretty short and experimental. The Roger Corman version was the longest. I’d be interested to see how someone else handled the story.
(There have been multiple comic book adaptations of it, too. The Classics Illustrated version is both the most faithful and the most tepid. The version that appeared in one of the Warren magazines back around 1970 – Creepy or Eerie or one of those – was the most stylish and impressive.
For the most off-the-wall version, see Elvira’s Haunted Hills – really. It’s a spot-on sendup of Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe movies, but especially Usher.
Cassandra Peterson mortgaged her house to make this one.
Thanks for letting us know, Maserschmidt. I’m a huge fan of Flanagan and TFotHoU so I will be watching this asap. As I always do in threads that involve MF, I want to recommend one of his lesser known but outstanding films, Absentia
Mrs. Solost and I watched ep.1 last night, and I’m hooked. More ‘Dynasty’ than ‘Die, Nasty!’ so far; the supernatural elements are being introduced gradually amid the story of the origin of the Usher family-owned pharma empire.
This is basically a fictional world where the Ushers are the Sackler family. And get their just desserts. Well I’m 4 episodes in and gorgeously horrible things have happened to 3 out of 6 very horrible people.
I had to have it pointed out to me that Verna is an anagram of Raven. Hee.
We watched the entire series in one night - enjoyed it and have little/no complaints. Will likely watch it again for details missed the first time around.
I’m three episodes in and I’m loving it. I adored Hill House, but I thought Bly Manor was a bit slow for my liking. I haven’t gotten around to Midnight Mass yet, but it’s queued up. I remember seeing Flanagan’s Occulus at TIFF Midnight Madness years ago. I liked it well enough, but could not have forseen that the director doing the Q&A at 2 in the morning would go on to such a stature in the genre.
I enjoyed Fall of the House of Usher. The only previous work of his that I’ve seen was Midnight Mass, which I enjoyed. Incidentally, this article from The Hollywood Reporter discusses the events of the fourth episode (The Black Cat).
Flanagan wanted to make it clear that after the cat goes missing, the menacing replacement cat he adopts is entirely a hallucination caused by the mysterious Verna (Carla Gugino) and that Pluto is alive and well.
And this article, also from The Hollywood Reporter, lists all of the Poe references in the show.
You might enjoy Flanagan’s first two series from his “horror anthologies very loosely based on classic works of fiction” trio, then.
I really liked The Haunting of Hill House. The second anthology series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, I enjoyed slightly less than THOHH, but still very good, I thought.
I’m surprised at the number of Poe references I’ve caught so far. I read a lot of Poe, but as a kid, so it’s been a long time. I’ll have to check that article out after I see the whole series to see what I missed.
Just watched episode 4. I liked the tiny bit of humor the writers snuck in, getting a little dig in at CSI and a hundred other police procedurals, when Roderick was looking at the security video of the lab, trying to get a good look at the female security guard’s face, and said in a commanding voice “enhance!”.
Pym the lawyer: uh, I can zoom in, but I can’t enhance, that’s not really a thing.
Roderick to his sister Madeline: really? You can’t enhance?
One question about that; why didn’t Roderick or Madeline recognize Verna as the bartender from years ago with whom they made that deal (with the devil, apparently)?
In the scene right after the security video scene where Roderick said ‘enhance’ and the lawyer said, ‘uh, that’s not a thing’, there was a scene where either Roderick or Madeline was holding a blown-up still image of the security guard that did have a label saying ‘enhanced’, but looked like it just had something like a Photshop ‘Unsharp Mask’ filter applied to it. Which will make a pixilated image slightly sharper, but not as razor-sharp as a ‘CSI-style’ enhancement. The woman’s face still could not be seen very clearly, but it did look like to me, from the concerned look on Roderick / Madeline’s face, that they were starting to suspect who it was.
It was a grainy photo of a woman they’d met once 40 years ago, and presumably should’ve been an old woman by now. Not really surprising they didn’t recognize her.
