Mike Flanagan‘s company Intrepid Pictures has moved on from the Netflix streaming service and is now set up with a multi-year deal at Amazon’s Prime Video, but there’s still one last Flanagan-produced series coming to Netflix. It’s the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired limited series The Fall of the House of Usher, which will be available to watch as of October 12th – and today a clip has arrived online to give us an early look at the characters we’ll be following through the events of the show. You can watch it in the embed above.
Here’s the set-up for Poe’s story The Fall of the House of Usher: Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline are the only two surviving members of the aristocratic Usher family. For many years, they have lived together in the ancient mansion which is their ancestral family home. Madeline Usher has been ill for a long time and is not expected to live much longer. Partly due to his sister’s illness and partly, he believes, due to the negative influence of the old mansion in which he lives, Roderick Usher has fallen into a deep melancholy. To help recover his spirits, he summons his old friend, the story’s unnamed narrator, to come visit him.
This limited series isn’t solely based on that story, though. Just like Flanagan and his writers drew inspiration from multiple different Henry James stories when crafting The Haunting of Bly Manor and multiple Christopher Pike stories when they made The Midnight Club, they’re mixing elements of multiple different Poe stories for this show. Here’s the synopsis for the series: Ruthless siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built Fortunato Pharmaceuticals into an empire of wealth, privilege and power. But past secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman from their youth.
The cast of The Fall of the House of Usher includes Bruce Greenwood (Gerald’s Game), Kate Siegel (Hush), Rahul Kohli (Midnight Mass), Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Carla Gugino (The Haunting of Hill House), Mary McDonnell (Battlestar Galactica), Carl Lumbly (Doctor Sleep), Henry Thomas (The Haunting of Bly Manor), Samantha Sloyan (Grey’s Anatomy), T’Nia Miller (Years and Years), Sauriyan Sapkota (The Midnight Club), Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights), Katie Parker (Absentia), Michael Trucco (How I Met Your Mother), Malcolm Goodwin (iZombie), Crystal Balint (A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting), Kyleigh Curran (Secrets of Sulphur Springs), Paola Nuñez (Bad Boys for Life), Aya Furukawa (The Cabin in the Woods), Matt Biedel (Narcos: Mexico), Daniel Jun (The Expanse), Ruth Codd (The Midnight Club), Robert Longstreet (Halloween Kills), Annabeth Gish (Before I Wake), Willa Fitzgerald (Scream: The TV Series), and Igby Rigney (F9).
Characters include Bruce Greenwood’s Roderick Usher, “the towering patriarch of the Usher dynasty”; Mark Hamill as “a character surprisingly at home in the shadows”; Mary McDonnell as Madeline Usher, Roderick’s twin sister; and Carl Lumbly as Poe’s investigator C. Auguste Dupin. Gugino, who described The Fall of the House of Usher as “batshit crazy in the best possible way” when the show was in production, also gave some information about her character Verna: “There is a fantastical supernatural element to the story, and she is the manifestation of that. You could say she’s the executor of fate or the executor of karma.” Gugino added that the show has quite a lot of very dark humor, but also “really touches the soul”.
Flanagan directed four of the episodes, and the other four were directed by Michael Fimognari, who was Flanagan’s cinematographer on Oculus, Before I Wake, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and the Flanagan / Netflix shows The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. Flanagan and Fimognari executive produced The Fall of the House of Usher with Trevor Macy and Emmy Grinwis.
Will you be watching The Fall of the House of Usher when it reaches Netflix next month? What did you think of the clip above? Let us know by leaving a comment below.