Back in October, we heard the very cool news that genre filmmaker Mike Flanagan is drawing inspiration from multiple different Edgar Allan Poe stories to craft a limited series called The Fall of the House of Usher for the Netflix streaming service. The news got even better a few days later when Flanagan described the show as a “crazy heavy metal riff that’s just blood-soaked and wild”. And it keeps getting better, because now the names of the first five cast members have been announced. They are Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Carla Gugino (The Haunting of Hill House), Frank Langella (Masters of the Universe), Mary McDonnell (Battlestar Galactica), and Carl Lumbly (Doctor Sleep).
The Hollywood Reporter provides character details:
Mark Hamill will play “a character surprisingly at home in the shadows”; Frank Langella is Roderick Usher, “the towering patriarch of the Usher dynasty”; Mary McDonnell is Madeline Usher, Roderick’s twin sister; Carl Lumbly plays Poe’s investigator C. Auguste Dupin.
Details on Gugino’s character were not available.
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.
Flanagan hasn’t named the other stories that are inspiring this series. Coming to us from Netflix and Flanagan’s production company Intrepid Pictures, The Fall of the House of Usher will consist of eight episodes. Flanagan will be directing four of those episodes, and the other four will be 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 are executive producing The Fall of the House of Usher with Trevor Macy and Emmy Grinwis.