It was just announced in October that the next Netflix series from Mike Flanagan – the genre regular behind the Netflix shows The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass – would be the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired The Fall of the House of Usher. Less than four months after the announcement, The Fall of the House of Usher is already in production, with cast members Kate Siegel and Rahul Kohli having confirmed this by sharing pictures from the set.
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 Bly Manor, they’re mixing elements of multiple different Poe stories for this show.
In addition to Siegel (Hush) and Kohli (Midnight Mass), the cast of The Fall of the House of Usher includes Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Carla Gugino (The Haunting of Hill House), Frank Langella (Masters of the Universe), 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), and Igby Rigney (F9).
We only know details about a few of the characters:
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.
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.
Flanagan has said that this show is going to be “blood-soaked and wild.”