The Midnight Club, the latest series from genre filmmaker Mike Flanagan, is currently available to watch on the Netflix streaming service (you can read our review of the show HERE and watch our interview with Flanagan and executive producer Trevor Macy at THIS LINK, or in the embed above) – and next up is the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired limited series The Fall of the House of Usher. Netflix hasn’t announced a premiere date for that one yet, but Flanagan took the opportunity to hype it up a bit during a recent interview with The Wrap… and even compared to the Giallo style!
Here’s what Flanagan had to say about The Fall of the House of Usher:
It’s crazy. It is unlike anything I’ve ever done, but in the other direction. My favorite way to describe it to people is like The Haunting of Hill House is kind of a string quartet, and The Haunting of Bly Manor is this delicate, kind of beautiful piece of classical piano music, and The Fall of the House of Usher is heavy metal. It’s rock and roll. It’s the closest I will get to Giallo. It’s wild. It is colorful and dark and blood-soaked and wicked and funny, and aggressive and scary and hilarious. I’ve never gotten to work on anything like it. We left everything on the field with it, and it’s just bombastic fun. I’m really excited for that to find its way out because I especially think both The Midnight Club and Usher just go off in their own drastically different directions, and next to each other they’re fascinating to me.“
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.
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).
Aside from Roderick Usher, “the towering patriarch of the Usher dynasty”, we only know details about a few of the characters:
Mark Hamill plays “a character surprisingly at home in the shadows”; 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.
I’m really looking forward to The Fall of the House of Usher. Are you a fan of Flanagan’s work, and will you be watching this show? Let us know by leaving a comment below.