We are like a virus,” one character from The Fall Of The House Of Usher says as he closes his arc. What precedes this line is hours of backstory on the Ushers, headed by twins Roderick and Madeline; and present-day, where the Ushers fall one by one.

As ever, horror as a genre is very much a macabre expression of various facets of the human condition, and in Mike Flanagan’s hands, the story is whittled bit by compassionate bit, into an object we can all look upon and recognize ourselves in. It isn’t always nice to see yourself in someone else, or someone else’s story, because at times, we see the parts of ourselves we never acknowledge. In The Fall Of The House Of Usher, it is the things said out loud, very eloquently that might jolt some of us back into ourselves and remind us what we had set out to do in life and where we went instead.

Taking the work of horror fiction’s OG Edgar Allen Poe and not fudging it up by either staying too true to the text or deviating too far from it, and somehow making your own mark on it couldn’t have been easy, but Flanagan has done it before, and he does it again.

Where he’s adapted Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep into miniseries, Flanagan has also worked with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House and Henry James’s The Turn Of The Screw for his The Haunting... anthology for Netflix. Flanagan spins the source material with such obvious love, that fans of the books forgive him for every liberty he takes. He chased The Haunting Of Bly Manor with Midnight Mass, and followed that up in 2022 with The Midnight Club, based on popular YA writer Christopher Pike’s book of the same name, while tinkering within the series with almost all of Pike’s bibliography.

The Fall Of The House Of Usher will by turns depress you and thrill you. The depressiveness arises from how accurate the description of modern lives is: chasing wealth and beauty and physical symbols of perceived status while completely neglecting what we could be turning our attentions to instead. The thrill is in how well every frame plays out, how chronically unlikeable every character is, how you can’t help but wonder what you would have done in their place. If it engages you and scares you, whatever it is, it is worth sticking to. 

With each miniseries, we are treated to some of the best writing for television within the genre. Flanagan’s characters tend to speak frequently and at length, and if you’re a fan, you possibly wait for the well-placed soliloquies, because they speak to you so intensely.

The Fall Of The House Of Usher will by turns depress you and thrill you. The depressiveness arises from how accurate the description of modern lives is: chasing wealth and beauty and physical symbols of perceived status while completely neglecting what we could be turning our attentions to instead. The thrill is in how well every frame plays out, how chronically unlikeable every character is, how you can’t help but wonder what you would have done in their place. If it engages you and scares you, whatever it is, it is worth sticking to.

There are always sweet little Easter eggs for his audience in Flanagan’s creations. The most obvious non-Easter egg perhaps has to be the cast of actors that rotates through all his shows, plus or minus one or two. This isn’t a bad thing because if one actor can play a doting father in one, and a rich douchebag in another, there’s the range you look for in an actor right there, and the skill of the director in drawing the performance out of his cast.

There are also references to the Flanagan universe as a whole, and references to everything within the time period the story is set in, plus an always-stellar soundtrack.

Whether horror is your bag or not, The Fall Of The House Of Usher is a must-watch, if for nothing, then for Roderick Usher’s speech about lemons, which is the world’s tiniest crash course in advertising and PR.