Shock, horror! Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a trashy mess of a literary reboot

What do we mean when we talk about adaptation? Oftentimes, it’s a lot like cooking with a pre-written recipe – you’re free to make tweaks, throw in a few extra spices, but the end result remains more or less the same. The Fall of the House of Usher, Netflix’s new horror miniseries based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, takes a different approach, tipping the contents of every cupboard into one giant blender. Yes, you might say. The right ingredients are all in there. But the final product is a big, indiscernible mess.

Created by horror maven Mike Flanagan – the showrunner behind Netflix chillers The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and The Midnight Club – House of Usher is extremely loosely adapted from Poe’s 1839 story of the same name. It follows wealthy pharmaceutical magnate Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), whose adult children all start dying in mysterious and macabre circumstances. Most of the story is told via flashback, with each episode forming a gothic parable drawing from one or several of Poe’s published works. Tales such as “The Raven” and “The Telltale Heart” are remixed and modernised, along with a smattering of Poe’s less famous stories. The end result, however, is muddled: a hodge-podge of ideas and themes held together with spit and glue. As a piece of television, it’s trashy and ersatz. As a work of adaptation, it’s even worse.

Though swathes of its story are set years in the past, you can feel House of Usher straining for contemporary relevance in every ligament. In Poe’s original work, Usher is a recluse living in an inherited mansion; in Netflix’s version, he’s a Big Pharma tycoon. The premise – deliberately, we presume – invokes the Sackler family, the corporate dynasty infamous for their role in the US opioid crisis. (The Sacklers were also at the centre of the 2021 Hulu drama Dopesick, and of Netflix’s own series Painkiller earlier this year.) The venomous infighting between siblings, meanwhile, seems like a self-conscious attempt to ape HBO’s masterful Succession – an unflattering comparison that’s made all the more inevitable when the soundtrack cuts in with distinctly Succession-esque minor-key strings.

Though House of Usher’s pointed “eat the rich” messaging is supposed to imbue Poe’s ideas with a timely edge, its attempts at satire too often come across as clumsy and unconvincing. Consider, in the very first episode, the scene where we are introduced to investigator C Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly). The character, rooted in the protagonist of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, meets with Roderick Usher, who tells him he wants to offer his “confession”. Usher’s life of luxury is hammered home as he offers Dupin a drink from a diamond-and-gold-encrusted bottle of cognac. The moment, or perhaps just the prop, gives the character an air of nouveau riche garishness, rather than the kind of stately luxury we are seemingly meant to infer. 

Where the scene really fails is in that most crucial of duties: worldbuilding. It is the year 2023, we are told, but the building in which Dupin and Usher meet seems ripped from the pages of Poe: when Dupin pulls out a 21st-century voice recorder, it feels like an anachronism. The dialogue, too, in this scene and elsewhere, is flimsy and overwrought. “How many subpoenas have you sent me over the years? You finally got me,” Usher says, exposition flying out of his mouth like spat teeth. “Don’t lecture me on family values,” he says shortly afterwards. “You’re just as s*** in that department as I am.” It’s nuanceless stuff, and hard to take seriously. Poe was a writer capable of subtlety and contradiction; House of Usher beats you over the head with its intentions.

If Flanagan had truly been interested in adapting the works of Poe faithfully, there would have been more straightforward ways to do so. An anthology series, perhaps, without the need to contort each disparate story into one big interconnecting narrative. Or a longer-form, substantial weaving together of two or three stories, instead of trying to cram a dozen underdeveloped story ideas into each instalment. Ultimately, many of Poe’s stories are smart and twisty enough to withstand the ravages of time, to retain their power to shock and scandalise even to this day. House of Usher attempts to reinvent something that does not require reinvention. 

Despite Usher’s obsession with Poe, it’s actually a very different Gothic writer who most springs to mind while watching it: Mary Shelley, and her iconic Frankenstein. That is to say, the series itself feels like Victor Frankenstein’s monstrous creation – an artificial thing stitched together from the remains of dead organisms. The difference, I suppose, is that this creature has no philosophy to offer; there’s no reason to spare it the wrath of the mob.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is streaming now on Netflix