As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
He's a little burned out that his last moments went Out with a Bang.
After six years on the platform, Mike Flanagan has confirmed that The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) will be his last show on Netflix.
And no, he does not tone down any of his usual schtick here. In fact, one can say that he has a lot of creative methods on how to make you feel unsettled to downright distressed while watching.
This page is going through a clean-up.
General
- All of the deaths of the Ushers. While it can be argued how well deserved their deaths are, there is no denying that they are flat out gruesome and horrifying nonetheless. Each death is mentioned in their individual episodes. Tread lightly going forward, the crew pulled out all the stops to make them as horrifying as possible.
- The visual gore is one thing, but the Usher family's Karma Houdini status is also horrifying. Even without Roderick and Madeline's Deal with the Devil protecting them, it is entirely believable that a family this rich and this powerful could absolutely do whatever they want and face almost no consequences for those actions at all.
Episode 1: A Midnight Dreary
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."
- from The Raven
- The opening. The audience sees a living room wall decorated with balloons and New Year's decor, with a crowd counting down from five. Just before 3, there is a decrypted brick wall, and at 2, split-second images of a raven cawing at the camera, and a woman whose face goes from neutral to a maniacal grin in the blink of an eye, all while Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" plays.
- During the funeral scene, there are split-second shots of the Usher children suffering their horrific fates. They appear in such a quick fashion that the viewer won't have enough time to process what the hell just happened before their eyes. You just saw and heard how they all die, but without proper context, the dots cannot be connected.
- Eliza Usher's religious fanaticism is this due to the Realism-Induced Horror. While it wasn't bad in their childhoods, Roderick and Madeline's mother would grow more disillusioned with time due to her developing CADASIL. So disillusioned in fact, that she rejects traditional medicine and firmly believes that God will heal her.
- Eliza's final night alive. Whoo boy, it's where the story really kicks off.
- In a direct plot reference to its namesake story, an Usher is Not Quite Dead, but is Buried Alive due to being in a death-like state. Here, however, instead of Madeline, it's Eliza. After Roderick and Madeline fail to convince William Longfellow to help Eliza, they return home to find their mother motionless. Believing her to be dead, they bury her in the backyard.
- During the storm, the twins look out the window, and all they see in the backyard is a hole in the ground, their makeshift coffin is smashed to smithereens with splinters of wood everywhere, and muddy footprints leading into the house. Roderick and Madeline slowly walk through their darkened house, looking for any sign of their mother, only for Madeline to silently reveal she sees her... standing right behind Roderick, looking like a freshly risen zombie in the kitchen.
- Her standing behind Roderick before Madeline fearfully points out her location is both a Lightning Reveal and a Freeze-Frame Bonus packed into one.
- Eliza then strangles Roderick with a look of pure malice, only to stop once they both apologize for their actions and beg. She then walks down the street in the dead of night like a woman possessed, her children following. In her final breath, she strangles William and succeeds in killing him (made much worse by Roderick and Madeline deducing that he was their biological father), only to collapse dead soon after the deed.
- After Roderick tells Dupin the story and when the latter asks why he is telling this particular story, the former replies with "I assume that I'm supposed to because she's here." When Dupin asks Roderick to further give meaning to that sentence, the Usher simply states that she's "right behind him". Dupin dismisses this as a power play and refuses to look. Except that, after he says this, if one looks closely to the left, a figure wearing Eliza's muddy nightgown is standing right behind him, out of focus and perfectly blending into the background. And during a thunderclap, the figure suddenly moves out of view.
- Allesandra and Victorine's surgery session with the chimpanzee regarding a new type of heart transplant. While not "disturbing" like certain moments in the series, it can still be distressing seeing a chimpanzee being used for testing especially since it was outlawed.
- The ending repeats the introduction, except alongside the woman in the raven's mask, the corpses of the Usher children appear, staring at their father when he looks back twice. When exiting the church, Roderick suffers from a panic attack with a bloody nose when he sees a jester in the backseat of his limo, and while staring at the sky, sees a raven peering down at him. All he can do is mutter "It's time."
Episode 2: The Masque of the Red Death
"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall."
- From The Masque of the Red Death
- Just the very fact that Ligodone, a popular opioid from Fortunato, is a massive contributor to a lot of pain and suffering to the individuals that abuse it, resulting in an untold amount of deaths and life-altering casualties. Flanagan has once again proven that sometimes, reality can be scarier than fiction.
- While talking to Dupin, before Roderick talks about a joke from The Wizard of Id, another person stands in the doorway, looking like they suffered fourth-degree burns. Then they walk towards Roderick, and get up close to his face, with milky blue eyes, horrific burns, and a Death Glare. A Jump Cut would reveal this person to be Perry.
- The entire masquerade party. Everything about it. If A Midnight Dreary is meant to serve as an introduction to the Ushers, then this episode is the Establishing Series Moment for what's to come.
- To give the context; Perry throws a masquerade orgy at one of Fortunato's closed pharmaceutical factories in an attempt to receive the respect of the entire family, and prove that his hedonistic nightclubs can contribute to the family's legacy.
- Even taking out what happens later, just the very fact that the very party you're having a blast at is being recorded without your or anyone's consent, with said footage being used for potential Blackmail purposes, reeks of pitch-perfect Paranoia Fuel.
- And finally, the climax of the party, the spinkler shower.
- The viewer already has an uneasy feeling about what that liquid is in the tankers since Perry himself believes it to simply be water. But the very, very dire wording from the lawyers indicates that it's a highly acidic chemical.
- When the sprinklers are turned on, Perry closes his eyes and lets the droplets touch him with the entire scene rendered in slow motion to be Played for Horror. And when the first droplet hits the mixing board, a sizzle is heard, and all the sounds of people partying are replaced by screams of fear and agony. The acid shower starts eating at dozens of people as they run towards the doors, only to realize there's no way to escape, as the doors have been barricaded and they are stuck melting alive. When the lights turn back on, the once-populated dance floor is now coated in soupy human remains, chemicals, and corpses burnt to the bone, with the few unfortunates still alive moaning in pain and gasping for breath (which leads to a whole new realm of horror when you realise at least some of them likely inhaled the acid and their lungs are melting along with their skin). Perry himself lives long enough to suffer as Verna gives him a kiss and puts her mask over his face.
- Notably, the next episode has a police sergeant at the scene note that even experienced units are puking in the alley over what's inside: really gives a feel for just how horrific what happened is.
- Perry's death is the only death with a body count. While the other deaths were horrific in their own way, the only victim was an Usher. Perry died along with 78 people and counting.
- The opening sound for the episode (and over the credits instead of a closing theme) is the sound of dripping echoes. In the opening, it's grim Foreshadowing for the aftermath of the party, and in the credits, the effect doesn't suspend the viewer's feeling of horror.
Episode 3: Murder in the Rue Morgue
"With terrible force it pulled out a handful of hair. And when the woman, covered with blood, tried to run from it, the animal caught her again by the hair and with one move of its arm it nearly cut her head from her body. Throwing down the body, the animal turned and saw that the daughter was moving, watching it with horror."
- From C. Auguste Dupin's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
- The Usher's attorney, Arthur Pym, shows up at the scene of the rave's aftermath, where he ventures inside to retrieve certain pieces of evidence. Aside from some small echoes of drops, the entire room is deathly silent. Pym's rubber boots are an absolute necessity as he all but wade through the melting mass of bodies, some of which are still steaming.
- Then there's the Jump Scare when Morella makes her survival known to Arthur. A relief she survived, but then horrific that she was in that amount of pain for that long.
- When Leo wakes up from his party with his friends, he looks like he's recovering from a pretty bad hangover. But when he wipes his face, there's blood smeared on his face. It's when he drinks orange juice from the jug that he sees the blood, then sees blood and small bits of black fur on his shirt. He fears at first that it's Julius' blood, but fortunately, he's still sleeping. Unfortuantly, Leo sees bloody footprints leading to his discovery of a dead Pluto, in a pool of blood, with a knife sticking out.
- When Morrie wakes up in the hospital, she completely goes into a state of panic, ripping off the bandages and revealing her condition to Lenore, to the latter's horror.
- Even with the knowledge of how violent chimpanzees can be, it will not prepare you for Camille's death.
- To give the context; Camille eyes at Victorine as the target for a potential smear campaign, and goes to the facility of her work to uncover the chimps she's been experimenting on. She riles the animals up by taking pictures with the flash, causing them to rattle in their cages.
- As she goes deeper into the room, one of the cage doors swings open. Verna suddenly appears there, questioning why Camille hates her sister so much. When Camille balks, Verna jumps onto a table and backs her into a corner, ping-ponging between armour-piercing responses and feral outbursts. It becomes clear that Verna is acting through the escaped chimp and Camille has nowhere to go, especially when she opens her vest, revealing a massive surgical incision and hooting in rhythm like the chimps in the room.
- As Camille takes one more picture at Verna, it's not the latter in the camera view, but a chimpanzee. Once the flash goes off, it lunges at her. The scene cuts to the facility in the morning, as the workers open up and find two bloody handprints followed by a puddle of blood. As they investigate further, they find the chimp admiring its carnage. The chimp turns to the workers and gives a Slasher Smile as we see Camille's mutilated face and body.
- Camille's death is the only one not shown on camera. The amount of blood caked all over the lab, plus the two handprints, suggest that it was prolonged and extremely violent, and for Camille, survival instincts took over despite her facing death with dignity.
- The episode begins and ends with the chittering of chimpanzees.
Episode 4: The Black Cat
"The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame."
- From The Black Cat
- The episode's requisite ghost jumpscare. Roderick is chatting with Dupin when all of a sudden something falls from the ceiling with a loud thud. Startling enough, but then Roderick looks at it and it turns out to be Leo's body. It jumps from mildly unsettling to incredibly creepy when Leo looks up at him and half of his face is absolutely covered with blood.
- Prospero's ghost/hallucination shows up again in this episode and looks as burned and melted as ever, only this time there's no gauze in the way. As Juno obliviously asks Roderick what's wrong, it leans towards a terrified Roderick until they're uncomfortably close, reminding us in the process that it has no eyes... Smash cut to the next scene.
- Following the first two deaths, the siblings begin to progressively go insane, becoming dangerous to those around them. Leo, assuming he must have killed Pluto, searches the city for another cat that looks exactly like it so he can replace it without his boyfriend noticing. He finds one at a cat shelter run by Verna, who tries to talk him out of adopting the cat in favouring of saving the life of an unwanted cat. He takes the black one anyway, only to find out it's far more violent than he expected. It leaves a nasty scratch on his arm upon entering his home. Not long after, Leo begins to find dead rodents and birds everywhere, including in his bed. Soon afterwards the cat gives him another nasty scratch, this time across his eyeball. Having had enough, he calls the storekeeper (Verna) to take the cat back. She comes to his home and starts telling him how cats are predators. The cat lunges at him again and Leo thumbs out its eye before it leaps out of sight again. He looks to Verna to see she now has an eye hanging out of her socket; Verna is once again speaking through an animal. She continues taunting Leo as he frantically tears his home up in an increasingly desperate attempt to find the cat. Even as his boyfriend gets home, Leo continues smashing walls, seeming insane as he asks his shaken boyfriend to grab the cat before it can run. Spotting the cat on the balcony, Leo runs towards it, lunging for it only to miss and fall to his death. After his body lands, we are shown the bathtub where Leo put all the cat's gruesome kills; it is pristine, a clear sign that Leo was hallucinating the whole time. The last shot of the episode shows Leo's corpse on the sidewalk, and a black cat - wearing the same designer collar as the original pet - appears and meows at him, showing that the hallucinations had started even further back - he never killed Pluto.
- The episode ends with the sound of police sirens loudly approaching, presumably after his boyfriend called 911.
Episode 5: The Tell-Tale Heart
"You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded..."
- From The Telltale Heart
- The ghost jumpscare gets mixed up this episode. Roderick taunts Dupin, only to watch him go still as his chest starts bleeding through his shirt and his heart visibly contracts. Dupin looks up - suddenly he's replaced with Vic, who has a bloody stab wound and Prophet Eyes and screeches.
- Vic slicing Al's chest open to implant the heart mesh, on the living room floor, in a desperate attempt to save her life. Even if the mesh did work, it was a pointless endeavor, because Al's fatal injury was to her head and the implant wouldn't have fixed that. But Vic is so desperate to prove that the mesh works (and undo her terrible mistake) that she convinces herself Al survived. She doesn't realize it until Roderick shows up and finds Al's body himself.
- The horrifying subversion of The Tell-Tale Heart: the squishing, chirping sound Vic is hearing is actually real, and Roderick can hear it too. It's coming from the heart mesh implant Vic put in Al's dead body to try to bring her back to life. Vic talks to Al like she's still alive and had obviously moved her long-dead body to keep up the delusion. It's only when she tries to force Al to (posthumously) apologize to Roderick that she realizes what she's done... but then declares, eyes wide and fanatical, that they need a better heart to test the mesh on. She then stabs herself in the chest in front of her horrified father... and only then does she realize what she's done to herself, managing to call out to him once before dying.
- The episode ends with the sound of the chirping, squelching noise she was both hearing and hallucinating: the heart of her girlfriend with the heart mesh surgically implanted.
Episode 6: Goldbug
"This bug is to make my fortune," he continued, with a triumphant smile; "to reinstate me in my family possessions. Is it any wonder, then, that I prize it? Since Fortune has thought fit to bestow it upon me, I have only to use it properly, and I shall arrive at the gold of which it is the index."
- From The Gold Bug
"In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."
- From William Wilson
- The episode's ghost jumpscare starts with a mirror being shattered behind Roderick with a bang, throwing him out of the chair. Tamerlane looks down at him, face bloody and cut up, and as Roderick begs her to stop her neck cracks and her head lolls to the side.
- Before she dies, Tamerlane puts herself in a situation where she must introduce Goldbug on her own without the help of her much more popular, much more charismatic husband whom she had basically forced to leave through hurtful, paranoid accusations of infidelity. The entire time leading up to Goldbug's launch, she is clearly sleep-deprived, causing her to experience visual and auditory hallucinations of Verna as the call girl the couple used to substitute for their normal love life. These hallucinations grow increasingly more intimate and personal up to the moment of the Goldbug launch speech with Verna seemingly taking Tamerlane's place as the speaker, resulting in Tamerlane bursting onto the stage before her cue, yelling embarrassingly and inappropriately before realizing the mistake she has made. As she continues to stumble through her speech before dozens of people and even more behind the many cameras pointed at her, every verbal mistake, every awkward moment seems amplified, culminating in a massive nervous breakdown before a public audience of possibly millions where she hallucinates Verna's face taking over and replacing every image of hers, fulfilling her paranoid delusion that she is being replaced by her own reflection. The launch ends with her smashing all the onstage monitors with the mic stand before hurling it into the audience towards an apparition of Verna, resulting in Juno being struck in the head.
- As she returns home, Tamerlane is again beset with hallucinations emerging from the many mirrors of her richly decorated loft. Fearing that Verna, the stalker call girl, has broken into her home, Tamerlane grabs a fireplace poker to defend herself, only to uselessly smash it against nearly every mirror she encounters, mistaking her own face with the face of an intruder. This causes her to scatter glass everywhere. Her attempts to protect herself result in nothing but pain as she is basically forcing herself to walk across a sea of broken glass, peeling and pulling massive shards of glass from the soles of her feet. This culminates in Tamerlane cornering herself on her own bed, smashing the headboard mirror as well as the ceiling mirror in a thoughtless attempt to rid herself of Verna's face. As she falls, shards of glass both falling down and rising to meet her due to the reckless jump she makes to reach the ceiling, Tamerlane visibly realizes she's about to die as she falls in slow-motion back to the bed, massive shards of broken glass from the mirrors she just impulsively smashed piercing into her from both below and above. The end result is a pile of broken glass that shudders with her last seconds of life.
Episode 7: The Pit and the Pendulum
"I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things."
- From The Pit and the Pendulum
- Frederick. Going alone into the factory where Perry had his party to find his wife's missing wedding ring, he takes what he believes to be cocaine but turns out to be the extremely powerful paralytic he had been giving his wife to torture her, leaving him incapable of moving or even calling for help as the factory is demolished with him inside. And that's not the worst: some parts of the building end up falling down and swinging in a way that simulates a bladed pendulum, slowly coming down and cutting through his abdomen over and over again before bisecting him entirely. One can only imagine Frederick to have been pretty relieved when the factory finally fell, actually killing him.
- The subversion of the titular story: unlike the unnamed narrator, who watches in terror as the pendulum descends but is able to escape at the last second, Frederick actually does get slashed several times and is nearly bisected entirely.
- Not a death, but Frederick's wife Morella is subjected to a pretty horrifying fate. Following a moment of weakness, she decides to go to Prospero's orgy and cheat on her husband. Her punishment? She ends up involved in the acid shower, and even though she survives, she is severely disfigured. That would be by itself Disproportionate Retribution, but it gets worse from there as her husband takes them away from the hospital and brings her home only so that he can torture her and trap her in a And I Must Scream state. Particularly triggering for any victims of domestic violence as not only has Frederick shown Morrie first hand how evil and sadistic he really is, but he also expects her to stay with him for the rest of their lives."I've got another house to put into order. While I'm there, I'll look for your ring. Maybe it's still there. If not, I'll get you a new one. But if I do find it, I'll bring it home. And if you ever take it off again...I'll weld it to your fucking finger."
- Frederick isn't just keeping doctors away from her—he's preventing her from receiving even basic care, like changing her bandages, which are stained with blood and fluids even before he starts torturing her.
- Roderick is visited by a hallucination of four-year-old Frederick, and sees his stomach sliced open and entrails spilling out, just like what happened to the adult version.
- What makes this worse is when the camera cuts to young Frederick moments before the bisection shot, he stares up at Roderick with a slack-jawed expression, like he's paralyzed. For anyone who has kids and sees this, it's a horrifying sight to even imagine, regardless of how very brief a shot it is.
Episode 8: The Raven
"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lift - nevermore!"
- from The Raven
"There was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters–and the deep and dank tarn closed silently over the fragments of the House of Usher."
- Throughout the mini series, August has heard a thumping sound from the basement. Roderick assures him it's Madeline, but doesn't reveal why she's down there. Only in the final moments do we discover her fate. As a flashback reveals, Roderick lured Madeline to their former home and into their basement. Down there, they reminisce about their history and their deal with Verna over a shared bottle of liquor, with Madeline continually making excuses for what they've done and taking no accountability. But when Madeline gets up, she finds out that Roderick drugged her drink. Madeline slips into unconsciousness, and Roderick- in the throes of the same madness that consumed his family- takes out ancient Egyptian burial tools to perform funeral rites on Madeline's body, treating her like an Egyptian queen. Back in the present, August hears the thumping getting louder and louder, until he asks Roderick- after he performed the ceremony, did he make sure that Madeline was dead? Cue Madeline bursting out of the basement, her eyes gouged out and replaced with two sapphires and her tongue cut out of her head, leaving her to only be able to howl in abject agony at her fate. Madeline attacks her brother the same way her mother attacked their father, and the entire house starts caving in around them. It is all August can do to escape with his life, as he exits the building just moments before it collapses, witnessing the final end of the House of Usher.
- You want Nightmare Fuel? Verna showing Roderick the real monument to his life's work - an endless rain of corpses falling from the sky, freeze-framed by flashes of lightning, as she recites grim statistics about the death toll of the opioid epidemic.
