Series / The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

"The crisis, the danger has passed, and the lingering illness is over at last. And the fever called 'living' is conquered at last."

"You know what a resolution is, really? It's a deal you make with the future. The future's coming fast. It's nearly here."

— Verna

The Fall of the House of Usher is a 2023 Gothic Horror crime drama miniseries developed by Mike Flanagan, based loosely off an array of major works by Edgar Allan Poe, including its namesake story. It stars Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Mary McDonnell, Carl Lumbly, Samantha Sloyan, T'Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel, Sauriyan Sapkota, Zach Gilford, Willa Fitzgerald, Katie Parker, Malcolm Goodwin, Michael Trucco, Henry Thomas, and Mark Hamill. Though not premiering under The Haunting title, the series is a Spiritual Sequel to Flanagan's previous The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor.

The series is a modernized take on the stories of Poe, centering around corrupt CEO Roderick Usher (Greenwood), who, along with his scheming twin sister Madeline (McDonnell), built a global pharmaceutical empire. Now, a mysterious woman (Gugino) begins to pick Roderick's dysfunctional heirs off one by one.

The series premiered on Netflix October 12, 2023.

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The Fall of the House of Usher includes examples of the following:

• Abusive Parents:
  • William Longfellow, Roderick and Madeline's biological father, is introduced saying that no child is too young to whip. Eliza kept her kids away from him because he ordered her to, but also probably because she was afraid he would be violent toward them.
  • After the death of their mother, Roderick and Madeline lived with abusive foster parents.
  • Roderick himself becomes one. Not only is he willing to put his own children against each other when he suspects that there's a (fake) informant in the family, but it's revealed that he (along with his sister) sold out his entire bloodline to Verna, in exchange for wealth and power without suffering legal consequences.
• Accents Aren't Hereditary: Napoleon and Victorine speak with British accents while the rest of their siblings and relatives have American accents. Justified in that most of the children have different mothers, making it possible that they were raised in Britain while the others grew up in America. Furthermore, it's mentioned that Leo at least didn't meet Roderick until his late teens, making the fact that he grew up in the UK more plausible.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: Roderick is the series' version of the unnamed narrator from "The Raven". In the original poem Lenore was his lost love, here she's his granddaughter. He's still mourning her untimely passing however.
• Adaptational Villainy: Many of the characters. Madeline, whose only character in the original story is "beautiful and dying" until she finally snaps at the end, and who has often been some kind of ingenue or damsel in distress in other adaptations, is now scheming and ruthless. Roderick is also a ruthless CEO with a lot of criminal activity to his name (and a womaniser, though that's more just Adaptational Jerkass), where Roderick Usher in the original story was a sensitive, isolated young man who (despite coming from a corrupt and screwed-up family) doesn't seem to have committed any crimes himself prior to the events of the story or possibly ever, depending on whether you think his burying Madeline alive was deliberate or not. Camille is also a far nastier character than the character her name is taken from, who is simply a murder victim.
• Adaptation Amalgamation: Aside from its namesake story, other Poe stories are incorporated into the plot as well, such as The Masque of the Red Death (a mysterious woman in a skull mask and a red cape at a wild party) and The Raven (Lenore's texts/the family patriarch repeating "Nevermore" over and over and the Death figure, Verna, taking the guise of a raven and deriving her name from that word).
• Adaptation Deviation:
  • Many, many, as this is not unlike Flanagan's former "House" series. Particularly notable is that where the source story has Roderick Usher tortured by the knowledge that Madeline was put into the tomb alive, the TV version has him so haunted by ghosts and/or hallucinations that he reacts to her being alive with mild surprise.
  • "Goldbug" is a particularly In Name Only adaptation—and even the name is slightly changed, from "The Gold-Bug". The only thing the episode keeps is that the main character is fixated on "Goldbug", which they are convinced will be the key to making their fortune. Despite the title, the episode actually takes more from William Wilson.
• Adaptation Expansion: The Usher family in the original story was down to two members in a decrepit old house with the narrator being a visiting friend. The show presents a much larger family and a wider range of characters around them, playing different roles from different Poe stories.
• Adaptation Species Change: One of the show's storylines prominently features chimpanzees, while their literary counterpart in the Poe story that inspired said storyline was an orangutan. This was probably done as chimpanzees make more sense as subjects for Animal Testing and can be far, far more vicious and violent than orangutans.
• Adult Adoptee: Not legally. But the four illegitimate Usher children all met Roderick for the first time and joined the family in their late teens or early twenties. While they call Roderick "Dad" and refer to Madeline as their aunt, they don't have close familial relationships with them or with their other siblings, and Frederick and Tamerlane see "the bastards" as interlopers who don't deserve to be truly part of the family. Among each other, only Napoleon and Camille appear to be at least friends, while Napoleon is something of a mentor for Perry.
• Aerith and Bob: The children of the Usher family consist of Tamerlane, Victorine, Napoleon, Prospero, and their siblings Frederick and Camille. Slightly downplayed since the siblings with unusual names all have more conventional nicknames: Tammy/Tam, Vic, Leo, and Perry respectively.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: Verna can see what lives the members of the Usher family could have lived and she says that seeing what good people they could have been, particularly Madeline, breaks her heart.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • In "The Black Cat," a familiarly collared black cat is seen on the street below Leo's apartment. This collar was the collar on the cat Leo apparently killed in "Murder at the Rue Morgue." The collar was not put on the replacement cat. Given that the circumstances of Leo's death show the mouse corpses and even the replacement cat to not have been seen by anyone else except Verna, did Leo ever actually kill his boyfriend's cat, in which case the collared cat is another example of something not quite real, or did the cat actually just get out of the apartment that night, and the corpse of the cat that Leo found in "Murder at the Rue Morgue" was the part that wasn't real? Word of God confirms the latter.
  • Were Napoleon's and Victorine's hallucinations before their deaths caused by Verna, by extreme stress and exhaustion, or by early-onset CADASIL inherited from their father?
  • Verna's true identity is never explicitly detailed. She's often dressed in a manner traditionally associated with Death, and her ability to kill simply by touching someone is another power Death is often said to possess. But her dealmaking and trickery are more commonly associated with the Devil. There's never a clear answer, so the character could be Death, the Devil, both, or neither.
• Animal Testing: Victorine and Alessandra use chimpanzees to test their experimental heart mesh. Verna tells Camille that testing on chimps is all but banned, but exceptions can be made if the research really needs it. She implies that Vic's research isn't really one such case, but rather one juiced by her family's infinite coffers, which makes her abuse of the process by fudging the data much more despicable.
• Armor-Piercing Response: After explaining how betraying Dupin will gain Roderick success at Fortunato, Madeline then comments on her stunned realization that Annabel Lee genuinely believed in her husband doing the right thing. A teary-eyed Annabel responds by saying, "You are so...small, Madeline." Her initial response is subtle, but it's later revealed that Madeline painted the saying on the final brick used to trap Rufus in the wall, making it the last thing he'd ever see. The comment clearly stuck with Madeline.
• Artistic License – Biology: Verna as the pound worker describes cats as "apex predators." While some felines are apex predators, like lions and tigers, domestic cats are preyed upon by a variety of predators, such as wild canines and large birds of prey.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: Napoleon calls satin "a poor man's silk," which doesn't make any sense. Satin is a type of weave, while silk is a type of material. Satin is often made of silk.
• Asshole Victim: The Series. It's probably easier to list the characters who don't deserve to die.
  • The Usher clan is (with four notable exceptions, two of whom married into the family), a bunch of amoral and corrupt one-percenters willing to do anything to get to and stay on the top of the world, comfortable in the knowledge that their money and power and a little bit of supernatural aid will keep them consequence free.
  • Madeline and Roderick's biological father William Longfellow. When, as curious children, they're caught sneaking onto his property, he threatens them; when their mother Elizabeth, who was his secretary, becomes mentally ill, he fires her; when they come to him begging for help because Elizabeth is dying, he laughs in their faces. Elizabeth then murders him during a dissociative episode.
  • Roderick's boss Rufus Griswold exploits Roderick in a number of ways, but most egregiously, sets it up so that the US government's case against Fortunato rests on Roderick's testimony, which Roderick then withdraws at the hearing; the case collapses, and Fortunato goes on to create the modern opioid crisis. When the twins brick Griswold up behind a wall in the basement of the new company headquarters, it's hard not to feel some satisfaction.
• Ax-Crazy: Prospero is characterized as this, threatening one of his lovers with a fork on the suspicion that they ate his eggs from the fridge. After Camille and Prospero die, the remaining Usher siblings all become extremely dangerous to other people and themselves.
• Bastard Angst: If Freddie and Tammy's coldly calling them "bastards" (in the former's case, right to Perry's face) and Perry's talk with Leo was any indication, then Roderick's illegitimate children didn't exactly have an easy time growing up. And as the Usher family dynamics show, not even the comforts of privilege and riches did anything to help mitigate whatever issues they could've gotten from this treatment.
• Bastard Bastard:
  • Four of the six Usher siblings are illegitimate and aren't good people. (Not that their legitimate half-siblings are any better...)
  • Madeline and Roderick are also this, being the result of Longfellow getting his secretary pregnant while married to another woman.
  • Madeline is quick to assume (incorrectly) that this is the case with Verna, initially concluding that she's another one of Roderick's children out to get the family fortune to herself.
• Batman Gambit:
  • During his opening arguments, Dupin makes what seems to be an elementary mistake, saying that he has an informant within the family as a witness—which is a shock to Pym, because he mentioned no such person in discovery, breaking a very basic rule of criminal justice procedure. (By law the defense must have access to every piece of evidence the prosecution plans to use.) When called up by the judge and reprimanded, he meekly apologizes and agrees to strike any mention of the supposed Usher witness from the record, before shooting Roderick a triumphant smile. That's because he didn't say it for the jury at all, he said it for Roderick. Dupin lied about there being an informant, fully expecting that the Ushers would tear each other apart with paranoid accusations. It works.
  • It turns out this is all payback for what went down between Dupin and Roderick back in 1979. The pair had been working together with Roderick agreeing to testify on the illegal dealings of Fortunato. But at the deposition, Roderick suddenly claims the company had done nothing wrong and Dupin was harassing him. Roderick and Madeline had been playing Dupin as, while arrested for perjury, the charges won't stick and now Roderick is the golden boy of Fortunato.
  • Camille's job as the family's spin doctor seems to involve a lot of these.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: The solution to the first episode's question of "who is the Usher informant?" is an attempted one. There is no informant. Auggie hoped that announcing there was an informant would lead the Ushers to collapse into A House Divided, and that someone would decide to flip rather than risk being backstabbed by someone else, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. It may have worked, but Verna came for justice first.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Ushers are an enormous family in the pharmaceutical business, in which the patriarch, Roderick, has multiple illegitimate children and they are all shown squabbling amongst themselves even before things get really bad. Dupin even refers to them in court as a "crime family". The first episode wraps with Roderick offering fifty million to whichever of his children discovers the supposed government informant within the family, after Madeline not-at-all subtly threatens to murder anyone who threatens the Ushers.
• Big Sister Bully: Almost none of the siblings are particularly kind to each-other, but Tam and Frederick openly refer to the other four as "The Bastards", looking down on them for their illegitimate status. Frederick also threatens Perry when he speaks out of turn while shadowing him.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: Verna asserts that humanity could fix its problems if all the money they spend on television and movies in a year went to more constructive pursuits.
• Bittersweet Ending: All of the Ushers die and while for most of them it's their chickens finally coming home to roost after decades of avoiding any sort of consequences, innocent Lenore also dies as she is part of the Usher bloodline. The Fortunato company dissolves and its fortune goes to Juno and Morrie who recover from their addiction and burns respectively and use the money to make the world a better place. Pym is arrested and takes his consequences without a fight, and Dupin retires, finally getting closure in his decades-long feud with the Ushers.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead:
  • The three main women in Roderick's life. His sister Madeline is blonde (she has gray hair in present day), his first wife, and his only true love, Annabel Lee, has long red hair, and his new wife, Juno, has black hair.
  • The Usher women. Camille has white blonde hair, Tamberlaine has red hair, and both Frederick's wife and his daughter have long brown hair. (His other daughter, Victorine, has a shaved head.)
• Body Horror: What starts as the beginning of a sexy anonymous masked orgy party filled with hunky men and beautiful women quickly turns into a horrific nightmare as acidic chemicals rain down on them from the ceiling—causing their skin, flesh and even bones to start burning, smoking and melting like candle wax, all while they are screaming, crying and banging on the locked doors in a fruitless attempt to escape. With the distressing sounds and visuals, one could argue this is the most dismaying and brutal death in the entire show. It's revealed in the aftermath of this tragedy that upwards of 78 people and counting died this way, their flesh and internal organs melted into a bloody goo on the floor. The fact Verna took the time to evacuate all the wait staff, but none of the guests other than Morella, implies she considered them deserving of dying alongside Prospero. But without any exposition on this matter, the audience is left to wonder what on Earth the victims could have possibly done to deserve such a scary and horrific death.
• Bookends: In the first episode, teenage Roderick is strangled by his mother, who had just climbed out of her grave and has mistaken him for the man that wronged her. He dies the same way—strangled by Madeline, who had just climbed out of what was meant to be her grave and knew very well that she was attacking the man who had wronged her.
• Break the Cutie: Some of them get better, but man, does the show like to watch them break.
  • Morella is a beloved wife and mother to Frederick and Lenore, who is often ridiculed by the other Usher family members, but not only is she invited to Perry's pop-up orgy just so that Perry can attempt to blackmail Frederick to get back at him, she becomes hideously burned and deformed by the acidic sprinklers. When she shows signs of recovery, to Lenore's joy, she's brought home by Frederick - but it's revealed that he didn't do this to get her better care. It was to medically torture and abuse her with paralytic drugs to keep her unable to move and forcibly pull her teeth with pliers, because Frederick, deranged by cocaine, deeply believed that because of her mysterious burner phone and Morrie being at the party, Morella was cheating on him with his younger brother.
  • Juno. She continually tries to be a part of the family and thoroughly mourns the death of each Usher, despite the kids' varying levels of hatred towards her. Roderick is essentially keeping her on Ligodone as a spokesperson and mocks her requests to stop taking it, despite her fears of becoming addicted once more and of suffering the side effects others have undergone.
  • Tamerlane's husband, Bill, genuinely cares for and loves his wife - enough to partake in her cuckquean fantasies despite hating the experience - and wants her to take care of herself. All he receives is Tamerlane verbally abusing him, degrading him, and a separation. Even after her disastrous Goldbug conference, Bill still calls because he loves her and cares about her wellbeing but her response is to throw the phone across the room.
  • Roderick's first wife and the mother to Frederick and Tamerlane, Annabel Lee, is loving, caring, and extremely supportive to not only Roderick, but to Madeline and even Dupin, despite her fears for their family's future due to her husband's whistleblowing on Fortunato. When it comes out that Madeline and Roderick planned to betray Dupin at the hearing to secure Roderick's place at Fortunato, Annabel Lee is heartbroken at how truly horribly heartless her husband and especially her sister-in-law are. Despite having custody of the children, Annabel watched Frederick and Tamerlane slowly side with their father - having been bought off - and would eventually take her own life.
  • Al is an idealistic doctor who wants to help people with heart conditions. She has to watch her beloved girlfriend descend into less and less ethical actions, until finally Victorine forges her signature on unapproved human trial paperwork, hugely abusing her trust. And then Victorine kills her in a fit of rage. She dies knowing that the woman she loves is a selfish monster, that her greatest project has come to nothing because of Victorine's methods, and whatever she has left will be destroyed by Pym. She doesn't even get to actually blow the whistle as she said she would, though the only comfort she had against her entire life going down in flames before her eyes was the knowledge she would be doing the right thing.
• Capitalism Is Bad: The show is explicit about the damages Big Pharma has wreaked on the world. Roderick's "When Life Gives You Lemons..." speech explicitly lists out things corporations have actually done over the past century to gain more money, market share and power. Madeline expands this theme to entire society, musing near the end of the show that the world now consists of an underpaid workforce conditioned to want material goods that only hasten the deterioration of the environment.
• Cast Full of Gay: The majority of the Usher family fall somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum, with Madeline, Vic, Leo, Camille and Perry all explicit and Tam at least leaning that way with her propensity for female prostitutes despite the fact that she watches rather than participates. Dupin also has an unseen husband.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • A character watches Gerald's Game, a prior work of Mike Flanagan. No word on who plays that film's protagonists while Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood play Verna and Roderick here.
  • There's a curious example with Edgar Allan Poe; his poetry does exist since it's quoted by numerous characters, but he himself is never mentioned and in-universe Roderick seems to have written at least two of Poe's poems himself and in the alternate universe where he didn't take Verna's deal, he would have been a poet.
• Central Theme: Consequence. All things have consequences, even when you try and escape them, and a single choice from a single person can ripple out and change the world.
  • The Usher family's choice to prioritize the attainment and demonstration of wealth, power, and privilege fostered in each member the behaviors that end up destroying them.
  • Madeline's and Roderick's Deal with the Devil in their youth, both literally and metaphorically, is the root cause of the entire story. In it, they make a deal to protect themselves from the legal consequences of their actions and ensure the station they desire, i.e. money, power, and personal success. While they are never successfully held accountable in court, the bargain and their rise to fortune comes with a myriad of other consequences for themselves, their family, and the world by the end of their lives.
  • The choice to invest in, advocate for, and produce Ligodone and, later, the choice to ignore and bury the evidence that Ligodone is addictive and has terrible side effects, led to the deaths of millions. Verna emphasizes this in the hours before Roderick's death, showing him a vision of a tower made of corpses while more bodies rain from the sky, and calling this his true legacy.
  • Verna spells out this theme to Prospero in The Masque of the Red Death, noting that there's no such thing as an event free of consequence and that tonight Prospero and his choices will be particularly consequential. Minutes later, his choices to not heed the EPA inspectors' mention of dangerous waste materials on the properties and to hook the sprinkler system to the tanks on the roof end up killing nearly everyone at his party, including himself. In terms of consequences we witness, the aftereffects lead to his already stressed family destabilizing further, with Leo's recreational drug usage intensifying dangerously and Frederick not only taking up cocaine but becoming severely abusive to his wife once his knowledge of her attendance at the party causes him to doubt her loyalty. These aftereffects end up massively consequential in and of themselves, contributing to the circumstances of Leo's and Frederick's deaths and Morella's choices regarding the funds she's left with.
  • Verna explains the positive of this theme to Lenore. By saving her mother Morella, Lenore has indirectly saved an untold number of people, as her mother will use the money she inherits from the Ushers to create a foundation for domestic abuse victims and the people her mother saves will go on to save even more.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Usher children being unhappy that Juno is included in Roderick's will. Come the final episode, she inherits Fortunato since all the blood-descendant Ushers are dead.
  • Madeline's AI immortality project. She uses Lenore's data in the beta-testing, but all it can do is text variations of the word "nevermore" over and over...and make it look like Lenore has been texting Roderick all night.
  • The sapphires Roderick gets as a gift for Madeline. He uses them to replace her eyes after he murders her.
  • Camille's files, and the information she has her assistants gather for her. She turns out to have had a file on Arthur that "barely scratches the surface" on his crimes, but is still enough to send him to prison for the rest of his life. After all of the Ushers are gone, Camille's former assistants turn over all the information they have to the police, Arthur's file included.
  • Nightshade powder, which comes back repeatedly. Victorine is rumored to be using it in her surgeries, and it directly contributes to Frederick's death.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The informant. Subverted when it turns out they never existed in the first place.
  • Toby and Beth, who vanish from the story after the third episode but later hand over crucial files to the police which leads to the dismantling of Fortunato and Pym receiving a life sentence.
• Color-Coded Characters:
  • Each of the Ushers have a specific color that recurs in their homes and wardrobes. It is also the color that lights their death scenes:
    • Frederick is blue.
    • For Tamerlane, it's green with bits of gold.
    • Victorine is orange.
    • Camille is silver and white.
    • Leo is yellow.
    • Prospero, for obvious reasons, is red.
  • Verna is often in black when she's not taking on each of the others' colors as she targets them.
• Coolest Club Ever: Prospero pitches one to Roderick, hoping his father will fund the creation of a club which would put Studio 54 and The Limelight to shame. When Roderick refuses, Prospero decides to throw his own party in an abandoned Fortunato warehouse, which turns out to be a fatal mistake.
• Creative Sterility: When high, Camille muses that the Ushers don't actually create anything. Ligodone was invented by a chemist that didn't even work for Fortunato at the time; Roderick just spread its use. Madeline never got the time to finish her immortality algorithm and the prototype using Lenore's data only repeats the word "Nevermore" or a variation. Frederick is a yes-man who does as his father asks. Tamerlane isn't the face of Goldbug, Bill is: Goldbug itself is mocked as an upscale "Goop" beauty product. Victorine didn't create the heart pumping device; she's just dating the doctor who did and is bankrolling the project. Leo doesn't make videogames; he just finances them. Perry's focus is mostly on partying. Camille herself notes all she does is spin, like a ceiling fan, and never actually goes anywhere.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: All of the Usher children get one of these. However, Lenore, the sole grandchild, does not - her death is quiet, leaving her youth and innocence intact.
  • Prospero, his friends, and his party guests are all burned to death by acidic chemicals that were mainlined to the sprinkler system at the old factory he was holding the party. Basically an acid shower that melted them slowly.
  • Camille is mauled by a chimpanzee at one of the Usher testing facilities, having her face ripped up.
  • Leo hallucinated various versions of his boyfriend's cat, Pluto, attacking him and jumped off the balcony of his high rise loft when trying to take a swing at her.
  • Victorine, driven mad by the stress and pressure of completing her heart mesh and by accidentally murdering her girlfriend, stabs herself in the heart in front of Roderick.
  • After attacking every mirror surface in her apartment in an attempt to attack Verna, Tamerlane smashes the mirror above her bed with a fire poker and gets impaled and shredded by mirror shards.
  • After going inside the dilapidated building where Prospero died before demolition began, Frederick takes a bump of coke and begins to pee on the spot where his brother's body was found. He immediately finds himself paralyzed, as Verna had hypnotized him into putting some of the paralytic agent he used to medically abuse his wife into his cocaine stash after he ripped out her teeth. Verna then mimics his voice and tells the crew to begin demolition. Frederick is left to watch the building go down around him and a sharp pendulum-like piece of rubble slowly bisect him.
• Deal with the Devil: While it's debatable if Verna is a demon, it's clear the bargain with Roderick and Madeline was this. Made in 1979 after they killed Rufus to take over the company, Verna promised the Ushers would live a life of wealth and success and never be convicted of any crime. The price? That their entire bloodline would end at the same time. The two agreed with Roderick later admitting they never really believed in it. They also didn't realize that rather than only themselves and Roderick and Annabel's kids, it would count for all of Roderick's offspring with other women. Verna offers the same deal to Arthur, but he wisely turns it down.
• A Death in the Limelight: Episodes 2-7 focus on a particular Usher, and the episode culminates in their death:
  • "The Masque of Red Death" focuses on Perry, and ends with him being immolated at the orgy.
  • "Murder in the Rue Morgue" focuses on Camille, and ends with her being mauled to death by a chimpanzee.
  • "The Black Cat" focuses on Leo, and ends with his falling over a balcony to his death in his attempt to kill the cat that's been tormenting him.
  • "The Tell-Tale Heart" focuses on Victorine, and ends with her stabbing herself in the chest in a moment of delusion.
  • "Goldbug" focuses on Tamerlane, and ends with her being impaled to death on glass shards.
  • "The Pit and the Pendulum" focuses on Frederick, and near the end he is paralysed by nightshade powder and bisected even as a building collapses on top of him.
• Death of a Child: Since the deal includes Roderick's entire bloodline, Verna is forced to kill the teenaged Lenore, much to her sadness since Lenore is not just innocent but good; Roderick correctly describes her as the best of the Ushers. Beforehand, she sits Lenore down and explains how much good her mother will eventually do in her name, and unlike the rest of the family, Lenore is granted a peaceful and painless death.
• Decomposite Character:
  • Roderick shares the duties of Montresor in The Cask of Amontillado with his sister.
  • The titular William Wilson is split between William "Bill" Wilson (name and sex) and his wife Tamerlane (who wrangles a supposed doppelganger).
• Distinction Without a Difference: The Ushers and their cronies insist that Ligadone is not addictive. Roderick does, however, acknowledge that people who decide to taper off it are going to experience an Epic Catalog of very unpleasant symptoms that sounds, if anything, worse than what most opioid addicts go through when experiencing withdrawal.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The climax of the orgy organized by Perry is very reminiscent of a mass shooting, with a large number of people trapped in a contained area and unable to escape; the only difference is that instead of a shooter, the cause of death is corrosive chemicals from the sprinkler system.
  • Quite a few commentators have observed that Roderick and Madeline's Deal with the Devil to shorten their heirs' lives in exchange for money and power has definite parallels to governments and CEOs wrecking the environment and leaving future generations to deal with climate change.
• Double-Meaning Title: The Fall of the House of Usher is both literal and metaphorical — the Usher family is dead and their company will be dissolved, and the final members, Roderick and Madeline, die when their childhood home collapses on top of them.
• Due to the Dead: Subverted. At the end of the series, Dupin is seen leaving the recorder he used to tape Roderick's confession on his grave, while mocking him for his fate and telling him that now he can finally move on with his family. Verna also leaves some "gifts" to each tomb of the Usher as a way to mock their deaths. However, it's played straight with Lenore, as Verna leaves a black feather with a white orchid on her tomb, symbolizing her peaceful yet tragic death.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • Verna tells Lenore before taking her that Morrie will eventually achieve this. After being chemically burned, tortured by her husband and Outliving One's Offspring, she fully recovers from her burns, inherits a large portion of the Usher fortune and uses it to fund domestic violence charities as well as found a non-profit in Lenore's name that saves countless lives.
  • Juno is able to overcome her addiction and likewise goes on to use her inherited fortune to help millions.
• Enhance Button: Zig-Zagged. When viewing the security video of The R.U.E. Morgue death of Camille, Roderick curtly orders Pym to "enhance" the image. But the footage obeys real-life limitations, and Pym points out that you can't just "enhance" an image from a security camera — you can zoom in, but that doesn't make the image any clearer (Roderick laments that it always works on TV). They are able to obtain an "enhanced" view of Verna later in the episode, but the angle shows it must have come from another camera rather than enhancing the footage we saw earlier. Even still, the new image is of much higher quality than should be possible with another security camera of the same model.
• Every Man Has His Price: Defied by Verna, who laughs off Roderick and Madeline's attempts to "renegotiate" their deal and insists the terms are set.
  • Also averted by Arthur, when offered his own Deal with the Devil by Verna; despite the fact that he will spend the rest of his life in prison if he doesn’t take it, whatever “leverage” it would cost him isn’t worth what Verna’s offering.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • It's clear that, if she had a choice, Verna would not kill Lenore. Sadly, she has no choice.
  • Alternatively, Verna may be behind the gruesome deaths of the Usher family and potentially countless others but she considers Frederick's torture of his wife to be so heinous that she directly intervenes to make his death more painful.
• Face Death with Dignity:
  • Lenore seems to be aware that she is about to die, content that her mother will recover and help millions. Her death is the most peaceful.
  • Roderick also seems to resign himself to his fate when his house caves in.
  • If you see Camille's last action as defiance instead of missing all the clues, she counts too.
  • Pym surrenders quietly and offers no defense at his trial. While he isn't immediately killed, given his age and the severity of the charges he's facing, death in prison is a certainty, and he accepts it calmly.
• Fan Disservice: "The Black Cat" features the handsome, well-built Leo shirtless —albeit covered in blood, knocking holes in the walls of his apartment, and frantically searching for a cat that isn't there.
• Fantastic Drug: A lot of the Ushers' money comes from the fictional medication Ligodone, a painkiller described as halfway between ibuprofen and opioids. Despite what the official data says, however, it's very addictive and has destroyed numerous lives.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • The show begins in the present day with Auguste gladly prosecuting Fortunato CEO Roderick's case after decades of trying to bring him down, so the audience knows that the 1970s plotline where they work together to blow the whistle on Fortunato is probably not going to end with them as besties. Indeed, it ends with Roderick becoming CEO by killing his boss and taking advantage of the goodwill he gained from lying at the deposition.
  • The Framing Device of Roderick telling Dupin how the Ushers really died, makes their deaths in episodes 2-7 Foregone Conclusions as well. The final episode shows this was also the case In-Universe. Roderick and Madeline sealed all of their fates by making the deal with Verna.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Roderick and Madeline buy drinks from Verna, she says the first two are on the house, and asks if they want to start a tab: "Buy now, pay later?" In a manner of speaking, their tab with Verna coming due is the plot of the entire show. They do buy now, and they very much pay later.
  • While not in the show, every poster of each Usher member has a portrait ruined or damaged in a way that reflects their own deaths.
• Framing Device: The story is being told by Roderick Usher to Auguste Dupin in the former's decaying childhood house. This is occasionally lampshaded, such as when Dupin asks how Roderick could narrate things he wasn't present for.
• Freudian Excuse: Most everyone on the show has an excuse for their twisted, horrific actions and most of those excuses originated with wanting Roderick's approval and love. Not that Verna's accepting it though, especially not from Frederick.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Another recurring theme. The Ushers are A Big, Screwed-Up Family, and there are valid genuine reasons for all their twisted behavior. But their actions were all performed of their own free will, and they thoroughly earn their consequences.
• Friendly Enemies: Roderick and Auggie to a degree. C. Auguste Dupin has spent several decades unsuccessfully trying to prove the Ushers' many crimes and is adamant that they be punished. Roderick is equally determined to go on frustrating his efforts, and will not hesitate to commit horrendous acts to stay out of Auggie's reach. However, when talking to each other, they do show signs of mutual respect and even affection, which can be plausibly explained by Roderick's appreciation that Auggie is a better man than himself and Auggie's acknowledgment of the more human side of Roderick's nature which he suspects is still somewhere deep inside.
• Generation Xerox:
  • Frederick is openly treated as a pale imitation of his father, earning the nickname "Froderick/Frauderick", and at one point Vic expands this to directly compare Tam to Madeline as well.
  • Likewise, Madeline and Roderick share a similar fate to their mother and father: Madeline playing her mother's part, in that she nearly died only to survive long enough to kill (via strangulation) the man who wronged her, in this case her brother Roderick, as her mother did their father.
• Greed: A driving force to most members of the Usher family and also their downfall. In fact, it was Roderick and Madeline's greed which kickstarted the plot and led to their doom via a Deal with the Devil in order to become rich and powerful, no matter how steep the price would be.
• Hate Sink: While all of the siblings' deaths have some karmic justice to them (Perry used his pop up orgy as seeds for a mass extortion scheme and threatened his friends; Camille made a career of covering for her family in the public eye, plus forced her assistants to have sex with her as part of the job and fired them when they refused; Leo cheated on his boyfriend, then convinced himself he had killed his cat in a grief-fueled drug blackout and bought another cat to cover it up; Victorine forged her girlfriend's signature and accidentally killed her when they broke up; and Tamerlane belittled her husband and stepmother), one can argue that they didn't deserve such gruesome painful deaths. That absolutely can't be said for Frederick however, who is racist and violent towards his youngest brother at best and downright sadistic and entitled at worst. When he suspects his already mutilated wife might have cheated on him with Perry, he denies her a recovery in the hospital despite being in critical condition, bringing her home under the guise of rehabilitating her himself. In actuality, he enacts a torturous revenge on her, drugging her to keep her paralyzed but awake and then using pliers to rip out her teeth, as well as filling the walls of the room with various iterations of their wedding picture due to his obsession with her assumed infidelity. When Lenore confronts him about her mother not receiving any medical care, Frederick gaslights her about the specialists, and threatens her if she keeps asking questions. Verna is so disgusted with his behavior that she decides to be more hands-on with her approach to his death—which she wasn't with the others, who she actively tried to warn away from digging their own graves.
• Hollywood Genetics: Victorine is Roderick's natural daughter, making her half white, but actress T'Nia Miller clearly has no significant white ancestry at all. Though people of biracial ancestry often can and do take after one of their backgrounds more than the other.
• How We Got Here: The series opens with all the Usher children dead and Roderick recounting what led them to that point before he turns himself in to the authorities.
• Hypocrite: Roderick and especially Madeline are furious at the idea that someone in the family would betray their own blood. In exchange for guaranteed personal success and immunity from legal consequences, they condemned their family to die alongside them before most of those family members were even born, cutting everyone else's lives short while Madeline and Roderick got to live to old age and die just before they would have naturally anyways. The two even initially call the price for their success a "good deal.".
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Doubles as a Mythology Gag: Camille mentions that the Roderick Usher Experimental facility, where the company keeps animals for pharmaceutical testing, is sometimes morbidly referred to as the "RUE Morgue."
• Inn Between the Worlds: Verna's bar, which she herself describes as "outside of time and space," though this particular variation on the trope also carries notes of The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday.
• Irony:
  • Madeline's downfall mirrors both the way she manipulated Gris and Roderick. Like Gris, she doesn't notice that her drink has been drugged until it takes effect and regains consciousness when it's too late to escape. And like Roderick, she is tricked by her sibling, the one person she believed she could trust. Unfortunately for Roderick, however, the similarities don't end there, since like Roderick she also ends up Not Quite Dead, and comes back to ruin her sibling's plans.
  • Mentioned by Verna: what drove her to take direct action was Frederick's use of the pliers. In his alternative life, he would have been a pretty good dentist.
  • Both the Usher fortune and the Fortunato company, acquired and sustained by Roderick and Madeleine in their intense drive for wealth and power, squabbled over incessantly by Roderick's children, are finally inherited by Juno and Morella, the two women who married into the family rather than being born into it, who were treated cruelly by the Usher children, and who promptly dismantle everything to create something far more beneficial.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Roderick's kids refer to Juno as an "it" while sitting at the same table as her to show their disdain.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The Ushers have been getting away with their evil actions for decades due to their wealth and influence and now Verna is setting out to finally give them their comeuppance, in swift and brutal fashion.
• Karmic Death: After torturing Morrie with a paralytic and torturing her while she can't fight back and peeing in the spot where Perry died, Frederick is paralyzed by the same paralytic and dies in the same spot as his brother in a puddle of his own piss, utterly powerless as he is slowly sliced apart.
• Killed Offscreen: The last we see of Camille alive is her taking a picture of Verna, who transforms into a chimpanzee the moment the flash goes off and lunges at Camille. We then cut to the next morning, after the deadly mauling has taken place.
• Kill the Cutie: Lenore. Unlike her work with Lenore's aunts and uncles, Verna takes zero pleasure in taking the life of someone innocent, who's just watched everyone she loved go mad and die and who had just discovered her mother's horrific abuse at the hands of her father. Not only does Verna make her death quite quick and painless, but assuages Lenore's worries by telling her that her mother will get better and help millions of people in the future, and all in Lenore's name.
• Know When to Fold Them: When Pym realizes Verna is more than human and sensing her deal is what has led to the Ushers' fates, he turns down her offer and thinks it's better he "[plays his] own hand" with his own fate. Once the Ushers have fully fallen, he's arrested for his long litany of crimes but accepts it quietly, not even offering a word in his defense.
• Lack of Empathy: With the exception of Leo, and to a much lesser extent Camille, none of the siblings show an ounce of remorse when one of them dies. Of course, as the deaths continue, the remaining siblings rapidly start to spiral into madness from the shock of it all.
• Last-Second Word Swap: Frederick very nearly calls Perry a racial slur before catching himself and switching to a different, not racist, insult.
• Loophole Abuse: Attempted by Madeline, but defied. Despite Verna's warnings, Madeline convinces Roderick to kill himself in the hopes of ending the deal and getting out of it with her own life. Roderick goes through with it, only for Verna to bring him back and politely inform him that she can't accept his "resignation".
• Lovecraftian Tropes: Usher gives a secondhand summary of Pym's backstory that seems close to the plot of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, but drifts closer to At the Mountains of Madness, the follow-up story by Lovecraft. In particular, Usher references "the realm of beings who lived...beneath us, out of time. And out of space", an element present in Lovecraft's work but not necessarily Poe's.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's kept deliberately vague for most of the story if Roderick is truly seeing ghosts or just hallucinations caused by CADASIL. Additionally, Roderick seems to know details he couldn't possibly know unless he spoke to the ghosts, though we only have his word for it, meaning most of the show could be told by an Unreliable Narrator. Then again, throwing a curve ball into all of this, Verna says off-handedly that souls don't exist, which would seem to preclude the possibility of ghosts. It's possible that the ghosts are just visions caused by Verna as a way to impart information to the characters and/or give them a good scare. Then again, Verna makes a comment to Madeline about having time to reflect on things after death, which would seem to imply that there is an "after" in which to reflect.
• May–December Romance: Roderick's second wife Juno is five decades his junior, which disgusts his biological children.
• Mythology Gag: A natural element for a series based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe:
  • Tamerlane Usher, eldest daughter of Roderick Usher, is named in reference to Poe's poem Tamerlane, one of Poe's first works.
  • Tamerlane's husband, William "Billy-T" Wilson, references the titular character of the Short Story William Wilson, but Tam experiences the events of the story (being haunted by a more charismatic, virtuous doppelganger) herself.
  • Frederick Usher, eldest son of Roderick of Usher, shares a first name with Frederick, Baron of Metzengerstein, a central character in Metzengerstein: A Tale of Imitation of the German, the first Short Story written by Poe to see print.
  • Victorine LaFourcade, the eldest of Roderick Usher's illegitimate children, shares a name with one of the characters briefly mentioned in the Short Story The Premature Burial.
  • Napoleon Usher, another of Roderick Usher's illegitimate children, shares a first name with that of the main character of the Short Story The Spectacles.
  • Camille L'Espanaye, yet another one of Roderick Usher's illegitimate children, shares her name with one of the murder victims in the first C. Auguste Dupin story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
  • Prospero Usher, youngest of Roderick Usher's illegitimate children, is named in reference to the protagonist of The Masque of the Red Death.
  • Lenore Usher, daughter of Frederick Usher and his wife Morella, and granddaughter of Roderick Usher, references the lost love of the unidentified narrator of The Raven.
  • Morella shares a name with the title character of another Poe short story.
  • Fortunato Industries is named after the jester in The Cask of Amontillado who was murdered by being lured by the prospect of fine wine to being suffocated by a stone wall built by his aggressor.
  • Attorney C. Auguste Dupin, an attorney who has dedicated his life to taking down the "Usher crime family", is a reimagining of the pioneer Gentleman Detective of the same name.
  • Arthur Pym, enigmatic lawyer of the Usher family, is named after the titular character of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
  • Annabel Lee, Roderick Usher's first wife, shares a name with that of the titular character of the last complete poem composed by Poe.
  • Verna is not directly named for a Poe character, but her name is an anagram for "raven".
  • Roderick Usher's marriage to a much younger woman, prompting his children to call her a "child bride" is likely an acknowledgement of Edgar Allan Poe marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin when he was twenty-seven.
  • Longfellow is named after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom Poe viciously criticized, to the point of accusing him of plagiarism.
  • Verna's last words in the final episode are from E.A. Poe's "Spirits of the Dead" poem.
  • The eulogy given at the second funeral is text taken directly from "The Premature Burial".
  • Several lines of dialogue are also direct quotes from Poe, or his poetry:
    • "Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence."
    • "Language in its highest expression is musical."
    • "Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
    • "The night, though clear, shall frown, / And the stars shall not look down / From their high thrones in the Heaven / With light like hope to mortals given...", from the poem "Spirits of the Dead"
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The Ushers are very clearly modelled after the Sacklers, another family who ran a pharmaceutical company and have been blamed for the Opioid crisis in America and are also known for hating each other.
• Nom de Mom: Camille and Victorine are the only of the illegitimate Ushers who have not adopted their father's name.
• Odd Name, Normal Nickname: The characters take their name from the works of 19th-century writer Edgar Allan Poe, and thus some sound long, archaic and formal in the show's 21st-century America setting. As a result, some of them have more mundane nicknames — for example, Tamerlane "Tammy", Napoleon "Leo", and Prospero "Perry".
• Open Secret: As Gris tells Madeline, everyone at Fortunato Pharmaceuticals knew that Longfellow was the father of his secretary's children.
• Parting-Words Regret: It weighs on Roderick that the last time he saw some of his children alive was the family dinner he spent trying to flush out the informant. Especially since the informant wasn't even real.
• Point of No Return: All of the Usher children reach a certain moment where, if they had taken Verna's words/persona to heart and chosen differently, they wouldn't have escaped dying but Verna would have given them far more peaceful and easy deaths. Perry could have decided to stop the rave/orgy from going ahead, abandoned his blackmail scheme and tried to prove himself in some other more beneficial manner; Camille could have let go of her hatred for Victorine and not tried to get the evidence to destroy her by going into the lab; Leo could have chosen not to deceive Julius and instead bring home one of the other cats from the shelter, admitting what he (thought he) had done to Pluto and that he needed help with his drug addiction; Victorine could have chosen not to lie to an apparently innocent and desperate woman in order to rope her in as a human test subject for a very risky and illegal procedure; Tamerlane could have talked to Bill and acknowledged her insecurities about her appearance and their sex life, instead of growing jealous of the latest sex worker they'd hired and pushing him away, or even just taken some time to rest after the failure of her Goldbug launch; and Frederick could have done literally anything other than what he did to Morella. Verna is so incensed by this last horrific act that she deliberately engineers an utterly horrendous death for Frederick.
• Practically Different Generations: Many of the children have considerable gaps in age due to being from different mothers. For example, Frederick and Prospero, the oldest and youngest respectively, are played by actors about thirty years apart in age, and in-universe Prospero is roughly ten to thirteen years older than Frederick's daughter Lenore.
• Predatory Big Pharma: The Ushers are a "crime family" who made billions from pharmaceuticals after a Deal with the Devil...or some malignant presence. Verna is a spirit of vengeance who is determined to rip through all the Usher heirs and kill them, innocent and guilty alike, in revenge for the hundreds of thousands of people they've killed. They are portrayed as completely corrupt and amoral, bribing and outright owning any oversight bodies that could stop them, falsifying medical studies, and having built their empire off huge amounts of false advertising that claim their (addictive) pills are non-addictive.
• Present-Day Past: Two examples, from Madeline, in the same conversation that is taking place shortly after midnight on New Year's Day, 1980:
  • First, she mentions "Fuck, Marry, Kill", a hypothetical conversation game that is not known to have entered pop culture before around 2007.
  • Immediately after, she asks "What would you do for a Klondike bar?", referring to both the product and its ad campaign that were introduced in 1982.
  • Verna notes that they are in a place beyond time and space, so it's possible that the future concepts/phrases worked their way into Madeline's mind due to the entire eldritch situation.
• Primal Scene: Both downplayed and narrowly averted when Lenore walks into Roderick's office and sees Juno sitting on his lap. While nothing explicit is actually happening, it's clear that Roderick still doesn't want Lenore to see.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Annabel’s ghost delivers one to Roderick, raking him across the coals for his neglectful, malignant parenting of their children. It’s notably one of the only times in the entire series that Roderick shows genuine remorse.
  Annabel: “He’s rich.” When people asked how you took them, how you convinced them away from me, “he’s rich,” I’d say. “He’s rich.” And you don’t understand what that word means. They were young. They only knew appetite, and “Here,” you said, “come with me. Gorge yourselves.” How could I compete with that? You didn’t feed them, though, did you? You starved them. Less and less of them came back each time until one day, they were empty. They were siphoned. You started filling them up with… What did you fill them up with, Roderick? What did you have to fill them with?? Because you weren’t rich, were you? I thought you were a rich man, all this time, but… I see you now. I look at you and I see… you. The poverty of you.
• Resignations Not Accepted: Invoked almost verbatim by Verna when Madeline tries to get Roderick to kill himself swallowing pills in the hopes that will circumvent the deal with Verna. Instead, Verna brings Roderick back to life and tells him "I couldn't accept your resignation" and no loopholes can change it.
• The Reveal: Verna isn't on a crusade of vengeance or justice; Madeline and Roderick struck a deal with her that guaranteed their success and immunity from legal consequences, in exchange for their entire bloodline ending when it came time for them to die. The bill became due when Roderick was diagnosed with a terminal illness implicitly in its late stage, leaving him not long to live. While Verna might try to influence the manner of death depending on how she feels, she's not the one who chose for the family to die now; she's simply following the terms Madeline and Roderick agreed to. This also explains why he was so keen on Victorine's research reaching human testing immediately: he could eke just a bit more life out of his situation.
• Rule of Symbolism: Each of the objects Verna places on the graves of the Ushers ties back in some way to the reason for their undoing:
  • Prospero receives the mask he wore to his orgy, which he refused to leave or cancel despite the obvious safety issues due to his desire to prove his business idea to Roderick and hurt/blackmail Frederick.
  • Camille receives the phone she used to both photograph the chimp that tore her apart, and which she attempted to use to photograph evidence that would sabotage the sister she hated.
  • Napoleon is given the collar belonging to Pluto, the hated pet cat of the boyfriend he callously treated as a possession, which he eagerly sought to replace when he believed he'd killed it, with said replacement quickly tricking him into his own death.
  • Victorine's object is the heart mesh device she was desperate to make work, which she lied, defrauded and performed cruel animal testing for, and the obsession with which eventually caused her to kill her girlfriend before driving her to suicidal madness.
  • Tamerlane's is a golden scarab, the symbol of the Goldbug beauty company she drove herself mad - and her husband away - for; ironically enough, her obsession with a beauty-and-health company only shone a light on the flaws she always hated herself for.
  • Frederick receives the bag of cocaine he asked Napoleon for, and which caused his most vile tendencies to ramp up when he started using it. Fittingly, given Verna's admission of taking a more direct hand in his death, it's also very simply the method with which he was killed - that is, it also contains the nightshade powder Verna distracted him into filling it with that paralysed him before he was cut in two; and as a mark of Verna's disdain for him, she simply drops the bag on his tombstone as opposed to being careful when setting it in place.
  • Lenore, fittingly, is gifted a single black feather and white flower tied with a ribbon. Unlike the rest of her family, Lenore was a true innocent, and her death occurred only because her grandfather made a deal long before she was born.
  • Madeline has placed the sapphire eyes of Queen Twosret with which Roderick replaced her real ones, symbolising her malignant narcissism, her desire to live forever, and her and Roderick's twin obsession with Ancient Egypt.
  • Finally, Roderick has placed the glass he spent the night drinking out of while talking to Dupin. This, in turn, ties it back to the bottle of cognac Roderick was drinking out of - the same bottle (and drink glasses!) over which he, Madeline and Verna sealed their pact, and which started the whole affair to begin with.
• Sanity Slippage: As befitting of Poe's stories, each of the Usher children go through various levels of sanity slippage as the story goes on. Verna appears to if not outright cause them to lose their grip on reality, at least to help it along..
  • Leo murders his boyfriend's cat (or so he believes) after a late-night binge on drugs, and begins to go crazy after he is attacked several times by the replacement cat, tearing up the walls with a hammer when he believes he hears it inside them.
  • Victorine, under the pressure from Roderick and Madeline to begin human trials for her heart mesh, begins hearing a squishy, chirpy noise everywhere she goes and has to turn on loud music to drown it out. It's only after she remembers accidentally bludgeoning her girlfriend that she remembers the noise is the mesh she put on her dead girlfriend's heart, who she thinks is still alive.
  • Tamerlane, stressed and suffering insomnia from the impending launch of her new wellness company, desperate to make a name for herself outside of Roderick and Madeline's pharmaceutical dominion and the various deaths of her siblings, begins experiencing situations where she seemingly falls asleep without realizing it, which is shown to the audience as a series of jarring jump cuts.
  • After his wife, Morella, survives the acid bath orgy that killed Perry, Frederick receives a phone that his father and Pym believe was Morrie's burner phone. Despite evidence that says otherwise, Frederick begins to have coke-induced suspicions that the phone was indeed hers and Morrie was having an affair with Perry, behind Frederick's back. These beliefs lead Frederick to decide to bring her home despite her needing intensive care, only to subject her to medical torture by periodically injecting her IV with a paralyzing agent every time she shows signs of recovery and pulling all of her teeth with pliers in a coke-fueled rage.
  • Roderick, since being diagnosed with advanced CADASIL, begins experiencing hallucinations of ghosts of his dead mother, his dead children, and the rattling chains (or possibly the bells on the jester mask?) that held down his boss after Roderick and Madeline drugged him and buried him alive inside of a brick wall in the basement of Fortunato.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Pretty much the Usher family motto, one more or less directly articulated by various members of the family when they face any resistance. The family has been able to use its extraordinary wealth to evade consequences for its crimes going back nearly 50 years. Of course, that ethos finds its limits when it runs up against Verna, who can't be bribed and will ruthlessly enforce the rules of her agreement with Roderick and Madeline.
• The Scourge of God: During the slow annihilation of the Usher clan, the four bastards - in order, Prospero, Camille, Leo, and Victorine - are all killed first before any of Roderick's children born to his first wife.
• Setting Update: While the original story is supposed to be set around its original publishing in the 1800s, the miniseries takes places in November 2023 with a modern update to the tale with cell phones, massive conglomerates, and the opioid epidemic.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Dupin constantly counters Roderick's delusions of grandeur throughout the night and interview, and in the show's final scene he delivers one last jab by refusing to publish his enemy's confession; "Because in the end, it don't matter why you did any of it. I don't fucking care why you did it. We don't want your confession, or your rationale, or your explanation. So, take all that with you, why don't you?"
• Sibling Rivalry: Very few of the siblings actually like each other; Camille and Vic seem to have the most personal contempt for each other, while Frederick and Perry actively show their hate and spite toward each other until the siblings begin to die.
• Soft Glass: Hell no. Tamerlane smashes every mirror in her home in a delusional attempt to kill Verna, walking over glass shards with bare feet with predictable results. She meets her end when she gets impaled by falling mirror shards.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The energetic synth of Starship's "We Built This City" accompanies a scene where Leo discovers that the new cat has been leaving animal carcasses all around the apartment, including a dead mouse in his slippers.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Julius and (according to Word of God) Pluto the cat. Both their counterparts died in Poe's original works.
• Spoiler Title: The House of Usher is wiped off the planet by the end of the series. As in, the bloodline is gone.
• Starving Artist: In a discussion about the life Madeline and her brother could've had, Verna says Roderick would have been a poet. While she acknowledges that he would always be broke as a result, millions of people wouldn't have died because of Ligodone and the Usher bloodline wouldn't have been doomed. It's implied Roderick would ultimately have ended up happier in the long run.
• Take That!:
  • "The Masque of the Red Death" takes a jab at the trend of AI writing:
    Madeline: Hell, an algorithm could write movies and TV shows.
    Roderick: Not well.
  • "Goldbug" posits that several influential American figures, from the Rockefellers to Mark Zuckerberg, struck deals with Verna to reach where they are. The script pointedly calls out the "Toxic Twins" Koch brothers and climate change denier Gina Rinehart. The last episode has Verna all but confirm one of her clients is Donald Trump.
• This Is Reality: Seeing video of Verna, Roderick demands they enhance the picture. Arthur tells him that only happens on TV and the best they can do is zoom in for a slightly better picture.
• This Is the Part Where...: By episode 7, Roderick has figured out the formula for his Once per Episode hallucinations: "What happens now, see, is you start talking. And then all of a sudden I spot a little hint of Freddie, but I try to ignore it because you can’t see him, and then he manages to get a good jolt in there for my benefit while you look at me like I’m insane..." This time, though, the hallucinations throw him a curveball by showing Frederick as a happy child running to his father's arms before things take a turn for the horrifying.
• Token Good Teammate:
  • Heavily downplayed with Leo among Roderick's children. He is manipulative, selfish and dishonest like the rest of his siblings but he's also the only one who shows love for his siblings (he gives Perry a genuine You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech) and is legitimately grief-stricken when Perry and Camille die. The rest are incredibly indifferent at best and callous at worst.
  • Lenore is a straighter example for the whole Usher clan, by virtue of being an innocent young girl that truly loves her family and tries her best to do good by them. She's the only one who seems to care if the family really did do what they're accused of, or who thinks that if they're guilty they should actually be punished. It doesn't save her, but Verna at least does make her death painless and comforts her as it happens, reassuring her that it will help save millions, and making clear that she takes no pleasure in it in sharp contrast to her borderline glee with the others.
• Too Dumb to Live: Prospero holding an orgy in an abandoned chemical plant is already pushing it, but hooking the sprinkler systems back up to the roof tanks without testing their contents means that he ends up hosing himself and his guests down with corrosive chemicals.
• Truth in Television: A person suffering from extreme insomnia will usually experience microsleeps, very brief and uncontrollable episodes of unconsciousness, just as Tamerlane does.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Downplayed. While Henry Thomas is far from ugly, he's made to look plain and slightly greasy as Freddie, promoting the idea that Morella is way out of his league. Perry even wonders how a dweeb like Frederick landed a bombshell like Morella.
• Undignified Death: Frederick dies in a puddle of his own piss as he's sliced in half and eventually crushed under a collapsing building.
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • In the first version of the argument that ended Victorine and Alessandra's relationship, the fight ends with Vic angrily throwing a marble figurine at Al as she storms out of the house. The second time, the figurine hits Al in the head and kills her, and Vic scrambles to revive her using the heart mesh implant—to no avail, obviously, because the implant doesn't work, and Al's fatal injury was to her head anyway. Vic is so desperate to get that implant working and to undo her mistake that she blocked out the fact that Al had died on her living room floor.
  • Discussed by Dupin when he asks how Roderick could have known what really happened to each kid when they were alone and tells Roderick "I have to take this with a grain of salt." Roderick explains each of the children's ghosts told him. However, Roderick is by his own admission suffering from a disease that causes him memory problems, hallucinations, and other dementia-like symptoms, so the reality of the circumstances remains in question.
• The Unreveal:
  • It's never exactly confirmed in the series just what Verna is exactly supposed to be - Death, a demon, a deity - all that's clear is that she has incredible supernatural talents and makes deals with mortals for high prices, and that when it comes time to collect, she will collect no matter what. Although, she implies in her conversation with Pym when she says that she "came topside" that she's one of the immortals from Hollow Earth.
  • The audience never finds out what exactly the guests at Perry's orgy did to merit their dying gruesomely alongside him.
• Villain Protagonist: The Ushers. In his opening argument during their trial, Dupin outright refers to them as a crime family and a discussion held amongst the family indicates that they have no problem killing anyone who may pose a threat to them.
• Was It All a Lie?: After Roderick betrays Dupin in favor of Fortunato, Annabel Lee tells her husband that the man she fell in love with would never do such a thing, causing her to wonder if she made him up in the first place.
• Wealthy Philanthropist: Juno and Morella use the fortunes they inherit from the deaths of the Ushers and the dissolution of Fortunato towards philanthropic endeavors.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Every single one of Roderick's children are desperate to prove themselves to him in some way, which is ultimately their driving goal. It's especially true of Frederick, who is noted by Verna just before his death to have done everything he ever did because he was chasing Roderick's approval.
• Where It All Began: Twice over. Prospero (the first Usher heir to die) and Frederick (the last) both meet their fates in the exact same location, and Roderick returns to his childhood home to finish the tale of the Usher family that started there.

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"I'm the richest man in the world. You know that?"