“The Fall of the House of Usher”: Less a Horror Than a Fantasy Story

Photo by Eleanor Brooke on Unsplash

Packed with references both to Poe’s works and contemporary headlines, Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher follows the lives of Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell): their difficult childhoods, their rise to the top of Fortunado Pharmaceuticals, and their Faustian bargain with a shapeshifting Mephistopheles-figure (Carla Gugino) that ushers in their success, then reduces their empire to a rubble of death and disgrace. On the surface, the miniseries is an apt horror story for our times. But on a deeper level, and in its central message — that those who seek profit, no matter the cost to human and animal life, will face justice — it is more fantasy than reality.

The series takes aim, more often than not directly, at corporate greed and political corruption as manifested in real people. Verna, Gugino’s demonic character eventually admits, like the devil in the Rolling Stones’ song, that she played an important role in the careers of figures from William Randolph Hearst to Prescott Bush, from Mitch McConnell to Donald Trump[1]. The Ushers themselves are based on the Sackler family, whose tenacity and entrepreneurial spirit we have to thank for the opioid epidemic. Though Usher’s writing does at times come across as didactic, its writers and actors, in an almost superhuman effort, attempt and…