The Fall of the House of Usher TV Episode Recaps & News

The Fall of the House of Usher doesn’t waste any time before playing Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest hits. In the first 30 seconds of the series premiere, I counted at least four references to four separate works, some more obscure than others. (No points for noticing the raven, but you admire the audacity of that “Another Brick in the Wall” needle drop, which is destined to send a shiver up the spine of anyone who knows “The Cask of Amontillado.”)

Flanagan is an old hand at doing this kind of thing. His The Haunting of Hill House modernized a beloved horror-lit classic; his The Haunting of Bly Manor, nominally an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, wove in a few other James stories as well. One episode in, The Fall of the House of Usher feels like a little of both: a series that uses Poe’s classic short story as a jumping-off point for a ripped-from-the-headlines interrogation of Big Pharma greed and its consequences with memorable bits from a bunch of other Poe stories stirred into the mix.

To any viewer weaned on a steady diet of Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination, this opening montage is both a statement of purpose and a challenge as real as spotting the ghosts that popped up in the backgrounds of series creator Mike Flanagan’s previous Netflix shows: Just how well do you know Edgar Allan Poe, anyway? — Scott Meslow, “The Fall of the House of Usher Series-Premiere Recap: Keeping Up With the Ushers”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK57069mraCVYrOiuMtmpp9lpJ2ybrTOrqqeZZ%2Bbera%2Fx56paA%3D%3D