“I called you tonight to give you the only thing you’ve ever wanted.
My confession.
I’ll tell you how my children died, but where to start…the beginning I suppose.”
Mike Flanagan has been one of my favorite filmmakers ever since I first watched The
Haunting of Hill House, and while it has been quite a few years now, I did read a lot of
Edgar Allan Poe through middle school and high school, and I always loved his work,
so I was fully expecting The Fall of the House of Usher to be the best thing I’d seen all
year, and while I did enjoy it overall, I still can’t help but feel disappointed at
what could have been.
To be clear, these are just my opinions.
I think it’s much easier to be the armchair critic looking at a finished work and nitpicking
its flaws than it is to create something new, I also recognize that any of my own personal
take-aways are just that, personal, and other people will have their own feelings, so I’m
not arguing that I could have written something inherently better, just that there are ways
that I would have done things differently if I were in Flanagan’s shoes, and sometimes
it’s just fun to play that game of imagination if nothing else.
The thing is, I did spend a good amount time of imagining, because it was announced years
ago, before they ever shot any footage or even announced the cast, when all we knew
was that Mike Flanagan would be adapting The Fall of the House of Usher and some other
Poe stories into a miniseries, and I spent a lot of time wondering what that would end
up looking like.
Just from the start, I can’t help but wish he kept things in the original period.
I respect what he was doing, it’s the same perspective that guided Rian Johnson in writing
Knives Out and Glass Onion, homages to Agatha Christie novels, with the idea being that
when Christie was writing her stories, they weren’t period pieces, they were a commentary
on the world that she was living in, and the same is true for Edgar Allan Poe, but I have
to admit, imagining Flanagan’s version of something like Dracula or Sleepy Hollow; the
way people dressed back then, the cobblestone streets or the carriages, the old manors or
the humble hamlets, is just far more appealing to me than another modern setting.
But I think it’s about more than aesthetic, Poe’s stories were fitting of that era for
a reason, it was a time when there was a lot more mystery and superstition in the world,
which I think lends itself well to that kind of Gothic horror.
But we could talk in circles all day about whether he made the right choice with the
setting, ultimately my issues with the show go a lot deeper.
I think it’s only natural to compare a writer or director’s work against the other things
they’ve done, both of these seasons also happen to be some of my favorite works of
television ever made, but I also think particularly in the case of Hill House, there are enough
similarities in the story and its structure that help to illustrate some of the problems
that I have.
When you think about it, both stories are just as much of a mystery as a horror story.
The first episode of each series lays the foundation for these central mysteries that
won’t be paid off until much later: what happened in the house on this particular night
and how did their mother die?
Why is the Usher family all suddenly dying, and what happened on New Year’s Eve?
These mysteries are dovetailed through the past and the present, with each episode also
giving us a direct perspective of one character, following through each of the Crain and the
Usher children to learn more about their lives while still feeding back into the larger mystery.
But I just don’t think the structure is nearly as effective here, and I think it holds
Usher back from its full potential.
Because there’s a tension to this mystery in Hill House, we obviously can assume the
house is haunted, but everything else is unknowable.
They slowly peel back the layers through each of the Crain’s perspectives until we finally
see that night first hand in the penultimate episode, and it offers a revelation that feels
heartbreaking and deeply unsettling, but also feels like a proper reveal, something that
we couldn’t possibly have known even though some elements were foreshadowed.
But I feel like the mysteries in House of Usher aren’t just foreshadowed to, they’re
practically spelled out for us in the first episode alone.
We hear all about resolutions, how their lives are about to change forever, how Roderick
takes the blame for the death of his children, while muttering that “it’s time.”
I don’t think it would take a detective like Dupin to figure out that there’s some
sort of Faustian bargain at play here, and that’s more or less what it turns out to
be.
But this is what I pieced together just in the first episode, so I don’t think it needed
to have been this major reveal saved for the finale.
I felt similarly about the other main mystery, because we know that they don’t start out
running things at Fortunato, but just in the first episode we also learn that they did
something that requires them to hide from the police and build a credible alibi, that
also conveniently paves the way for them to take over the company.
Again, I don’t think you need to be a detective to arrive at this logical conclusion, if you’ve
read Poe before you could have guessed exactly where this was going in great detail, but
even someone who’s never read Poe would likely be able to put two and two together
several episodes before the big reveal.
Which isn’t to say that I think these are bad scenes, I actually think they’re some
of the best in the series, I just don’t think they needed to be treated like a major
plot twist.
The other side of this structure that I just don’t think works as well as it could have,
was by using individual episodes to go through each character’s story one at a time.
Hill House does the same sort of the thing, but with a few major differences.
First of all, the flashbacks.
In Hill House the flashbacks give us a chance to see all of the Crain children as children,
living in the house together, as we learn about the trauma they’ve each suffered,
and how that’s informed the adults they’ve grown into.
But in Usher, the flashbacks focus mostly on Roderick and Madeline.
The only two Usher children we ever even see in flashbacks are Frederick and Tamerlane,
and they’re both still babies.
We don’t ever really learn what made them the way they are, what sort of relationship
they have with each other, with their father, with any of their mothers, they all just kind
of exist as another caricature of the ultra-rich, sex and drug obsessed with streaks of violence
and not much else.
But I feel like that’s just dishonest, even the worst people in the world are still complicated,
and I wish we got to see more of that complexity.
Really I think the problem again comes from the structure, this episodic slasher that
kills off all the Ushers one by one.
To reiterate, these are all opinions here, and credit where credit’s due, I’m not
sure I could come up with half of the brilliant things that Flanagan did with this show, but
now that it’s in this finished form, I can’t help but wonder what changes would have made
it all work better for me, and I just so happened to come up with some solutions.
First off, I don’t think there’s any reason we need to know that all of the Usher children
are dying before it starts happening, and I think if you spend the majority of that
first episode or two giving us more time with the characters, seeing who they are and what
made them the way they are, not only do you get more complex characters than what we ended
up with, but I think you create a lot more tension when they start dropping.
I also think the deal with Verna should have been shown to us much earlier.
Because it seems a little ridiculous to me that it takes them as long as it does to figure
out what’s really happening.
Having this surreal conversation on the night they murdered somebody, a woman who knows
every detail of their lives and what they’ve just done, promising fortune and every hope
and dream but at the cost of their bloodline, this feels like something that would burn
itself into anyone’s memory.
It’s justified in the story as a folie a deux, a delusion shared by two, but what about
Pym?
He also saw Verna when he was on his expedition, with a memory that the show makes very clear
that he remembers.
So we’re expected to believe that even with all of these inexplicable things happening,
with Usher children dropping like flies just like Verna had promised, with Roderick also
clearly suffering from major health problems that signal he’s nearing his end, which
was also part of the deal, and their best theory is that she’s just another of Roderick’s
bastards?
To me, the whole “deal with the devil” story works when the characters are aware
of the deal they’ve made.
The tension comes from their desperation when it’s time to settle up, which I think is
the perfect fit for this kind of story anyways, all about the rich and powerful escaping consequences
at every turn just because they’ve got deep enough pockets, only to find themselves locked
into a deal with a price they can’t negotiate.
So in my version, we’d start with a lot more character development and let these deaths
come as a genuine surprise, and then in the third episode or so, we’d see a flashback
of Pym on expedition when he sees Verna, a face he sees again in the security footage.
When he brings this news to Roderick and Madeline, he’s not sure what to make of it until they
recognize her too, and they all start to realize what’s happening.
You’ve given us the hints, so the characters should as well, and then you give us this
scene to solidify everything.
I think that this would create a lot more tension, because I think one of the key functions
of the slasher genre is that at some point the characters become aware of the kind of
story they’re in.
Alien, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Suspiria, pick your poison, at some point
they know that they’re in real danger, but that’s a big part of what creates the suspense
and the horror.
Instead it feels like everyone is in perpetual denial, and you can argue that that was the
point, but I think the truth of this situation would be more complicated than that.
If Roderick bred anything into these kids, it’s these hard pragmatic ideologies concerning
self-preservation, and if we know anything of the rich and powerful it’s that they
can be incredibly paranoid, so I think we should have seen more of that.
Watching these characters slowly unravel when they realize that it’s time to pay the piper,
and do everything in their power to try and escape this fate.
Imagining a version of the show where Roderick and Madeline know exactly what’s happening
and are stuck living in perpetual fear of what they can’t change, being truly powerless
for the first time since taking over Fortunato, just sounds a lot more interesting to me.
And imagine the impact this could have for the Usher children, watching as they descend
into madness and paranoia over their inevitable deaths, rather than just carrying on with
business as usual.
We get some of that in Tamerlane’s episode, but I feel like that should have been the
tone for all of them after Verna enters the picture, and I feel like I would have been
a lot more invested if that were the case.
But another problem is just the structure of the deaths themselves, always one character
per episode, and always right at the end.
It’s like at every turn, all of this tension that should come so naturally given the context
of the story, is just being cut out by these structural issues.
It’s presented as this slasher mystery, but it’s kind of ignoring the major tenets
of both of those genres.
The mysteries aren’t that layered and they’re certainly not that difficult to figure out,
and the slasher formula is so procedural that we know who’s going to die within the first
five minutes of every episode, and we know that someone always will die in those final
minutes, and considering most of these characters are really only expanded on in that very same
episode, never to be seen again, it’s not like we feel any emotional weight in their
final moments.
Instead it feels like we’re just kind of being pulled along a path when we already
know how it’s going to end, while inter-cutting with flashbacks that do the same.
This whole subplot of Dupin and Roderick does provide some interesting moments, but it’s
not exactly difficult to figure out that he’s not going to follow through with his testimony,
because we know that Dupin’s career was derailed by Roderick, they’ve got a bit
of a rivalry going on, so why should we doubt for any moment that he’s just stringing
him along with no intention of confessing?
Not to mention that corporations don’t usually promote people who try to air out all of their
dirty laundry, so if he did go through with his testimony, I find it hard to believe that
he’d ever be put in charge of the same company that he tried to rat out.
It’s like he just showed all of his cards too early.
Giving us every piece but the last, saving it for the finale to complete the puzzle that
we already solved.
The frustrating thing is how much genuine brilliance is there.
Flanagan always nails the aesthetic, I think the performances are terrific, and this concept
of weaving together all of these iconic Poe stories into one epic saga of a family and
their deal with the devil is great, he has plenty of interesting ideas on display, but
it just doesn’t carry that same weight as Hill House or Midnight Mass, and frankly it
didn’t even come close for me.
All I feel are the countless missed opportunities, because I know he can tell a great mystery,
he’s done it before.
I know he can get you invested in characters, that’s like his secret weapon, but god does
he know how to deliver the goods when the time comes, and I just didn’t ever feel
this show reaching those same heights.
And the sad part is how much of this could have been solved with just a few more scenes
with the major characters, or some simple restructuring.
I could probably ramble for a while longer, I have other frustrations that I didn’t
even get into here, but I don’t want to just tear the show to pieces, it’s still
better than most other horror shows out there, I had fun watching it, I just expected better
from Flanagan at this point.
But I don’t know, I also could be totally wrong, I know a lot of people loved it.
But I want to know what you guys think, did you love it, did you hate it?
What would you change about it, if anything?
but I guess that’s all for now, thank you for watching, and I’ll see you next time.