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Flanagan finishes his Netflix contract on a high, gleefully capturing Poe’s magic, eerie romance and sense of dread. His shows have become the streaming service’s best offerings for spooky season, and it is hard to imagine how that void will be filled. It’s not perfect – the order in which the Poe family meet their fates is a case of diminishing returns, as its most intriguing members are dispatched too quickly.
Netflix’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ premieres as horror master Mike Flanagan adapts Edgar Allan Poe - WTOP
Netflix’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ premieres as horror master Mike Flanagan adapts Edgar Allan Poe.
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
All 'The Fall of the House of Usher' Poe References Explained - Netflix Tudum
With this foreboding introduction, we enter the interior through a Gothic portal with the narrator. With him we encounter Roderick Usher, who has changed drastically since last the narrator saw him. His cadaverous appearance, his nervousness, his mood swings, his almost extrahuman sensitivity to touch, sound, taste, smell, and light, along with the narrator’s report that he seems lacking in moral sense, portrays a deeply troubled soul. We learn, too, that his twin sister, Madeline, a neurasthenic woman like her brother, is subject to catatonic trances.
Episode 7: “The Pit and the Pendulum”
Some scholars speculated that Poe may have attached special importance to the fact that Roderick and Madeline are twins, noting that Poe previously investigated the phenomenon of the double in “Morella” (1835) and “William Wilson” (1839). Other scholars pointed to the work as an embodiment of Poe’s doctrine of l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”), which held that art needs no moral, political, or didactic justification. The secret that is buried and then comes to light (represented by Madeline) is never revealed. The symbol which represents the secret – Madeline herself – is hidden away by Roderick, but that symbol returns, coming to light at the end of the story and (in good Gothic fashion) destroying the family for good. Roderick grows more erratic in his behaviour, and the narrator reads to his friend to try to soothe him.
Episode 2: “The Masque of the Red Death”
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is an 1839 short story by Edgar Allan Poe ( ), a pioneer of the short story and a writer who arguably unleashed the full psychological potential of the Gothic horror genre. The story concerns the narrator’s visit to a strange mansion owned by his childhood friend, who is behaving increasingly oddly as he and his twin sister dwell within the ‘melancholy’ atmosphere of the house. Just like in the episode, Poe's short story of the same name features a party thrown by a character called Prospero (played in the series by Sauriyan Sapkota) which is crashed by a mysterious masked figure. Instead of contending with acid falling through overhead sprinklers, the politically influential revellers in Poe's story are the aristocracy trying to escape a plague within the privileged confines of the prince's palace — but in the end, it comes for them all. There are many overlaps in the design of Prince Prospero's party however, as Poe's tale describes many rooms for debauchery, and of course, it's a masquerade.
A mere glimpse of the Usher mansion inspires in the narrator “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.” Upon entering the house, the reader as the narrator navigates through a series of dark passages lined with carvings, tapestries, and armorial trophies. Poe draws heavily on Gothic conventions, using omens and portents, heavy storms, hidden passageways, and shadows to set the reader on edge. A week after Madeline’s death, the narrator lies awake with an unexplainedfeeling of fear.
Dreams, for instance, are the way our unconscious mind communicates with our conscious mind, but in such a way which shrouds or veils their message in ambiguous symbolism and messages. Roderick Usher is a gifted poet and artist, whose talents the narrator praises before sharing a poem Usher wrote, titled ‘The Haunted Palace’. The ballad concerns a royal palace which was once filled with joy and song, until ‘evil things’ attacked the king’s palace and made it a desolate shadow of what it once was.
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Poe’s writing helped elevate the genre from a position of critical neglect to an art form. “The Fall of the House of Usher” stands as one of Poe’s most popular and critically examined stories. Whether the reader is trapped by the house or by its inhabitants is unclear. Poe uses the term house to describe both the physical structure and the family.
Breaking Down ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’s’ Edgar Allen Poe References, From ‘The Raven’ to ‘The Black Cat’
Roger Corman's 1961 film The Pit and the Pendulum, which stars Vincent Price and boasts a script by horror legend Richard Matheson based on Poe's short story. Leo's incredibly supportive and empathetic boyfriend is named for Poe's story "The Journal of Julius Rodman." Julius also owns a black cat called Pluto, which is the name of the leading feline in Poe's "The Black Cat" — and a big clue to Leo's fate. Like Madeline, Roderick is connected to the mansion, the titular House of Usher.
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In a neat bit of production design, Vic and Allessandra's heart mesh design has a circular disk at the front with smaller circles within it. And it's almost certainly a reference to the "The Tell-Tale Heart," whose protagonist feels "vexed" by the pale, filmy blue eye of his elderly companion staring at him — so much so that it drives the protagonist to murder. Roderick Usher takes the credit for most of them, but several Poe poems are read aloud by characters during The Fall of the House of Usher. Roderick Usher’s first wife, the love of his life and mother of Freddie and Tammy, is named for Poe’s 1849 poem, in which the narrator laments his lover who died. In the series, Roderick constantly quotes the poem to Annabel Lee as if he wrote it himself. Poe famously loved ciphers, so Flanagan has peppered his episodes with references for sleuths to find — the director has even dropped references to his own work throughout the series.
His name has since become synonymous with macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but Poe assumed a variety of literary personas during his career. The Messenger—as well as Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s—established Poe as one of America’s first popular literary critics. In the pages of these magazines, Poe also introduced of a new form of short fiction—the detective story—in tales featuring the Parisian crime solver C. The detective story follows naturally from Poe’s interest in puzzles, word games, and secret codes, which he loved to present and decode in the pages of the Messenger to dazzle his readers. The word “detective” did not exist in English at the time that Poe was writing, but the genre has become a fundamental mode of twentieth-century literature and film. Dupin and his techniques of psychological inquiry have informed countless sleuths, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” wasoriginally published in September of 1839. In the tale, the narrator visits achildhood friend who is sick and in need of company. The house is old anddecrepit, and it seems to cause the madness of the last surviving Ushersiblings, Roderick and Madeline. When Madeline succumbs to an illness, she isburied in a house vault, only to return after a premature burial. Madelineemerges from the vault the night of an intense storm and collapses on herbrother in death. Rather than convey a lesson, Poe's story explores gothic elementsof the supernatural and evil to convey this tale of horror.
The story opens with the narrator riding alone on a cloudy autumn day to theHouse of Usher. He describes a childhood friendship with the owner, Roderick Usher.Roderick had requested the narrator’s company during his convalescence from anillness. The narrator reflects on the once-great Usher family and that theyhave only one surviving direct line of descendants, comparing the beautiful butcrumbling house to the family living inside. As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, he and Roderick hear cracking and ripping sounds from somewhere in the house. When the dragon's death cries are described, a real shriek is heard, again within the house.
“It’s batshit crazy in the best possible way,” Carla Gugino told Netflix during production. “It has quite a lot of very dark humor, but also really touches the soul.” In the series, Gugino portrays a shape-shifter named Verna, whose origins can be traced back to a — let’s just say — very famous Poe character. “There is a fantastical supernatural element to the story, and she is the manifestation of that,” she added. As these first look photos and posters reveal, Verna isn’t one to be played with. “You could say she’s the executor of fate or the executor of karma,” said Gugino. His father disappeared not long after the child’s birth, and, at the age of three, Poe watched his mother die of tuberculosis.
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