Welcome back to White Rose of Avalon my Darlings!   Today’s post is going to be a review featuring my thoughts on the new Netflix horror series The Fall of the House of Usher.    It was just released last Thursday, and from what I have seen it seems to have been getting some pretty polarizing reviews.    I think that the polarizing nature of the series is something that makes it all the more intriguing.   I want to warn you here that there will be some spoilers ahead in this post, so proceed with your own caution if you have not seen the series yet!

The series is by Mike Flanagan, who also did the two Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor.   It makes so much sense that he would follow up two series based on classic horror literature by taking on the icon of horror literature, Edgar Allan Poe!    The cast of the series was really great, and I particularly loved getting to see Carla Gugino, who seems to be in most of Mike Flanagan’s work, as this very intriguing character who brought the story together.

Now, anyone familiar with this blog and my YouTube channel will know that I am a huge fan of Edgar Allan Poe, and have been since I was a child.    I have a huge place in my heart for Gothic Romance works of the 19th century, in general!   With that being said, I was so excited when I heard that this series was coming out this October, and knew it would be part of my Season of the Witch entertainment.

Honestly, the series did not disappoint, and I had very high expectations!    One thing that I was delighted to discover, was that it was not a straight re-telling of The Fall of the House of Usher, while I adore that Poe tale, I knew that an eight-episode series would be far too long to stretch out that one tale.   Finding that Flanagan chose to entwine many Edgar Allan Poe tales together in a single narrative, with The Fall of the House of Usher as the framework was immediately intriguing!    I also was the total Gothic Literature nerd getting overly enchanted by every little reference I could pick up on throughout the series.    Even the names were obviously tying together all of Poe’s body of work.    We had Usher characters named Lenore, Morella, Tamerlane, and Annabel Lee, all of whom are named for Poe’s poems except Morella who is named for a short story.    The story even worked in C. Auguste Dupin and Gordon Pym (here called Arthur Gordon Pym, or simply Arthur, or even sometimes ‘the Pym Reaper’).    

Each of the deaths of the Usher children took inspiration from different Poe tales.    That way we got to see The Masque of the Red Death, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, Gold-bug, and The Pit and the Pendulum.    There is also the great tie-in of The Cask of Amontillado which was hinted at with the naming of the company as Forunato, but brought full circle in the end!   The series gets bonus points from me for also having a brief reference to Berenice, which may have gone over the heads of viewers less Poe-loving than myself.   The pulling of teeth due to obsession with the beauty of a smile is a reference to Berenice!    There is even a small reference to my all-time favorite Poe tale Ligeia, or at least I perceived it as such.    That reference is that Madeline Usher is obsessed with immortality and seeks to live forever, which is exactly what Ligeia was doing in her story!

Finally, I have to discuss Carla Gugino’s character, and why she was my favorite part of the series.   Who and what she was left me guessing throughout the episodes, at first I took her to be a ghost, but soon I realized she was much more powerful and complex than a simple ghost.    I wondered if she was a Demon of some sort, as a bargain had been struck, but that was not quite right either.    My husband, who watched part of the series with me suggested she was an Angel of Death, however, that did not fit with the making of deals.     At the end of the day, I realized that she was the Spirit of the Raven herself, the Spirit of Poe’s Macabre Magick made manifest in physical form!     She acted as a Demon striking a deal, but she did not want souls or any dark deeds for her deal, she only wanted to observe, as she was all-knowing and all-seeing.    She knew exactly what would have happened had a bargain never been struck!    She also acted as a Psychopomp, bringing the dead into the afterlife, where they in turn became ghosts to torment Rodrick Usher.    She even felt remorse at having to take Lenore, being very gentle and merciful in how she killed her, letting her die painlessly!   Verna, as is her credited character name, truly embodied the heart and soul of Poe’s beliefs and morals, by using his tales to enact a balancing of the scales to create change.    I do not see her as the villain, but rather as the arbiter of true justice for all the evils committed by the family after a deal that never needed to be struck was enacted!

I hope you have enjoyed this review.   Did you enjoy The Fall of the House of Usher?   Did you get the Poe references throughout?   Are there any references I missed in my review?   Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is a poster for the series.     I found the poster on https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15567174/.

Tarot Note: I have a page offering tarot and oracle readings for those interested in these services!    I am very happy to be offering these readings to my treasured readers at White Rose of Avalon!  Link to page: https://whiteroseofavalon.life/tarot-and-oracle-readings/