Horror expert Mike Flanagan (“Doctor Sleeps Awakening”, “The Haunting of Hill House”) gives Edgar Allan Poe a spectacularly staged update: In the eight-part miniseries, the Usher family clan from Poe’s short story not only bears a great resemblance to the self-important Roys who are in… the hit HBO series “Succession” in internal power games, but also with the billionaire Sackler family, who, as manufacturers of the addictive painkiller Oxycontin, are accused of having driven millions of Americans into addiction. And by the way, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is also a wonderful homage to Poe’s oeuvre.
It is not enough for Flanagan to simply modernize the short story from 1839 and have a different child of the clan patriarch Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) die in each episode, but he not only hides countless allusions to other works by Poe in the episode titles . For example, you meet Annabel Lee or Auguste Dupin, and quotes from the poem “The Raven” lurk everywhere. (Netflix)
