The FAIL Of The House Of Usher

So strap yourselves in oh my brothers and only friends, this is gonna be a rant about the latest Netflix show "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" helmed by Mike Flanagan of "The Haunting Of Hill House" and "Oculus" fame. Mike Flanagan I'm starting to think is going to be one trick pony as I thought "The Haunting Of Hill House" was actually legit but after striking out with "The Haunting Of Bly Manor" and whatever the hell "Midnight Mass" was, "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" is a MASSIVE failure on all accounts and as an avid fan of Edgar Allan Poe I'm going to explain exactly why and where this show fails and MAYBE explain how it could have improved.

Let's start with Edgar Allen Poe. As I mentioned before I am a HUGE fan of Edgar Allan Poe and ever since "The Following" used Poe as a mild motif for Joe Carroll's murders I've been waiting for a modern take on Poe as he has a full breadth of work to pull from that could benefit from a modern take. "The Cask Of Amontillado" and "The Masque Of The Red Death" are my favorite stories so imagine my surprise when I heard that Mike Flanagan was helming a mini-series that would combine the stories of Poe under the narrative of "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" (a story my wife enjoys). Of course, after his last few works, I had my suspicions...and then the trailer dropped...and...well...

...but I still decided to give it a chance. After all with a show boasting Henry Thomas and Mark Hamil and once again EDGAR ALLAN POE can't be all bad...right...? Anyway, the show was awful, so awful that getting through it was a SLOG of epic proportions, why? Because of the MODERN take on Poe's stories. Modernity is ruining modern-day storytelling as everything in this day and age if it isn't about how absolutely evil Trump, Republicans, White people, and Christians are then it's about Queerness, and Queerness is what we find front and center in "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" where we find nearly all of the main characters are some form of sexual deviant or some sort of degenerate. Tamerlane likes to watch her husband have sex with other women, Victorine is gay, C Augustine Dupain is gay, Prospero is bisexual, Napoleon is bisexual, Camille is bisexual and none of their sexualities moves the plot forward in any way shape and, or form. There isn't a single instance where their sexuality causes their downfall.

One could argue Tamerlane suffered her downfall when the sex tape was leaked, HOWEVER, she was already WILLINGLY involved in a cuckquean fetish anyway, so that's not really damaging if she's into that. But I digress. Poe wrote tragedies, and I loves me a good tragedy, be it The BeeGees's song or literature, I love me a good tragedy, BUT the cornerstone of any nutritious tragedy is characters who don't deserve it and more and more Hollywood is churning out stories that are supposed to be horror movies when in actuality they're schmuck bait flicks that feature characters doing absolutely stupid things for stupid reasons and then act surprised when something horrible happens. "Talk To Me", "Hereditary" and others, all of those are movies where the characters make a stupid decision and something horrible happens but at the very least "Hereditary" can be justified...kinda..."Talk To Me" cannot, and we'll discuss that in a later article....trust me...

Talk to The Hand because The Face ain't listenin'!

The point I'm getting at is for a tragedy to work the characters have to be innocent when the evil befalls them, that's why it's tragic when Mufasa dies but not tragic when Scar does, BUT keeping within the realm of Poe's tragedies nearly ALL of the characters didn't deserve the fates that befell them. You could argue maybe Fortunato deserved to be sealed behind a brick wall to starve to death BUT we're only told Fortunato insulted Montressor, we're never told the nature of the insult and therefore can only assume it must have been absolutely awful...but then again, Montressor could be an unreliable narrator. You could argue that Prince Prospero is a jerk, partying it up with his friends in some masked ball while everyone in the city is dying BUT far be it for a man for having money and wanting to offer his friends some little levity in the midst of crisis. "The Black Cat" and "The Tell Tale Heart", yes those men were murderers but they were caught in a frenzy that possessed them and was immediately horrified by their actions and ultimately ended up confessing to the deeds or being overcome with the grief.

Poe made his characters human and therefore contradictory and fearful but we could always listen and care about them because we understood they were merely human, BUT if "The Tell-Tale Heart" had opened with The Narrator getting a blowjob before tending to the old man, or "The Black Cat" had a threesome in the middle of the story what would be the purpose of that? Just like we'd be the purpose of having our introduction to Napoleon getting head from a groupie only to toss her out on the balcony when his boyfriend came home, or Prospero boasting to his father about how his club is going to be about VIPs blowing VIPS. Now granted all of this does do the job of telling me about the characters but it also tells me I don't like these characters and I am not supposed to like these characters and if I don't like these characters how am I supposed to care when bad things happen to these characters?

These Three are the worst...they make this series unwatchable...especially Prospero...

This brings me to drug use in horror movies and I absolutely CANNOT stand drug users in horror movies, because it seems like all characters smoke drugs and do alcohol and we as the audience are supposed to be like "They're cool!" (I'm looking directly at you "Midsommar"...with your weird ass "Everyone has done." shrooms bullshit...), but being deviant is exactly the same. And it's not that the characters are gay, it's the fact that they're gay and disgusting about it, Prospero has orgies, Napoleon is in a committed relationship and actively cheats, Tamerlane wants her husband to cheat on her, Camille demands sexual favors from her assistants...how does any of this make me wanna root for the characters? "Ugo, you're not supposed to root for these characters.", you might be saying, "Fair point, I'd say, but if that were the case then number one, don't call these a tragedy, and don't call this horror". I feel like a new genre needs to be invented to define these kinds of movies...or maybe there is a genre and these are just really violent cautionary tales about not being degenerate or not doing drugs...ya know, like "Reefer Madness" but serious.

I'll get to you too "Midsommar"...trust me...

In the end "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" FAILS in capturing the gravitas of Poe's work. Poe wrote tragedies that defined the genre of Gothic horror, long lost loves, deep fears coming to life, the existential dread of death, and the sheer madness of murder. Poe was able to capture a swath of human emotions in his stories where narrators (often unnamed, and on purpose, I believe) relayed their tales to us not to boast in their madness but confess. Each Poe story of tragedy felt like a confession and we got to listen in on the story that caused the horrors that await us. Poe was an expert at capturing these emotions and humanizing characters who'd commit heinous acts because he himself was human and felt fits of rage, moments of despair, and extreme sorrow...but Flanagan...Flanagan has written caricatures of these emotions and instead of understanding the horrors of Poe, Flanagan decided to dwell on the violence of it. There was a time when Flanagan understood tragedy and this was in "The Haunting Of Hill House" when Nell all but too late realized she was in fact The Bent-Neck Lady. That scene is forever engraved in my mind as it managed to capture so many emotions of confusion, sorrow, dread, and of course, horror and by the end of that sequence I, as an audience member felt sorry for Nell because she wasn't a bad person, she wasn't a degenerate, and she didn't deserve the fate that befell her.

This literally made me sad.

In the same way, Luke, although he was a heroin addict, his addiction was THE tragedy. The trauma he experienced as a child of not only being aware of ghosts and the reality of what happened to his mother but the fact that no one believed him, that would be enough to drive anyone insane. Couple that with the fact that he was so young at the time and one can hardly trust their own memories at such a young age and the constant second-guessing of knowing what you know, it's no small wonder that fell into a life of drug use and depression. Theo was a lesbian but that wasn't the crux of her character, she was burdened with psychic powers that no one understood and she unfortunately knew every dark secret everyone held, and because of that she stayed away from people, including her own family. Olivia was tormented by the ghosts in the house driving her to want to "protect" her children...by murdering them and she ended up killing someone else in the process.

This was the real "The Fall Of The House Of Usher"

The tragedy in "The Haunting Of Hill House" is that all of these characters were normal everyday average people whose lives were upended when they encountered something that could not be explained and it systematically destroyed them. Luke wasn't doing drugs because he thought they were cool, Luke was doing drugs because he was in pain and wanted to escape the memories of his past. Nell wasn't a flake because she was a flake, Nell was a flake because she wanted something to grab onto that was solid to give her life meaning to fight against the darkness that plagued her. Olivia didn't want to murder her children, she was convinced by tormenting spirits that that was the only way to save them. And at the crux of it all was The House itself, an unexplained Eldritch horror that had a mind of its own and tormented whoever dared enter its doors. That's what "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" should have been, but instead we got sex, drugs, orgies, degenerates, and characters I couldn't wait to see die. And such a shame too because this series could have been a stepping stone in reintroducing Poe to younger people who may not have had the pleasure, but until someone else who actually has a respect for Gothic horror can take the helm and modernize Poe, I'll quote The Raven, "Nevermore."