The miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher started on Netflix yesterday. This is a horror series that could be the perfect evening entertainment for Halloween. The premise surrounding the series sounds promising.
What is The Fall of the House of Usher about?
The series has been on Netflix since yesterday and is therefore ideal for an upcoming Halloween evening. However, you don’t have to plan just one evening, but rather a whole day for the series.
The miniseries consists of eight episodes, each around an hour long. The first episode introduces the plot and the last episode brings the story to a conclusion. The other six episodes deal with the deaths of the heirs.
The series comes from Mike Flanagan, who already proved in 2018 with the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House that he has a knack for horror series. The Haunting of Hill House has a rating of 93 out of 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes rating platform, while The Fall of the House of Usher currently has 90% with 72 reviews (as of October 13, 2023, 12:51 p.m.).
If you want to get your own idea of the scary series, you can take a look at the following trailer:
Mike Flanagan creates the next horror hit with The Fall of the House of Usher
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Mike Flanagan stuck to Edgar Allan Poe’s works
Other series that Mike Flanagan had success with included The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and Goosebumps at Midnight. All of his works incorporate supernatural phenomena and characters such as vampires, ghosts and trauma.
In The Fall of the House of Usher, each death is based on a different work by Edgar Allan Poe. The series covers modern topics such as artificial intelligence, narcotics and medical animal testing.
Flanagan also took inspiration from Poe outside of the story. During the first episode, the song “Another Brick in the Wall” plays right at the beginning of the episode. The song alludes to the story “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which a man is trapped by his rivals behind a stone wall in the basement of his house.
Even Roderick’s children are all named after characters who appeared in the writer’s stories and poems. There are many more examples like this that show how much attention to detail Flanagan put into the series.
This is how the series is rated
What is praised and what is criticized? Flanagan succeeded well in putting Poe’s works into a series. The writing and the cast of actors were well done. The atmosphere and the dark humor are also mentioned as strengths.
What some critics don’t like is the pacing of the story. The flashbacks to the story of the twins are too long-winded and the ending, with its long lecture, would lead to “the failure of the horror drama”. The number of jump scares is also too high (via rottentomatoes.com).
If the series is too scary for you, these films could be a good alternative: 5 scary films for ages 6 and up that you can watch with the whole family on Halloween