Scream Stream 2023: Fall of the House of Usher

Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) is the insanely rich CEO of the Fortunato Pharmaceutical company along with his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell Battlestar Galactica) who is the COO. The company and the family are under legal attack by C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly, MANTIS) the Assistant United States Attorney, who is attempting to bring the corrupt family to justice.  During the opening arguments of the trial, Dupin lets slip that an informant from within the family will be the main witness. Roderick offers his very greedy family a large sum of money to the one who figures out who the informant is, while Madeline threatens physical violence when they figure it out.  Over the course of time, all six of the Usher children die in unrelated and unexplainable ways.  That is when he begins to see an image of a mysterious woman and the ghost of his mother.  Roderick calls a meeting with Dupin at his decrepit childhood home and offers him a confession to all the illegal activity and begins telling the story of the real source of his children’s demise. Much of the show is told in flashbacks ranging from the 1950s to the recent past. What is Roderick really guilty of and what actually killed his children?  Watch and find out!

Full disclosure, I have only had time to watch the first episode of this eight-part miniseries with Netflix releasing all episodes on October 12^th, 2023. The title of the series comes from a short story by famed American poet and author Edgar Allen Poe, but bears very little resemblance to the source material. Instead, using the names and borrowing some plot points from other Poe works.  For example, Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), the family’s lawyer, is a character in Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket about a young man who stows away on a ship called the Grampus (in the series, this is the nick name one of Roderick’s grandchildren calls him) and C. Auguste Dupin is a detective in three of Poe’s short stories, including The Murders in the Rue Morgue credited as being the first modern detective fiction story. In fact, just about every character’s name is derived from other Poe works outside of the House of Usher story.

At least from what I can see from the first episode, the show at its heart is a mystery with horror elements, although it calls itself a “gothic horror drama”.  The supernatural elements were subtle in this first episode, and it is hard to tell if these visions were real or in Roderick’s ill brain, but in the end, it doesn’t matter as the visual effects were effective in creating a strange and appropriately spooky atmosphere including a common theme in Poe’s writing, being buried alive.  Mike Flanagan does a wonderful job writing and directing the first episode, which gives us expositional material in creative ways via flashbacks and well written dialogue, offering the audience just enough information to not feel lost, but not enough to truly know what is happening yet, hooking them into watching the next episode. The performances are all strong and in a very short amount of time, the actors are all able to establish their unique character traits. The music was very well composed by John Andrew Grush and Taylor Newton Stewart known collectively as “The Newton Brother”. The score aptly creates the perfect tone for each scene. Even with straying so far from the source material, this is a well-conceived and produced show with an interesting plot intertwining many of Poe’s plots, themes, and characters.