The Fall of the House of Usher

Watched all eight episodes of the USA's The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), a modern deconstruction of Edgar Allan Poe's novel incorporating images and quotations from his other works. Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline head Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, a multimillion-dollar enterprise that markets a painkiller called Ligodone. Roderick has sired six children by five different women, all of the children living in extreme luxury. They mysteriously die, one by one--and the series explores the reasons why they did.

This is a well-produced, well-written, well-designed, well-directed, and well-performed movie. The story unfolds in a non-linear manner, but all of the scenes are assembled in such a way that the plot and chronology of events are clear, including the characters and their relationships to one another, in a mere eight episodes--considering that it takes Chinese wuxia 40-60 episodes to accomplish all that. Despite the ultramodern setting and production design, the unique darkness of Edgar Allan Poe comes through, and all episodes are entertaining, if not gruesome, with nary a dull moment.

On the downside, most of the dialogue is verbose, and Poe, perhaps, too frequently over-quoted, especially because Roderick Usher is presented as a Poe alter-ego  The attempt to showcase a multi-racial and multi-gender cast is also an overused remnant of the 20th century, and is, at this point in time, already quite corny. The cinematic template is that of the 1973 movie _Theater of Blood_, which starred Vincent Price, verging on camp, and the audience is compelled to simply wait for the next death to occur and how spectacular it might be. Similar deconstructions have been made before, such as that of Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" and, of course, Walt Disney's shameless deconstruction of timeless fairy tales.

Oh, there was one continuity glitch. In the episode titled "The Pit and the Pendulum," Freddie Usher zips his fly open and pisses on the floor, then leaves his fly open; Verna even mentions it. Seconds later, though, after he falls on the floor paralyzed, we see that his fly is not open.