Shock, horror! Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a trashy mess of a literary reboot

Edgar Allan Poe’s ghoulish gothic parables are remixed and modernised in this new horror series, writes Louis Chilton. But ‘House of Usher’ is telling tales without heart – no wonder nobody’s raven about it

A Poe attempt: Bruce Greenwood in the gothic series ‘The Fall of the House of Usher' (Eike Schroter/Netflix)

What do we mean when we talk about adaptation? Oftentimes, it’s a lot like cooking with a pre-written recipe – you’re free to make tweaks, throw in a few extra spices, but the end result remains more or less the same. The Fall of the House of Usher, Netflix’s new horror miniseries based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, takes a different approach, tipping the contents of every cupboard into one giant blender. Yes, you might say. The right ingredients are all in there. But the final product is a big, indiscernible mess.

Created by horror maven Mike Flanagan – the showrunner behind Netflix chillers The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and The Midnight Club – House of Usher is extremely loosely adapted from Poe’s 1839 story of the same name. It follows wealthy pharmaceutical magnate Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), whose adult children all start dying in mysterious and macabre circumstances. Most of the story is told via flashback, with each episode forming a gothic parable drawing from one or several of Poe’s published works. Tales such as “The Raven” and “The Telltale Heart” are remixed and modernised, along with a smattering of Poe’s less famous stories. The end result, however, is muddled: a hodge-podge of ideas and themes held together with spit and glue. As a piece of television, it’s trashy and ersatz. As a work of adaptation, it’s even worse.

Though swathes of its story are set years in the past, you can feel House of Usher straining for contemporary relevance in every ligament. In Poe’s original work, Usher is a recluse living in an inherited mansion; in Netflix’s version, he’s a Big Pharma tycoon. The premise – deliberately, we presume – invokes the Sackler family, the corporate dynasty infamous for their role in the US opioid crisis. (The Sacklers were also at the centre of the 2021 Hulu drama Dopesick, and of Netflix’s own series Painkiller earlier this year.) The venomous infighting between siblings, meanwhile, seems like a self-conscious attempt to ape HBO’s masterful Succession – an unflattering comparison that’s made all the more inevitable when the soundtrack cuts in with distinctly Succession-esque minor-key strings.