Netflix’s Next Horror Hit Is Edgar Allan Poe Meets the Sacklers. Oh, Boy.

You know a horror drama is flailing when its final episode pauses for a character to deliver a long lecture on Viagra, the Supreme Court, air pollution, and single-use plastics. Great horror stories culminate like a clockwork trap, with an inevitability that makes words almost superfluous. Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, newly released on Netflix, resorts to multiple gassy monologues explaining why all these terrible things had to happen.

The Fall of the House of Usher is something of a return to form for Flanagan, and that’s unfortunate. Of the four miniseries he has made for Netflix (I’m not including The Midnight Club, which was co-created by Leah Fong and intended to last longer than one season), three have been inspired by classic works of fiction: 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House (based on Shirley Jackson’s novel), 2020’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw), and this latest, very loosely based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The three adaptations were uneven at best. The exception, 2021’s Midnight Mass, an original work about an island community bedeviled by strange nocturnal phenomena after the arrival of a charismatic young priest, was so superior to its predecessors that it suggested Flanagan had tapped into a new wellspring of authenticity and depth. The Fall of the House of Usher, frustratingly, once more shackles him to source material that’s simply incompatible with his own gifts.

This time around, Flanagan has spun out Poe’s story about an aristocratic British brother and sister sequestered away in a moldering mansion into a saga of self-made American hubris. The fabulously rich Ushers command a pharmaceutical company whose star product, an opioid, has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Ushers insist that the drug isn’t addictive or harmful when used as directed—exactly what the real-life Sackler family (an apparently irresistible subject for TV dramatists) claimed about OxyContin. The series opens with a despairing Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) summoning the investigator-turned-DA (Carl Lumbly) who has pursued him in vain for decades. All five of Roderick’s adult children have died within the past few days, and—opening a bottle of obscenely expensive cognac in the derelict home of his childhood—the drug magnate is finally ready to tell his story.

Unlike the generation of Sacklers who brought OxyContin to market, Roderick and Madeline Usher (a sublimely icy Mary McDonnell), fraternal twins, came from nothing. Their mother, secretary to the head of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, became pregnant by her boss, who never acknowledges their paternity. Flashbacks depict how the twins clawed and double-crossed their way to the top of the company (“our birthright,” as Madeline calls it) in spite of many obstacles. Madeline remains childless, but Roderick has two children by his first wife, and three illegitimate kids from mistresses and hookups, all raised as his own.

Allusions to Poe come thick and fast. At the funeral for Roderick’s children, the priest delivers an atmospheric but incoherent eulogy cobbled together from Poe’s poetry and fiction. Roderick’s first wife is named Annabel Lee, Fortunato’s loyal fixer is called Arthur Pym (an unrecognizable Mark Hamill), and the investigator who doggedly seeks to bring the Ushers to justice is C. Auguste Dupin, after the central character in the first modern detective stories, a genre Poe invented. The Usher children each die by means derived from iconic Poe stories: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and so on.

None of these citations have much resonance. As with The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, Flanagan has taken works that are fundamentally about the horror of loneliness and turned them into occasions for florid family melodrama. He loves nothing so much as a pack of squabbling siblings; an unpleasable, authoritarian patriarch; a wronged and saintly mother. The characters in Poe’s stories, like the characters in Jackson’s and James’, feel cast out beyond the circle of human fellowship, slipping off the edge of the world and into the abyss. Flanagan’s characters are crowded, jammed together until they can’t help but lash out at each other. The scares in The Fall of the House of Usher—and there aren’t a lot of them—mostly come in the form of apparitions suddenly shoving their melted or mutilated faces up in Roderick’s grill. In Flanagan’s universe, the problem with people isn’t that you can’t hold onto them. It’s that you can’t get free of them.

There’s nothing wrong with an adaptation that takes liberties with the original, but why pick material so alien to your own sensibility that it gives you next to nothing to work with? Midnight Mass, the only genuinely frightening miniseries among Flanagan’s four for Netflix, is also the only one in the quartet that doesn’t feel forced. Community has its horrors, too, and Flanagan seems more intimately acquainted with these. In the insular village on Crockett Island, you can’t live down the worst mistake you’ve ever made or avoid that malevolent neighbor you’ve been feuding with for years. The same Catholic congregation that provides some residents with comfort and hope makes others feel oppressed or excluded. The promise of a religious revival conceals the poison of an ancient curse.

Although Flanagan has described his Catholic upbringing as “healthy,” it’s no coincidence that the most accomplished of these four miniseries puts Catholicism—the cannibalistic iconography of the Eucharist, the archaic hierarchy, the irradicable burden of sin—at its center. (When, in his latest show, a young Roderick and Madeline attend a costume party at which two guests are dressed as bishops, you have to wonder if Flanagan himself doesn’t recognize it, too.) If there’s a Catholic vein in horror, Flanagan makes for an excellent example. A preference for gore over introspection, drama over ennui, the notion of evil as a force of tremendous vitality that must be met with equivalent vigor—all of these qualities seem to come more easily to him than a morbid, WASP-y preoccupation with decay and death.

Perhaps this disconnect explains why The Fall of the House of Usher often seems unsure of its moral center. It soon becomes obvious that a shapeshifting demonic entity (Carla Gugino) is out to get the Ushers, specifically Roderick’s children. Why? Well, they’re all fairly terrible people, cruel and selfish, who treat other people as a means to their ends. Most of them are extravagantly kinky—Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) stages high-end orgies, Tamerlane (a poor man’s Shiv Roy, played by Samantha Sloyan) hires hookers to enact scenes of domestic tenderness with her husband while she masturbates, Camille (Kate Siegel) makes engaging in a nightly threesome a job requirement for her two assistants. Napoleon (Rahul Kohli) does drugs and hates cats, and even the seemingly mild-mannered Frederick (Henry Thomas) turns into an unhinged sadist when he finds out his wife attended one of Prospero’s parties.

But there is an original sin in this story, only revealed at the end. You can get the gist of it straight off, though: They’re greedy! Rich people are greedy. The demonic entity—whose name, Verna, is an anagram of “raven”—takes a break from her depredations to explain that humanity’s problems are self-inflicted. “Starvation, poverty, disease,” she tells Pym, “you could fix all of that with just money, but you don’t. If you took just a little bit of time off from the vanity voyages, pleasure cruising, billionaire space race—hell, if you stopped making movies and TV for one year, and you spent that money on what you really need, you could solve it all with some to spare.” Debatable, but not explosively so—it’s the kind of canned sermonizing that’s barely worthy of a Twitter thread, let alone a denouement. Perhaps Flanagan himself doesn’t believe in it. He’s still making TV, after all. Just not the sort of TV that does justice to his source material or, more importantly, to himself.