In short: The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

I’m not writing about TV and streaming shows here very often – the play by play format best for this sort of thing just doesn’t work for me – but I do have to make an exception for house favourite Mike Flanagan’s final outing at Netflix, before he is going to fight those other Elder Beings at Amazon.

Usher turns out to be quite the high note to go out on, mixing every single thing that has always been great at what Flanagan’s doing in and with horror – the emphasis on character and the exploration of themes while still keeping the shocks and the dread going, his love for working with a recurring ensemble of actors, his disinterest in “realistic” dialogue and following interest in the stylized and the actually interesting and so on and so forth – with a surprisingly complex critique of modern capitalism I didn’t expect in quite this form.

He’s certainly aiming for the obvious, blunt targets a lot, but there’s also room for talking about how money and consumerism changes the small, human relations in the show.

As a Poe piece, the show is closer connected to its source material than Flanagan’s two Haunting ofs were to theirs. Apart from the names, the deaths and the quotations visual and verbal, and so on, the show often manages to drag the actual mood of Poe into a very contemporary setting, turning the hypermodern gothic whenever possible. Thematically, this isn’t terribly interested in Poe’s personal fixations, but uses them, and the way he expressed them in his works to talk about the things it is interested in – apart from capitalism also the vagaries of family - of course, this being by Flanagan –, the opioid epidemic, and the toxic nature of quite a lot of things.

Even the decidedly non-naturalist acting style the ensemble goes for this time around fits perfectly into Poe’s aesthetic world – Flanagan’s patented monologues and his clear love for letting actors actually go to town in ways usually only theatre directors do clearly draws out the best from a cast that’s pretty damn brilliant even in lesser circumstances, bringing characters and ideas to life not by imitating how real people are and talk, but by very consciously intensifying and stylizing.

This and Flanagan’s other shows are pretty much exactly how I wish more horror TV would be, without the empty posturing and boring maximalism of something like American Horror Story, with an eye, a brain and a heart instead of an “irony” gland.