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It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the firm's genius COO, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick and Mary McDonnell as an elderly Madeline. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is an 1839 short story by Edgar Allan Poe ( ), a pioneer of the short story and a writer who arguably unleashed the full psychological potential of the Gothic horror genre.
Mark Hamill
Roderick eventually declares that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and that they are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed. Fearing that her body will be exhumed for medical study, Roderick insists that she be entombed for two weeks in the family tomb located in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helps Roderick put Madeline's body in the tomb, whereupon the narrator realizes that Madeline and Roderick are twins. The narrator also notes that Madeline's body has rosy cheeks, which sometimes happens after death.
Henry Thomas
When Griswold woke, he found that they’re sealing him behind a brick wall in the basement of the new Fortunato building he’s constructing. His cries for help were useless, because the holidays meant no one would be back in the building for days. But he wouldn’t last the night anyway — Madeline poisoned him with cyanide. After Leo (Rahul Kohli) wakes up from a bender with bloodstained hands to find his boyfriend Julius’ (Daniel Jun) cat stabbed to death in their living room, he knows he’s in trouble.
The Sacklers, horror, and 'The Fall of the House of Usher' - STAT - STAT
The Sacklers, horror, and 'The Fall of the House of Usher' - STAT.
Posted: Tue, 31 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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Most of the flashbacks to a young Usher and Dupin are thin, especially compared to the wicked fun on display in the fates of the Usher children. It feels like padding to get episodes to a full hour when Flanagan and company could have leaned even more into the episodic structure that highlights a single Poe per chapter. Late one stormy night, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) invites an investigator named C.
Annabel Lee
Once Roderick and Madeline were the only ones left in the bar after a long night of drinking, Verna revealed to the twins that she knew what they had done. But, if they agreed to her terms, she could guarantee that they would not only get away with Rufus' murder but also rise to control Fortunato's billion-dollar painkiller empire and never be convicted of a single crime. The younger version of Auguste was an investigator who sought to find the truth — and the good in people. A dedicated, kind, and thoughtful husband to Tamerlane, Bill (or BillT as his fitness followers call him) is more than happy to team up with his wife on their newest wellness venture. With only love for Tammy, Bill is always willing to do what will make her happy, even if it goes against his own desires. Roderick’s second wife, Juno, is a former junkie whose recent marriage to Roderick has left his family bewildered.
Over the next week, both Roderick and the narrator find themselves increasingly agitated. She possessed the warmth and moral compass of Annabel Lee, he thought, the “best of her without a broken heart.” She’s the one who called 911 and saved her mom from her father’s brutality. Her death brings Verna no joy, but she does tell Lenore about all the good her mother does in the future thanks to Lenore’s heroic choice to save her — before allowing the youngest and kindest Usher to die peacefully. The is a supernatural horror movie that takes place in an abandoned pizza joint.
The Tell-Tale Heart
He offers to lay out the truth about his family’s criminal, violent history. All of these nightmarish visions are attached to the family drama that Usher offers up for Dupin, giving the season a clever episodic structure in that each chapter intertwines a different Poe source into the overall saga of the Ushers. Contemporary readers and critics interpreted the story as a somewhat sensationalized account of Poe’s supposed madness. (As a recluse, Poe often invited such accusations.) Later scholarship pursued alternative interpretations.
The Fall of the House of Usher
What’s more interesting is to watch how the fallout of their decisions fell on Roderick’s many children, all torn apart by some of Poe’s most memorable creations. Within a few hours of the narrator’s arrival, Roderick begins to share some of his theories about his family. Much to the narrator’s surprise, Roderick claims that the Usher mansion is sentient and that it exercises some degree of control over its inhabitants.
Bruce Greenwood
To secure their fortune — and future — two ruthless siblings build a family dynasty that begins to crumble when their heirs mysteriously die, one by one. Poe was often dismissed by contemporary literary critics because of the unusual content and brevity of his stories. When his work was critically evaluated, it was condemned for its tendencies toward Romanticism. The writers and critics of Poe’s day rejected many of that movement’s core tenets, including its emphasis on the emotions and the experience of the sublime. Accordingly, commentaries on social injustice, morality, and utilitarianism proliferated in the mid-19th century. Poe conceived of his writing as a response to the literary conventions of this period.
We discover in the final episode, when she appears as a vision to Roderick, that she literally could not live without them. Annabel Lee reveals that she’d tell people “he’s rich” when they’d ask how he stole her kids away. But now she only sees poverty in Roderick, as he starved their children of love. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is probably Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous story, and in many ways it is a quintessential Gothic horror story.
The film was the first of eight Corman/Poe feature films and stars Vincent Price, Myrna Fahey, Mark Damon and Harry Ellerbe. Several days later, Roderick tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and they lay her to rest in a vault. In the days that follow, the narrator starts to feel more uneasy in the house, and attributes his nervousness to the gloomy furniture in the room where he sleeps. The narrator begins to suspect that Roderick is harbouring some dark secret.
In November 2023, Roderick Usher, the CEO of pharmaceutical company Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, loses all six of his children within two weeks. Auguste Dupin, an Assistant United States Attorney who dedicated his career to exposing Fortunato's corruption, to his childhood home, where he tells the true story of his family and unveils the Ushers' darkest secrets. Roderick and Madeline’s trauma begins when their devout mother, Eliza (Annabeth Gish), dies at home, and the twins bury her in a homemade coffin in the backyard. Eliza claws her way out and exacts vengeance on William Longfellow (Robert Longstreet) — her married boss, CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, and Madeline and Roderick’s neglectful father.
But the themes remain the same—guilt, obsession, vengeance, and a supernatural sense of justice. Roderick Usher’s children are getting what they deserve, not merely because they are the fruit of a very poisoned tree but because they have made horrific decisions to stay in the shelter of wealth and privilege. Usher has been reimagined as the head of a massive pharmaceutical company he runs with his twin sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell). Every episode includes flashbacks to a young Roderick (Zach Gilford), Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald), and Annabel Lee (Katie Parker), Roderick’s first wife. These fill in how the Ushers made their fortune, but they’re kind of a narrative drag. It’s important that Roderick and Madeline are cruel, selfish creatures—less so how they got that way.
As the series draws to a close, Verna—whose name is an anagram of the titular bird in Poe's classic 1845 poem "The Raven"—is shown placing an item on each of the Usher's graves that represents their respective downfalls, closing the loop of her karmic retribution. Decades later, once it became clear that Verna was the one killing off the Usher children, Madeline tried to sidestep the deal by convincing Roderick to kill himself. But Verna wasn't willing to let him get off that easy and brought him back to face the full extent of his reckoning, the death of his granddaughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran), the only morally good Usher.
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