Table Of Content
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges. I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher’s which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things.
Limited Series – The Fall of the House of Usher
“You could say she’s the executor of fate or the executor of karma,” said Gugino. Whether the reader is trapped by the house or by its inhabitants is unclear. Poe uses the term house to describe both the physical structure and the family. On the one hand, the house itself appears to be actually sentient, just as Roderick claims. Its windows are described as “eye-like,” and its interior is compared to a living body.
The Masque of the Red Death
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. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars—nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning.
The Tell-Tale Heart
No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn. On a stormy autumn (with an implied pun on the word fall?) evening, a traveler—an outsider, like the reader—rides up to the Usher mansion. This traveler, also the first-person narrator and boyhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the house, has arrived in response to a summons from Usher.
Character descriptions
Sigmund Freud would, over half a century after Poe was writing, do more than anyone else to delineate the structure of the conscious and unconscious mind, but he was not the first to suggest that our conscious minds might hide, or even repress, unconscious feelings, fears, neuroses, and desires. Roderick grows more erratic in his behaviour, and the narrator reads to his friend to try to soothe him. The plot of the romance (a fictional title invented by Poe himself, called ‘Mad Trist’) concerns a hero named Ethelred who enters the house of a hermit and slays a dragon. Roderick Usher is a gifted poet and artist, whose talents the narrator praises before sharing a poem Usher wrote, titled ‘The Haunted Palace’. The ballad concerns a royal palace which was once filled with joy and song, until ‘evil things’ attacked the king’s palace and made it a desolate shadow of what it once was.
Edgar Allan Poe
The sprawling primary suite features elegance all over the room from the flooring up to the ceiling and has a fireplace as well. The children’s room has large space added by the stylish bed while the bathroom is complete with a bathtub, shower room and is near the sauna, powder room, closet, and yoga studio. “The Fall of the House of Usher” updates the work of Edgar Allan Poe for the era of Big Pharma, turning his most famous tales into a sprawling story of the decline of a wealthy American family. It’s “Succession” meets The Tell-Tale Heart, a story of vengeance, power, betrayal, and bloody parts. ‘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.
In film and television
With him we encounter Roderick Usher, who has changed drastically since last the narrator saw him. His cadaverous appearance, his nervousness, his mood swings, his almost extrahuman sensitivity to touch, sound, taste, smell, and light, along with the narrator’s report that he seems lacking in moral sense, portrays a deeply troubled soul. We learn, too, that his twin sister, Madeline, a neurasthenic woman like her brother, is subject to catatonic trances. These two characters, like the house, are woefully, irretrievably flawed. The suspense continues to climb as we go deeper into the dark house and, with the narrator, attempt to fathom Roderick’s malady. The Mike Flanagan universe is growing, and this time, his upcoming series The Fall of the House of Usher is taking on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story of the same name but bringing a fresh, freaky twist on it, as well as infusing it with references to many of Poe’s other classic tales, all while serving up a top-notch ensemble cast that will be thoroughly stalked and haunted.
Film Credits
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall.
Usher’s Net Worth
IV.And all with pearl and ruby glowing Was the fair palace door,Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing And sparkling evermore,A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty Was but to sing,In voices of surpassing beauty, The wit and wisdom of their king. During a heated argument with Roderick, Madeline suddenly falls into catalepsy, a condition in which its sufferers appear dead. Roderick knows that she is still alive, but convinces Winthrop that she is dead and rushes to have her entombed in the family crypt beneath the house.
Gothic Rot and Retribution: The Fall of the House of Usher's Unsettling Approach to Poe's Work - Reactor - Tor.com
Gothic Rot and Retribution: The Fall of the House of Usher's Unsettling Approach to Poe's Work - Reactor.
Posted: Wed, 01 Nov 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The narrator also notes that Madeline's body has rosy cheeks, which sometimes happens after death. Over the next week, both Roderick and the narrator find themselves increasingly agitated. The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Late one stormy night, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) invites an investigator named C. He offers to lay out the truth about his family’s criminal, violent history.
The interior defies its exterior in that the interior is eccentric in many ways. I like it, especially the white and dark living room with green furniture. Presenting vintage Poe stories filtered through Mike Flanagan's deliciously dark lens, The Fall of the House of Usher will get a rise out of horror fans. 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.
And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.
” “No, not before,” he replies in one of the show’s many glimpses of Flanagan’s viciously dark sense of humor. (Poe had one too.) Roderick has been haunted by all his awful children who have shuffled off this mortal coil, and it’s because it feels like the ghosts are finally coming for him that he is ready to confess. He’s having visions of monstrous ghosts, including the recurring specter of Verna (Carla Gugino), a figure that connects most of these tall tales as a sort of vengeful force of karma, the devil come to take what she’s due from a man who profited off the pain of others. Inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, House of Usher traces the downfall of the uber-wealthy Usher family and their corrupt drug company, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. The story centers on Usher family patriarch and Fortunato CEO Roderick (Bruce Greenwood), who, as the show begins, calls up his longtime rival, assistant U.S. attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), to come hear his confession following the deaths of all six of his adult children (by five different mothers)—Frederick (Henry Thomas), Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), Victorine (T'Nia Miller), Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), Camille (Kate Siegel), and Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota)—in the span of a week.
The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.
A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master. Loosely based on various works by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. 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.
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