As you've probably already noticed, Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher is jam-packed full of Edgar Allen Poe references. But as well as the Usher children being named after Poe characters, each episode of the show is also largely based on one of Poe's short stories, just one of many clues that help predict exactly how each of Usher will die.
Some of these connections are fairly obvious due to the episode titles, others less so. We've broken them all down below.
Episode 1, "A Midnight Dreary"
Based on: "The Premature Burial" and "Morella"
Live burial and people rising from their graves is a theme in Poe's short stories. Although there isn't one particular story that closely resembles the plot of "A Midnight Dreary" — it's taken from the opening lines of "The Raven" and that's a whole other story that bookends the Netflix series — "The Premature Burial" and "Morella" both spring to mind. In the first, the narrator has a phobia of being buried alive (taphophobia) but recounts the tale of a woman who endures exactly that, then is resurrected. In the second, a man watches his wife deteriorate and die before ultimately finding no trace of her in her tomb. Both share parallels with Roderick and Madeline's mother, Eliza (Annabeth Gish), who climbs out of her fresh grave for a final act of vengeance.
Episode 2, "The Masque of the Red Death"
Based on: "The Masque of the Red Death"
Just like in the episode, Poe's short story of the same name features a party thrown by a character called Prospero (played in the series by Sauriyan Sapkota) which is crashed by a mysterious masked figure. The only real difference? Instead of contending with acid falling through overhead sprinklers, the politically influential revellers in Poe's story are the aristocracy trying to escape a plague within the privileged confines of the prince's palace — but in the end, it comes for them all. There are many overlaps in the design of Prince Prospero's party however, as Poe's tale describes many rooms for debauchery, and of course, it's a masquerade.
Episode 3, "Murder in the Rue Morgue"
Based on: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
There are quite a few differences between the plot of this episode and the short story it takes its name from, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", but both have one key thing in common: killer primates. In the tale, Poe's great detective C. Auguste Dupin (played in the series by Carl Lumbly) investigates the murders of two women, Madame L’Espanaye, and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye (the namesake of Camille, played by Kate Siegel) — both who have been brutally killed by not a chimpanzee but an orangutan. Their address in Paris? Rue Morgue.
Episode 4, "The Black Cat"
Based on: "The Black Cat"
Like "The Masque of the Red Death", this one also follows its source material more closely than most. Both feature a protagonist gradually losing their grip on reality, both contain the haunting image of a body hidden in the walls, and both revolve around the deep dislike and eye-gouging of a cat called Pluto. In the story, a man mutilates and murders a cat he hates, only to be terrorised by a cat that looks exceedingly like the one he killed. Mike Flanagan himself pointed out on X, there is a difference: in Poe's story, the demon cat is actually killed by the narrator, in his show the cat is merely a hallucination.
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Episode 5, "The Tell-Tale Heart"
Based on: "The Tell-Tale Heart"
Like episode 3, "Murder in the Rue Morgue", the setup of Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" is fairly different from that of the episode. In the tale, a narrator kills an old man he lives with and hides his body beneath the floorboards. But the end result is the same: a person being driven to murderous actions by the sound of a heartbeat only they can hear. Feeling pressure to continue her unethical practice into human testing of a heart mesh, Victorine (T'Nia Miller) hears the sound of the device throughout the episode. When she murders her girlfriend Dr. Allessandra Ruiz (Paola Núñez) to contain the truth of her experiments and prevent her from leaving, the sound continues to ring in her ears as she hides her final horrific experiment in the basement.
Episode 6, "Goldbug"
Based on: "William Wilson"
Poe may have a short story called "The Gold-Bug", but it's his story "William Wilson" that the "Goldbug" episode most resembles. This episode follows Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan) as she's haunted by an almost identical version of herself, which is exactly what happens to the main character in Poe's story. Another connection? Tamerlane's husband's name is Bill Wilson.
Episode 7, "The Pit and the Pendulum"
Based on: "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "Berenice"
Although it borrows its title directly from one of the Poe's most famous stories, Episode 7 really has a couple of different sources. The death of Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas), which is caused by a pendulous piece of building material swinging slowly down to cut him open, is almost straight out of Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum". But Frederick's removal of his wife's teeth, one of the most disturbing and WTF moments of the entire show, appears to have been loosely inspired by a story called "Berenice". That grim tale sees a man obsessing over cousin's teeth and eventually removing them after she dies.
Episode 8, "The Raven"
Based on: "The Raven," "The Cask of Amontillado", "Some Words with a Mummy," and "The Fall of the House of Usher"
The finale is another episode that takes its inspiration from a few different Poe stories. The titular poem, "The Raven" references the tragic death of Roderick's granddaughter Lenore. Roderick and Madeline bricking up Griswold (Michael Trucco) behind a wall in the basement is the same unpleasant method of murder found in "The Cask of Amontillado", complete with fool's costume. Meanwhile, Madeline's death at the hands of her own brother is pretty much straight out of "The Fall of the House of Usher" — though his grisly technique is more akin to "Some Words with a Mummy."
How to watch: The Fall of the House of Usher is streaming now on Netflix.
