Creative Poe References in 'The Fall of the House of Usher' Series

The Fall of the House of Usher is Netflix's latest Mike Flanagan horror. Like the name, the series is based upon the many works of Edgar Allan Poe. Naturally it is full of Edgar Allan Poe easter eggs and references. Each episode title is named after a tale of Poe's and foretells the death that happens in the episode. Additionally, nearly all the characters are named after Edgar Allan Poe characters. Yet some of the most creative references in The Fall of the House of Usher are when Poe's creations are placed in an ultra-modern world. This article lists the best of them. Spoilers ahead!

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Fortunato

Fortunato is a rich but naïve and arrogant character in Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. He is easily tricked by the narrator whom lures him into a wine cellar by promising to show him some expensive and rare wine. The narrator bricks the cellar closed to enact revenge.

Naming the Usher family business Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, reflects the way the Usher family are similarly blinded by greed. Roderick Usher's story especially parallels Fortunato's. A young Roderick agrees to Verna's (the Raven's) offer; he will be guaranteed a long life of riches if she can kill the entire Usher bloodline before Roderick finally dies. He does not believe the deal will come true and selfishly has many children with many women anyway. But of course the deal is actually a punishment for his greed and so Roderick Usher is tricked into ruin and death as Fortunato is.

The Fall of the House of Usher relates Poe's fable and its costs to the immense scale of corporate greed that exists in the modern age.

Fortunato/fortune also adopts a double meaning here. Verna offers Roderick's fortune in two ways: she reads, predicts, and enacts Roderick Usher's fortune (future), and the Usher family receive a guaranteed fortune (endless wealth).

Ligadone

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In Poe's story, Ligeia, the narrator becomes infatuated and fixated with a lady called Ligeia but cannot remember why or how. She dies and he begins to see her corpse come to life at night.

Ligeia is not simply referenced by the ghost corpses of Roderick's dead children haunting him in the show. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the Usher family build their fortune on Roderick and Madeline's invention of the drug 'Ligadone' which is inspired by the character Ligeia. The fictional pain killer is also based on the real life drug Oxycodone and its false advertising. Ligadone, like Ligeia, is addictive. However the Ushers fraudulently market the pain killer as non-addictive. Thus, Flanagan transforms the gothic theme of addiction from Ligeia and weaves it into a modern context of addiction. It becomes a commentary on the pharmaceutical companies that create and exploit addicts to make an immense profit off of them whilst denying any responsibility for the tragedies they cause.

Death by Entombment

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'Death by entombment' is a recurring concept in Poe's stories. It is the idea that your body can die but your soul, spirit, consciousness, likeness, self, whatever you want to call it, is saved somewhere else. Interestingly, it is also a similar concept explored in varying sci-fi and speculative fiction narratives today, toying with the concept of our minds being uploaded to a database like 'the Cloud' after we die. Flanagan combines Poe's concept with these contemporary takes in Madeline Usher.

Madeline is established to have an interest in Egyptian Pharaohs and their philosophy on eternal life. Her brother's attempt at giving Madeline an Egyptian burial symbolises Poe's notion of entombment founded upon Egyptology and their tombs for the dead. It also emphasises that the AI project of Madeline's is reminiscent of the 'death by entombment' idea because she wants to save people's minds in an AI and achieve a version of eternal life.

Madeline is complicit in the deal she and her brother make with Verna, but unlike Roderick, she believes in it. We assume she invents her AI program with the hopes to cheat death and by extension, her deal with Verna. This is not the only reason though, Madeline also wants to sell the AI because she believes the world's money will inevitably all go to big-tech and she wants her product to be a central part of that. Madeline knows pharmaceuticals won't keep the company on top forever and she does not want it to die with the family. As a result, she sets out to achieve two types of 'death by entombment'.

Lenore

Netflix The Fall of the House of Usher / Wikipedia

Madeline installs a prototype of her AI for Lenore, who of course is eventually killed by Verna because of her Usher blood. Yet at the beginning of the series we aren't aware of this and it is hard to understand why Roderick ignores constant texts from Lenore, the only one of his heirs he genuinely seems to like. We find out later that the texts are not in fact the 'real' Lenore because her body is dead, but they are instead from the AI of Lenore that Madeline created.

Lenore as a character is inspired by Poe's poem in which a woman of the same name dies but there is hope that she will be loved again in 'paradise' and she tries to contact the living. This is another example of how The Fall of the House of Usher expands and modernises Poe's stories. Although, whether the modern Lenore's fate is in fact paradise is eerily questionable so it fits perfectly with the existential horror of the show.