The Fall of the House of Usher’s Edgar Allan Poe references appear much the way ghosts and specters did in The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan’s similar gothic-remix series. Some are right there in the open, lunging for the viewer’s attention, while others are tucked away in a corner—easily unnoticed unless you’re looking for them.

The Netflix series itself takes its name from Poe’s 1839 short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which a disturbed man named Roderick recounts his gloomy family history to a bewildered friend, culminating in the apparent resurrection of his recently deceased sister, Madeline, and the literal collapse of their decaying mansion. In the series, Bruce Greenwood plays Roderick, who is reimagined as the head of the unspeakably wealthy Usher family—whose members have done unspeakable things to attain their riches. 

The series is essentially Succession filtered through the macabre lens of Poe, with the assorted Usher children vying for dominance in their toxic empire while still under the thumb of a powerful and charismatic patriarch. Other more powerful and supernatural forces are manipulating them all, usually in the direction of a gruesome demise. Since the fictional Ushers derive their money primarily from addictive pharmaceuticals, it’s easy to equate them with the real-life Sackler clan, whose role in the opioid crisis led The New Yorker to brand them “the family that built an empire of pain.”  

The Fall of the House of Usher is a kind of fictional rough justice—but even that has its roots in Poe, according to Flanagan. “Edgar Allan Poe saw his world through dark eyes. Life was a cruel and indifferent experience. He had a fiery disdain for the rich and corrupt, held many of his contemporaries in contempt, and seemed at once enraged and amused at the greed and exploitation that drove society,” the creator says in the introduction to a new collection of Poe tales featuring the stories that inspired the series. 

“Looking at the Usher family as an example of cancerous American privilege, our answer to the Trumps, or the Kardashians, or—more relevant to us—the Sacklers, we wondered how Poe would see some of these dynasties,” he adds.

Just as he does in the short story that gives Usher its name, a defeated Roderick Usher unfurls his tale while sitting in the rotting confines of his childhood home. In the series, though, his listener is not an old friend; he’s a longtime foe—Assistant US Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), who has been trying to bring the Usher family to justice for decades. 

In each chapter of the eight-episode series, Roderick describes the unnatural forces that conspired to clip off every branch of his family before finally claiming him and his equally ruthless sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell), matching the mutual sibling destruction of the original Poe story. The avenging entity plaguing the family is a demonic presence who takes on many forms and guises but is always played by Carla Gugino. “Presiding over it all is the mysterious character Verna, her name an anagram for Raven, who views the Usher family with the same bemusement, contempt, affection, and even appreciation that we found in Poe’s writings,” according to Flanagan.

Flanagan was unable to be interviewed for this story due to the Hollywood strikes, but the foreword he penned for the collection of Poe tales provides some insight into where his references are drawn from. Here are just a few of them. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

Episode 1: “A Midnight Dreary”

The opening scene of the series is a funeral for the last three remaining Usher children, and the minister’s remarks are culled from four different Poe sources. Two of them are poems: “For Annie” (“Thank Heaven! the crisis / The danger is past…And the fever called ‘Living’ / Is conquered at last”) and “Spirits of the Dead” (“The spirits of the dead, who stood / In life before thee, are again / In death around thee”). The other two are short stories. First, a passage from the 1850 tale “The Premature Burial”: “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.” The eulogy concludes with lines from the 1845 story “The Imp of the Perverse,” about a murderer’s self-destructive impulses: “We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably, we remain.”

Lumbly’s tireless prosecutor gets his name from the investigator in Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe’s story is regarded as a landmark in mystery fiction, with Dupin paving the way for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and other brilliant literary detectives. In the story, Dupin solves the mystery of how a young woman and her mother could have been savagely beaten to death despite being locked inside their home with no apparent way in or out. Dupin was a recurring character for Poe, appearing in his later stories “The Purloined Letter” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” 

This is the name of the pharmaceutical empire that Roderick Usher comes to control, primarily from pushing a fictional painkiller that results in countless addictions and deaths. (Hello, real-life Sackler family.) “Fortunato” is from the 1846 short story “The Cask of Amontillado” and is the name of the drunken victim who is lured into a vast wine cellar and entombed alive within its walls.

The name of the lethal painkiller Roderick Usher unleashes on the world is a variation on the name of the 1838 short story “Ligeia,” about an opium addict who believes his first wife’s ghost has returned to possess the dead body of his second wife.

The pharmaceutical executive who fathered Roderick and Madeline with his secretary is named after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a contemporary “whom Poe famously accused of imitating other poets to create his success, leading to what is sometimes referred to as ‘The Longfellow Wars,’” Flanagan says. The character’s ruthless approach to parenting (“Children are never too tender to be whipped”) is all Poe, however, with that line taken from his 1849 work “Fifty Suggestions.”

The mother of Roderick and Madeline (played by Annabeth Gish) is named after Poe’s own mother, a stage actor who was abandoned by the author’s father. Her career came to an abrupt end after she began coughing up blood in 1811; she died later that year, presumably from tuberculosis. During Eliza’s illness, her three young children (Poe was only two years old at the time) were cared for by fellow actors—Luke and Harriet Usher. In the series, Eliza’s grim fate is inspired by the plot of “The Premature Burial.”

The Usher family’s snarling bulldog attorney and murderous fixer (played by Mark Hamill) takes his name from Poe’s only complete novel, 1838’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The story is about a young stowaway on a whaling vessel who encounters a mutiny, becomes stranded at sea, and engages in cannibalism to survive. In episode six, Hamill’s character is said to be legendary for his exploratory history, however unseemly it may have been. “Watch for a delightful moment, improvised by Mark Hamill, when Pym tells a friend he’s ‘having Richard Parker for dinner,’ a wink to a character in the novel who is famously cannibalized by his shipmates,” Flanagan writes. 

The judge (played by Nicholas Lea) presiding over the case that Dupin has brought against the Usher family is named after an influential critic who helped raise Poe’s profile. John Neal was an author himself, though he was primarily known for his journalism. He is credited as the nation’s first daily newspaper columnist, and Poe called Neal’s support of his work “the very first words of encouragement I ever remember to have heard.” (Speaking of journalists: Camille L’Espanaye Usher, played by Kate Siegel, rattles off the names of several real ones for potential profiles of her family members, including “Breznican at Vanity Fair.”)

 
Episode 2 — “The Masque of the Red Death”

The name of Roderick’s youngest son (played by Sauriyan Sapkota) is taken from the lead character in 1842’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” about a decadent prince who throws a lavish party so he and the wealthy revelers can enjoy an orgiastic masquerade while a plague ravages the world outside his castle. Death infiltrates the party, however, and claims them all—as it does in sticky, gruesome fashion for Perry and his friends. “Our wealthy partiers took on the aesthetics of the time, as we filled a thumping rave with debutantes, social-media influencers, and drug dealers,” Flanagan writes. “But the crimson visitor would bring the same fate, and the same message, about the hubris of the wealthy.”

In flashbacks to the 1970s, we meet the Fortunato Pharmaceuticals head (Michael Trucco) who is encouraged by young Roderick Usher (Zach Gilford) to approve the experimental drug that will alleviate virtually all pain. In real life, Rufus Wilmot Griswold was the editor of a poetry anthology that included some of Poe’s work, but Poe himself lambasted aspects of the collection in a review. That sparked a feud that continued well after Poe’s death, with Griswold writing a cruel obituary for him. There was even a Drunk History segment devoted to their conflict.

This is the name of a rival company that Fortunato has acquired. Landor is taken from Poe’s 1849 story “Landor’s Cottage,” which is an immersive and romanticized description of a woodland home. Landor is also the last name of the investigator who collaborates with a young Poe in Louis Bayard’s 2006 historical fiction novel, The Pale Blue Eye. Christian Bale played that character in a recent film adaptation of the novel.

The name of the chemist who is said to have developed Ligodone is a shortened version of “Metzengerstein,” Poe’s first published short story from 1932. It’s about two feuding families. The head of one is dragged into his own burning home by a horse he stole from the rival family—a dark example of becoming the source of your own downfall.

A character builds a wooden ship in a bottle and names it this. The Grampus was also the name of the whaling ship in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Roderick Usher’s first wife (played by Katie Parker) is an innocent who encourages her husband to do right, even as he schemes and plots. She’s the anti–Lady Macbeth, and her name is taken from a mournful poem Poe wrote about a man lamenting his titular lost love. In the next episode of the show, young Roderick recites a few verses as a poem he’s written about Usher’s Annabel Lee.

Episode 3 — “Murder in the Rue Morgue”

Roderick Usher’s daughter, a sleek, platinum-haired publicist, is named after one of the victims from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” She suffers a similar bludgeoning demise at the hands of an out-of-control simian.

This is the guise of Verna as she steers Camille toward her end. She wears the name on a tag on her security guard outfit, but it is taken from a suspect in Poe’s “Rue Morgue.”

In the original story, the title refers to a road in a section of Paris known as Quartier St. Roch. In the series, though, “RUE” is not the French word for “street”—it’s an acronym for Roderick Usher Experimental, a medical research subsidiary that does animal experimentation. The “morgue” is where the unfortunate creatures subjected to its tests usually end up.

The hapless assistant (Igby Rigney) who is perpetually mistreated by Camille often finds himself dismissed with this frustrated line from his boss. It’s actually a reference to a character, literally named Toby Dammit, from Poe’s 1850 story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.”

Episode 4 — “The Black Cat”

This playboy Usher son, played by Rahul Kohli, gets his name from the lead character in the 1844 short story “The Spectacles.” It’s about a vain man who refuses to wear his glasses and falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a toothless 82-year-old—unbeknownst to him until he finally gets a good look.

The antagonist of Leo’s story is a black cat that he adopts (to cover up the murder of another) and mistreats—although it’s pretty vicious to him too. The story follows Poe’s 1843 short story “The Black Cat,” about a drunkard who wars with his pet feline—and ends up killing his wife, interring her within a wall to cover up the crime. In the series, Leo believes he hears the cat within the walls and tears apart his apartment before chasing the creature off the ledge of his balcony, falling to his own death in the process.

In flashbacks to the 1970s, Dr. Brevet’s name is discovered on some forged documents approving medical research. The reference comes from the 1839 short story “The Man That Was Used Up,” about the search for a war hero named Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith. When Smith is finally located, he’s discovered to be a small kernel of a human being who must have his limbs and torso assembled as prosthetics after losing most of his natural body in battle.

Episode 5 — “The Tell-Tale Heart”

This daughter of Roderick Usher (played by T’Nia Miller) is an unscrupulous research doctor who is developing a state-of-the-art cardiac mechanism—and testing it illegally on the chimpanzees that tore apart her sister Camille. The device’s incessant beating torments her after she commits an act of inexplicable violence, calling to mind the 1843 story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But her name comes from a different tale, “The Premature Burial.” That narrative recounts the case of Mademoiselle Victorine Lafourcade, a young woman who fell into an apparent coma and was buried alive in 1810.

At the funeral of the first three Usher children, the minister seems to be reading from scripture, but he is actually reciting another section of Poe’s poem “Spirits of the Dead.” As he reads, “Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish. Now are visions never to vanish,” Roderick Usher sees a vision of the ghastly remains of his youngest son.

This is the name that the demonic spirit Verna takes on when she infiltrates Dr. LaFourcade’s clinic as a potential patient. Clemm is a reference to Virginia Clemm, Poe’s 13-year-old first cousin and wife—although the exact nature of their relationship, and whether it was more platonic than romantic, is the subject of ongoing debate. Virginia Clemm died in 1847, two years before her husband, and her untimely passing at a young age is said to have inspired many of his melancholic poems about lost love.

That’s the address shown on Pamela Clemm’s driver’s license. It’s a double reference to Poe’s own death in that year. Poe was found semiconscious in a Baltimore tavern and hospitalized in a delirium that ended in his death four days later. His attending physician said that during this time, Poe repeatedly called out for someone he referred to as “Reynolds,” although who exactly that might have been has remained a mystery across the centuries.

The significant other of Dr. LaFourcade is also a doctor: Alessandra Ruiz (Paola Núñez), who has grown weary of her illicit experiments and wants to reveal the truth. Her name is drawn from a play called Politian, written by Poe in 1835. Set in Rome during the 16th century, the play features a character named Alessandra who is the focal point of a love triangle that results in murder.

Episode 6 —“Goldbug”

The eldest Usher daughter (played by Samantha Sloyan) gets her name from the title of a poem written by a 17-year-old Poe and published in 1827; it’s about a conqueror who laments giving up the true love he once felt for a peasant woman, which would have resulted in a quiet, simple life, to instead pursue a battle-strewn existence of conquest in search of greater power and wealth. 

Tamerlane Usher’s husband is a fitness guru named William T. Wilson, a name drawn from the 1839 short story “William Wilson.” In the series, the character (played by Matt Biedel) urges his followers to “get BillT,” a homonym for “built.” Behind the scenes, Tamerlane is the one fixated on doubles—she’s a voyeur who likes to watch prostitutes pretend to be her in liaisons with him. 

Poe’s short story “William Wilson” is also a doppelgänger tale; the lead character is obsessed with a similarly named classmate who  looks like him as well. After Wilson murders this double by stabbing him, he ends up seeing himself reflected in a mirror as the bloody victim—which (ahem) mirrors Tamerlane’s own demise in The Fall of the House of Usher.

This is the name Tamerlane gives to her Goop-like lifestyle company, which has a golden scarab as its logo. In Poe’s 1843 treasure hunt story, “The Gold-Bug,” a similar insect is the key to finding a lost cache of jewels and riches.

Two ancient blue stones that Roderick Usher has acquired by bribing various Egyptian antiquities officials are inspired by Poe’s story “Some Words With a Mummy,” which includes this description of similar relics: “The eyes (it seemed) had been removed, and glass ones substituted, which were very beautiful and wonderfully life-like, with the exception of somewhat too determined a stare.”

Episode 7 — “The Pit and the Pendulum”

Roderick’s eldest son (played by Henry Thomas) endures a grimly elaborate death based on the slowly slashing and descending blade from the 1842 short story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” But he takes his name from the previously mentioned “Metzengerstein,” which concludes with these lines: “Frederick, Baron Metzengerstein, was the last of a long line of princes. His family name is no longer to be found among the Hungarian aristocracy.”

The wife of Frederick and mother of Lenore is horrifically scarred after secretly attending Perry Usher’s rave-orgy. But Crystal Balint’s character is also the lone survivor of that horror, now wrapped in bandages from head to toe as doctors attempt to treat her acid burns. Her name is taken from the 1835 short story “Morella,” about a man who fears that his daughter is the reincarnation of his wife, who died in childbirth.

The so-called “best of” the Ushers, according to Roderick, which is a fairly low bar. This young character, played by Kyliegh Curran, is the only one of the Ushers who isn’t despicably evil in some way, although she will pay the same price as the rest of them as Verna seeks to end the line once and for all. Her end is more merciful, though. Her name comes from the 1843 poem “Lenore,” about the death of a young woman and her ascension into heaven. Lenore is also the lost love at the center of “The Raven,” and in that case is another example of both a young life ended too soon and the narrator’s endless mourning. 

Yikes. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Frederick tortures his ailing wife, Morella, by plucking out her teeth one by one. It’s one of the most excruciating scenes in the series, and it was inspired by one of Poe’s most controversial works, the 1835 short story “Berenice.” In that tale of madness, a man watches as his betrothed succumbs to an illness that destroys everything except her perfect teeth. After her apparent death and burial, he enters a trance-like state and awakens to find a box containing all of her teeth. A servant reports that she has been found exhumed—but alive. The implication is that he dug her up during his stupor and ripped out the teeth, but failed to notice that she was actually still alive after all. 

This Poe poem is recited by Verna when Madeline Usher comes to bargain with the demon for her own life. “What’s a poem after all,” Verna says, “if not a safe space for a difficult truth?” The poem is about a city swallowed by light from the “lurid sea”: “No rays from the holy Heaven come down / On the long night-time of that town.” It’s a variation on the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, two towns destroyed for their wicked ways.

Episode 8 — “The Raven”

In a flashback sequence, Madeline and Roderick kill Rufus Griswold, clearing the path for their takeover of Fortunato by entombing him within a wall while he is drunk, similar to the fate Fortunato suffers in “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Throughout the series, Roderick Usher has been receiving texts from his granddaughter, Lenore, that he refuses to answer. He finally reveals that Lenore is actually dead, taken by Verna—but the AI his sister created with Lenore’s personality has been sending the same word over and over again to him. It’s “nevermore,” the same word recited by the demonic bird in “The Raven.”

Roderick Usher keeps seeing visions of a grinning jester, which is the costume Rufus Griswold was wearing when they bricked him up alive. Poe also wrote the 1849 short story “Hop-Frog” about a court jester who gets murderous revenge on the king he serves—and the entire court.

While recounting the death of Lenore, Roderick Usher recites the poem’s opening lines: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…” In the flashback to her death, a raven menaces him in his mansion, flying to a white statue of a Greek goddess. This is Pallas, goddess of wisdom, and the Raven is a symbol of fear standing over and dominating rational thought: “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door / And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming…”

Roderick meets with Madeline in the basement of their childhood home. Each has plotted to kill the other, in the hope of sparing themselves from Verna’s wrath. “This carcass of a house, this is our tomb,” Roderick tells her. Before the night is over, the sister he believes dead will rise up and come for him, and the house they inhabit will collapse on them both, just as it did in Poe’s short story of the same name. As Flanagan writes: “For all the folly of our characters, for all the brutal and shocking deaths, for all the searing indictments of the madness of society, our story would have to view life as Poe viewed it: as a tragedy.”