Compelling Edgar Allan Poe adaptations have been thin on the ground since Roger Corman’s films in the 1960s. Admittedly, there was a spectacular segment in an early Treehouse of Horror Simpsons Halloween special, but with The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan proves just as adept as Matt Groening or Corman at bringing Poe to the screen.
Flanagan has form with making tributes to some of horror’s most beloved oeuvres. He took on Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House (which was fabulous), Henry James in The Haunting of Bly Manor (spooky but saccharine) and Christopher Pike in The Midnight Club (meh). Thankfully, Flanagan and Poe’s sensibilities prove a winning pairing, staying on the edge of terror without cascading into jump scares and sentimentality. Guilt permeates every frame of Flanagan’s Poe universe, and buys into not so much the horror as the terror. The feeling that something awful is imminent makes for an engaging watch.
