Tales Poe The Fall of the House of Usher Wikisource, the free online library

Table Of Content

• Cast
• Pages in category "Films based on The Fall of the House of Usher"
• Roderick Usher
• The Fall Of The House Of Usher TV Series: Release Date, Cast, And Other Things We Know About The Netflix Show
• Tales (Poe)/The Fall of the House of Usher
• The Fall of the House of Usher (1950 film)
• The Fall of The House Of Usher Has A Huge Cast That Includes Mark Hamill And Bruce Greenwood

Under the watchful eye of the caretaker, Nurse Thatcher (Beth Grant), Jill appears to be haunted by Maddy's ghost. And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue—but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a ​tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage.

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Cast

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. On the other hand, there are plenty of strange things about the Usher family. For one, “the entire family lay in the direct line of descent,” meaning that only one son from each generation survived and reproduced. Poe implies incestuous relations sustained the genetic line and that Roderick and Madeline are the products of extensive intermarriage within the Usher family. At Roderick’s words, the door bursts open, revealing Madeline all in white with blood on her robes.

Pages in category "Films based on The Fall of the House of Usher"

Fans of Mike Flanagan may recognize many of the names from previous projects, including The Midnight Club  and the well-reviewed film adaptation of Doctor Sleep. Flanagan also disclosed, during the initial cast announcement, that McDonnell plays Rodrick’s sister, Madeline Usher. The second wave of cast announcements included Henry Thomas, Samantha Sloyan, T’Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel, Sauriyan Sapkota, Zach Gilford, Katie Parker, and Michael Trucco. As the series draws to a close, Verna—whose name is an anagram of the titular bird in Poe's classic 1845 poem "The Raven"—is shown placing an item on each of the Usher's graves that represents their respective downfalls, closing the loop of her karmic retribution.

Roderick Usher

But past secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman from their youth. He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers." While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread; and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps.

When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother; but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears. Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality—of the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe.

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. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick and Mary McDonnell as an elderly Madeline. I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its final interment) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1950 film)

We painted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their ​way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling.

A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead—for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house. It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings.

It didn’t officially begin filming until January 31 (also confirmed via Twitter). According to Variety, the series follows the wealthy Usher siblings as they must deal with skeletons from their past. In the same article, Flanagan confirms that supernatural elements will be at play in this story. As Roderick finishes his story, an eyeless and bloodied Madeline suddenly bursts out of the basement and attacks Roderick as the house begins to crumble around them.

Frederick "Freddie" Usher is Roderick's eldest child and the natural heir to Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, but he's also the least equipped to run the family business out of all his siblings. Often picked on by his brothers and sisters, Freddie bears a fiery jealousy and compounding insecurity, which forces him down a path that even those closest to him are shocked to see. Meanwhile, Jill becomes intimate with Rick and tells him she has missed her period. In the meantime, Jill has discovered that the Usher family has practiced twincest for the past five or six generations, right down to Maddy and Rick. All the prior generations had twins, who later became a couple and birthed twins of their own and so on down the line to Maddy and Rick, who were to continue the Usher curse. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway.

The writers and critics of Poe’s day rejected many of that movement’s core tenets, including its emphasis on the emotions and the experience of the sublime. Accordingly, commentaries on social injustice, morality, and utilitarianism proliferated in the mid-19th century. Poe conceived of his writing as a response to the literary conventions of this period.

I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. 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?