WARNING! This article contains SPOILERS for The Fall of the House of Usher.

Summary

• Despite featuring unsavory characters, Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher keeps viewers hooked with its well-timed twists and attention to detail.
• The series draws inspiration from several Edgar Allan Poe poems, using lines and themes to evoke sorrow, question reality, and explore the nature of death.
• The use of Poe's works in the show adds depth and symbolism, highlighting the characters' guilt, regrets, and the inescapable nature of their fate.

Netflix's horror series characters, Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher keeps viewers hooked with its well-timed twists, attention to detail, and depiction of horrifying character deaths.

In all of its terrors and drama, The Fall of the House of Usher adopts several narrative and character beats from Edgar Allan Poe's stories. For instance, its title and Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher also draws inspiration and borrows quotes from Edgar Allan Poe's poems.

10 For Annie

In its opening scenes, Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher sets the stage for its drama by revealing that Roderick Usher's children are dead. As Roderick and his granddaughter, Lenore, sit in the pews of a church where the funeral of three of his children is being held, the preacher recites lines from many Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems. A few of these lines are also from the poem, For Annie, which Poe had written as a tribute to his late wife after she died from tuberculosis. The lines from the poem in the series, "The danger, is past, and the lingering illness Is over at last — and the fever called 'Living' is conquered at last," reflect the sorrow Roderick feels following the death of his children.

9 A Dream Within A Dream

Roderick refers to this poem and questions the nature of reality as he tells Lenore about his visions of his dead children. The Edgar Allan poem, A Dream Within A Dream, explores the fleeting nature of time and the impermanence of human existence. After Roderick loses all the of his family one by one, he, too, starts questioning the elusive nature of his reality like the narrator in A Dream With A Dream and wonders if his existence is a mere dream and if his daydreams of his dead children are dreams within dreams.

8 Eureka

Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka: A Prose Poem gives a glimpse of the author's view on a myriad of topics, including cosmology, metaphysics, philosophy, and the origins of the universe. In the ambitiously speculative poem, Poe also mentions the asteroid Juno, which might have been the inspiration behind the name of Ruth Codd's character in The Fall of the House of Usher. Although Eureka's subject matter does not directly align with the themes of the Mike Flanagan show, it could be one among the many mundane references made by the series to the author's works.

7 The Raven

The Raven is one of the most recognized poems written by Edgar Allan Poe. Owing to this, it is not surprising that it also holds immense narrative significance in Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher. Not only is the title of the show's opening episode, "A Midnight Dreary," the opening sentence of Poe's The Raven, but even Carla Gugino's The Fall of the House of Usher character, Verna, is portrayed as a shape-shifting raven. Just like the titular Raven in Edgar Allan Poe's poem symbolizes the narrator's grief towards a dead loved one, Verna (anagram for "Raven") in the series serves as a metaphor for Roderick's guilt towards crossing all moral boundaries to reach material success.

6 To My Mother

Like Roderick and Madeline lose their mother, Eliza, at a young age in The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe also lost his mother, Eliza Poe, when he was barely three years old. After losing his mother at such a tender age, the author went on to dedicate several different poems and stories to her. For instance, his first published story, Metzengerstein, is believed to refer to the fire that destroyed a theater where his mother worked as an actress. By drawing parallels to Eliza Poe in its opening arc and highlighting how her demise impacts Roderick, The Fall of the House of Usher also gives a nod to Poe's poem To My Mother, which is an ode to the author's memory of his mother.

5 Annabel Lee

The Fall of the House of Usher reveals how Roderick has had children with several women over the years. However, the flashbacks from the 1979 timeline confirm that his first wife's name was Annabel Lee. The name Annabel Lee has been derived from the title of another Edgar Allan Poe poem that explores a man's undying love for his beloved Annabel Lee. Although the original poem highlights how the narrator's devotion to Annabel Lee remains unshaken long after her death, The Fall of the House of Usher mentions verses from the poem to portray how Roderick regrets betraying his wife and separating from her even though she was his one true love.

Owing to this regret, he continues feeling her presence and even sees her ghost in the church, reminding him of what his life could have been if his mindless pursuit of earning material success had not blinded him. In the Mike Flanagan Netflix show, Annabel Lee is not only a symbol of Roderick's persistent love for his first wife but also a tragic projection of how Roderick holds himself responsible for her death. Towards the end of The Fall of the House of Usher, as he recalls Annabel Lee, he realizes that he sacrificed the warmth of love to fortune and fame.

4 The Bells

After young Madeline and Roderick Usher shut Griswold behind a wall of bricks on the climactic New Year's Eve of 1979, they hear the bells from Griswold's jester costume for hours from behind the walls. Towards the end of The Fall of the House of Usher, as Roderick sits across the same wall and recalls how the 1979 night sealed their fate, he hears the same bells from Griswold's costume. The bells are a nod to Edgar Allan Poe's poem, The Bells, in which the author describes iron bells as a symbol of mourning and death. By showing how Roderick starts hearing iron bells from Griswold's jester costume, The Fall of the House of Usher foreshadows his imminent doom.

3 The City In The Sea

Verna recites Edgar Allan Poe's The City In The Sea to Madeline Usher, reminding her of the inescapable nature of death. The poem uses dark imagery to personify death, which stands as a tall god-like figure over a decaying city. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline always seems to have a false sense of immortality as she believes that as long as they have influence and power, no one can touch them, even in death. By quoting the poem to her, Verna tries to warn her about the inexorable advance of time and how death spares no one.

2 Tamerlane

Samantha Sloyan's The Fall of the House of Usher character, Tamerlane Usher, is based on Edgar Allan Poe's poem, Tamerlane. Written in the first person, the poem describes the pain the narrator feels after looking back at their shallow pursuits of chasing power at the expense of relationships. It highlights how, in their dying moments, the narrator realizes that their one-dimensional ambitions and dreams have left them feeling empty because they came at a terrible cost. The poem's thematic explorations not only apply to Tamerlane in the Netflix series but to every other member of The Fall of the House of Usher's central family.

1 Lenore

Lenore is both a recurring name and theme in Edgar Allan Poe's works, especially in his poems Lenore and The Raven. In the two poems, Lenore is often the evocative symbol of a narrator's longing who cannot help but have haunting visions of his beloved Lenore. Roderick's granddaughter in The Fall of the House of Usher is named Lenore, who, like the one in the poems, es away at a young age. Like the one in the poems, she becomes a tragic allegory for Roderick's guilt and suffering from the realization that his path to material success was marred with the blood of his dead loved ones.