Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet watched The Fall of the House of Usher the whole way through, so beware!
Mike Flanagan’s final Netflix horror series (at least for the foreseeable future) is also arguably his most complex adaptation yet, with The Fall of the House of Usher adhering many of Edgar Allan Poe’s plotlines and characters to a largely modern-day story with socially relevant underpinnings. (It’s my new favorite horror TV show, for what that’s worth, and other critics have been equally kind.) Understandably, the complicated web of deceit and corruption spun by Bruce Greenwood and Mary McDonnell’s Roderick and Madeline Usher (respectively) leads to a cascade of devastating, tragic, and absolutely disgusting deaths and more atrocities that are sprinkled throughout the time-jumping season. Which in turn result in largely dark conclusions for not just those within the titular bloodline, but also those who get close to them.
Join me in stepping into a bar outside of time to sort through House of Usher’s ending, from laying out and ranking the major deaths to pinpointing the one true positive to follow the horrors that plagued the titular family in their final weeks among the living.
The One Positive Outcome From Verna’s Deal With Roderick
As the narrative fully established, Carla Gugino’s mysterious Verna and her reality-adjacent watering hole appeared to younger Roderick and Madeline in the aftermath of their highly immoral murder plot against the latter’s boss at Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, not only assisting the siblings with their alibi for that New Year’s Eve, but also helping to keep them out of any major trouble for the rest of their lives. All it took was Roderick’s amazingly selfish decision to agree to doom his entire bloodline, with that cataclysmic fate still far off in the distance at that point.
But the taxman came to collect, so to speak, as the Usher family was in the midst of a high-profile trial concerning the myriad deaths and other health issues tying back to Fortunato’s biggest moneymaker, the painkiller Ligadone. Each episode highlighted at least one meaningful death, with the body count rising steadily on the way to the family patriarch’s grisly demise, with so many ghastly actions taken along the way. Inarguably the most monstrous behavior came from Henry Thomas’ egotistical and insecure Frederick, who put his burned and suffering wife Morella through the most heinous medical treatment imaginable based entirely on his unproven assumption that she was cheating on him, possibly with his own brother.
By many viewers’ accounts, Frederick’s eventual death would already count as the best possible outcome from the show’s Verna-assisted reign of terror. But I’m speaking more about the prophetic reveal that the supernatural entity regretfully told to Kyliegh Curran’s Lenore just before she took the young girl’s life. Explaining that her mother would go on to successfully heal from her "battle scars" after a lot of hard effort, Verna then shared:
She inherits a sizeable fortune when Fortunato collapses. She puts it to work immediately. She gives most of it away. Domestic violence and abuse charities. But keeps enough to start a non-profit. She sets up chapters all over the world. She calls it the Lenore Foundation after her daughter, and she saves a lot of lives. Would you like to know how many? Dozens in the first year, then hundreds. Thousands soon after. And then a major burst of growth. 600,000 five years in. And in a decade, it’s millions. More than 3 million, in fact. Then it gets hard to count, because the people she helps help others, who help others, and others. And so on, and… This is the part I really want you to hear. You did that.
Will the Lenore Foundation be enough to truly counterbalance all of the damage done by Ligadone and Fortunato over the years? Perhaps when enough time passes. Will it be enough to justify all the pain and suffering that Morella went through? I'd expect time would also need to play into that one. Whatever happens, the non-profit is easily the standout slice of positivity to emerge from Roderick Usher's undoing, accompanied by the small amount of comfort gleaned from Lenore have a few seconds to know what she would go on to inspire.
The Fall Of The House Of Usher's Biggest Deaths, Ranked
Now let's take a quick look back at all of The Fall of the House of Usher's big deaths, so that we may rank them by how gnarly, fun, badass, etc. they each were. There are no hard rules here, unlike the way Verna runs things, so everyone's mileage will vary.
- RELATED: Upcoming Horror TV Shows: The Scary Shows Coming To TV And Streaming
- RELATED: Upcoming Horror Movies: All The Scary Movies Coming Out In 2023 And 2024
12. Lenore
As perhaps the only character within House of Usher whose actions and demeanor were entirely virtuous and just, Lenore's death was as big a gut punch as could be. There's no way to celebrate that kind of purely sad conclusion.
11. Annabel Lee
Similar to Lenore, Annabel Lee didn't seem to have a wicked bone in her body, except for the one that led to her birthing the pair of mini-monsters in Tamarlane and Frederick. Her death wasn't so directly confirmed, but her ghostly visage in the church was revealed to have a particularly nasty exit wound on the back of her head, indicating how she reacted to being ostracized by her kids in light of Roderick's money. Poor Annabel.
10. Leo
The obsession-driven lead up to Leo Usher's death is more harrowing and impactful than the death itself, as he spend lord knows how much time destroying the inside of his apartment while seeking out Verna's cursed feline. But it was certainly disturbing to see him leap-fall over the balcony railing, and it was a delightfully morbid touch to have what appeared to be the "real" cat Pluto walking by Leo's gnarled corpse.
9. Roderick
Weirdly, Roderick's death is the second in The Fall of the House of Usher to come at the strangling hands of a wronged woman who was initially thought dead, but who then rose up again to get her vengeance. (The first was Fortunato's former CEO William Longfellow.) But what makes this one stand out is that his whole-ass childhood home crashed down on top of him to truly seal the deal. House-crushing is quite the under-used horror death, I tell ya.
8. Madeline
Madeline was, of course, the wronged woman who strangled Roderick to death just before the house collapsed on top of them. What puts her above her deal-making brother, however, is the fact that Roderick had replaced her eyes with those mummification stones that were brought up earlier in the series. So she both looked freaky as hell, and was committing murder when she died. It's almost a crime she's still this low.
7. Vic
Few situations in House of Usher turned my guts as topsy-turvy as Vic's total mental break from reality, and while I was thankful to not have to watch a multitude of scenes with her in that lucid and frazzled state, I didn't necessarily want it to be because Vic took her own life all seppuku-like as Roderick stared on in horror. But what a wowzers scene all the same.
6. Rufus Griswold
Michael Trucco's Rufus Griswold was a complete turd, both as a corporate leader and as a human being. We didn't actually get to see his death play out, so it almost wouldn't count here, but I can't imagine anything too wonderful happened as he was trapped alone and masked behind a bricked-up wall in Fortunato's lower floors, with only the phrase "You are so small" written on one of the bricks as reading material. So that's a big win in my book.
5. Tamerlane
The death of Samantha Sloyan's Tamarlane was a particularly wild one, and not only because it was preceded by her freaking out and violently smashing Juno's head with a mic stand. With Verna plaguing this Usher offspring's reflections, Tamarlane went on tear, smashing all of the reflective surfaces in her home, which included the mirrored ceiling above her bed. Having already gritted my teeth over and over again just from her walking around barefoot, I was enjoyably even more unnerved seeing the mirrored glass puncturing her in those final moments. I'm pretty sure that was the one death in the show that could have theoretically been non-fatal had it happened without Verna's influence.
4. Frederick
If only Frederick had somehow been allowed to suffer the sorded fate of everyone on this list, he would have cemented a spot at the top. But he didn't quite go through as much physical pain as I'd have liked to see, since he was all numb and unable to feel anything. That said, he died in a puddle of his own piss, with the knowledge that he'd been duped by a beautiful woman (or a being that looked like one, anyway), and got lopped in half before being crushed.
3. Alessandra
Perhaps Alessandra would have been a more proper entry for a ranked list post-death awfulness, since her death itself was somewhat non-sensational and accidental, via Vic's impulsive blunt force trauma. But I'm stretching the rules to incorporate her final state of being within House of Usher, with Vic having surgically inserted the still-pumping heart mesh device into Al's corpse. So much nightmare fuel spurting out of that thing.
2. Camille
You know what you just don't get very much of in any kind of TV show, much less in horror? A cockstrong, stoked-by-evil chimpanzee beating a human to death. But that's definitely one of the wild and gory AF ways that the Usher family members are dispatched, with Kate Siegel's Camille serving as the target of furry primate fury. Even if viewers don't actually see the bludgeonings as they happen, the aftermath is enough to tell the tale.
1. Perry
I'm not sure i've ever seen a death that grossed me out quite as much as what happened to Perry and all of the other guests at his fate-ravaged party who all glommed together in interconnected clumps of acid-melted flesh. It's the wildest death of any Mike Flanagan TV show, and I can't imagine that he'll be able to easily top it in the future. Just the very sound of the squishing movements made by those slowest to die, that's the soundtrack of my hell. If ever there was a fantastic reason for Smell-O-Vision to have never taken off as a concept, this muck factory is a prime candidate.
The Fall of the House of Usher is available to rewatch in full with a Netflix subscription, for anyone who wanted to go about making a personal ranking of the big deaths.
