Spoilers below for Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, so be warned if you haven’t yet witnessed all the perfectly splendid grossness on display!
Of all the new shows hitting Netflix and other platforms ahead of Halloween, I’m willing to bet my very soul that The Fall of the House of Usher ends up being the most memorable and effective of them all. Recency bias be damned, it immediately became my new favorite horror TV series, squeaking by creator Mike Flanagan’s prior reimagined adaptation The Haunting of Hill House for the top spot. While the show’s top honors have to go to the immaculate cast of Flanagan regulars and to the exquisitely crafted narrative, House of Usher’s production design and visual effects work are also as top-notch as it gets, with so many wickedly stomach-turning scenes and sequences throughout all eight episodes.
I think we can all agree the end of the rave and its aftermath was the epitome of appetite-suppressing yuckity yuck-yuck. So as much as it may seem anti-intuitive to spend more time thinking about that gruesomeness, I kinda need to get some thoughts out about -+-not just that nastiness, but each of the other gloriously gross scenes that will forever be melted into the foundation of my brain even beyond all the upcoming horror shows on the horizon.
The Looks And Sounds Of All The Melted-Together Partygoers
Full-stop, the final scene in House of Usher’s second episode may very well go down as the most disgustingly tactile set design I will ever lay eyes and ears on; both it and Pym’s return to the dance floor in Ep 3 pretty much combined to become the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen in a scripted series. Prospero and his partygoers getting doused with acid from the sprinkler system seems like it should have been the biggest gut-twist, what with all the screams of confused pain happening. But no, it’s right after the power goes out and most of the crowd is already dead: those are the moments seared into my eyeballs and eardrums. When everyone is melted together, but the survivors are still trying to move around and make sense of it, with all the squelching and the groaning and the squelching and the moaning, and now I need a hug and some earplugs.
Morelle Clawing Her Bandages Off
Spoilers: this isn't the only entry focusing on Crystal Balint's Morelle, one of the small number of Fall of the House of Usher characters who largely refrained from any kind of monsterous behavior, even if it was her astoundingly terrible choice to heed Prospero's invitation in the first place. As if going through that accident wasn't bad enough, the loving mother awoke confused about what she'd been through, and immediately began trying to remove all the bandages covering the acid-burned flesh on her face, to both the abject horror of daughter Lenore and viewers themselves. Director Michael Fimognari thankfully delivered that final shot of Morelle screaming in terror through the gauzy "lens" of protective plastic.
Camille's Chimp-Beaten Corpse
During her relatively short stay in House of Usher’s eight episodes, at least as a living and breathing entity, Kate Seigel’s Camille was precision personified, both in her personal life and her work life. (Which were sometimes one and the same, but still.) Her meticulous practicality is perhaps what made Camille’s death at the bludgeoning hands of Ape-Verna that much more disturbing, because there was nothing so exact or balanced about the way her bloodied and broken corpse was slumped on the floor of Vic’s lab. Not to mention all of the smeared blood everywhere around the body, which adds another distinct unsettling layer. The thought of Ape-Verna using the wall to wipe the gory bits out of her fur is just ew.
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Cat-Scratched Eyeballs
The Fall of the House of Usher’s fourth episode featured multiple visuals that turned my spine cold, with several involving eye-related suffering. First was Rahul Kohli’s Leo, who was clawed right down the middle of his eyeball by the black cat that eventually led to his balcony fall and death. (I’d wager the cut was worse than the fall.) Later, after Leo was in the grips of Verna’s creeping madness, he was again attacked by the cat, and retaliated by gouging both of his thumbs into the feline’s eye sockets. Eye gouges are always nightmare fuel. Soon after, Verna turned to reveal her eyeball just dangling out of her face like the messiest earring known to man. Eye-yi-yi.
All The Dead Tub Creatures
The episode “The Black Cat” featured another nausea-inducing moment not long before Leo’s mania turned fatal, as he showed Verna that his bathtub held a pet cemetery’s worth of dead animals that the titular pet had killed and left around the apartment. And like, I don’t care that it was all revealed to be Verna-induced hallucinations, without anything so untoward laid out in the tub. I thought Leo finding that mouse under his pillow while getting a blowjob was terrifying enough, but that was merely child’s play.
The Pumping Heart Inside Al’s Massacred Remains
As much as the party floor of human goop shall forever hold the throne of Nastiest Scene, I dare say Bruce Greenwood’s Roderick discovering Allesandra’s murdered and mutilated body was just as devastating a reveal, albeit on a far smaller scale. Because the horror inherent to that sequence wasn’t just from seeing the days-old corpse with the still-pumping heart mesh attached, but from the utter lack of reality being grasped by T’Nia Miller’s Vic in the moment. Even if she was directly responsible for Al’s death and all the problems that led to that point, that wasn’t Vic’s end goal, so her highly bothersome suicide was almost as tragic a death as anyone’s. Well, except for Al’s, obviously.
Juno Taking All That Ligodone
Though every other entry on this list is soaking in blood and entrails, Ruth Codd’s former addict Juno is at the heart of a B-story that in some ways can be viewed as more bothersome than the various deaths, since she isn’t given any reprieve from her suffering. (Save for Roderick’s eventual death.) She’s a punchline within the family, and a walking set of data to her husband, thanks to the way her rather petite body is able to handle high doses of Ligodone, so it’s a mental hurdle unto itself to sit through the scene where Juno is actually taking the meds. Seeing the amount of pills is beyond bad enough, but the moment where she puts them all into her mouth made me want to spew bile from various orifices.
Freddie Pulling Out Morelle's Teeth
Similar to Juno's whole situation, nothing about Freddie's existence actually needed any viscera involved to earn the label of "utter-fucking-ly disgusting." And yet he just kept serving up heinousness like clockwork, with arguably the most palpably horrifying sequence came in Episode 7, when the jealousy-stricken monster pulled out his wife's teeth as she lay bleeding, drugged, and traumatized wrapped inside filthy bandages. It was emotionally crippling to see Lenore discovering the sordid truth about her mother's "recovery," but was visually tormenting to see everything that led up to it, even though we didn’t even actually see him pulling the teeth out. The magic of suggestive editing.
Madeline's Eyeless Corpse-Ghost
From the first episode to the last, The Fall of the House of Usher’s core convo between Roderick and Auggie rested atop the massive reveal that the former had murdered Mary McDonnell’s Madeline before the Assistant U.S. Attorney had arrived that night. Or at least he tried to, but you never can tell with an Usher. And good gawd almighty, the fact that Madeline’s eyes were replaced with the mummification stones brought her already gross look to a new level of Nuh-Uh, Nope. I guess I’m glad viewers were spared the sight of her bloodied visage as she blindly bumbled around in the basement, because one shot of that face is worth a thousand worms. Er, words.
Not that the above comprises the full gamut of gross and disturbing moments peppered throughout The Fall of the House of Usher — everything about Michael Trucco’s Rufus Griswold could have been included on here as well — but they account for quite a few of the gnarliest highlights. Relive the entire season with a Netflix subscription, which is also where the bulk of Mike Flanagan's other TV shows and movies are located, from Ouija: Origin of Evil to The Haunting of Bly Manor to Gerald's Game to Midnight Mass, and the list goes on.
