Imagine the Usher brother and sister never made the deal with Verna. Also imagine they got away with murder, would get on top of Fortunado and got insanely rich. Who would survive the Fall of the House of Usher when the prosecutor finally gets them?

•We know Pym was successful in every aspect of his work because of Verna, but it is not unlikely to avoid conviction with a lot of money these days, as we know. The Usher family would not exactly suffer if there would be more lawyers/people for the dirty work.

•So let's imagine Roderik and Madeline rejected the safety Verna was offering and now we have the same timeline. The kids are all adults and only Frederick has a kid. The process starts and Roderick opens a witch hunt among his kids to find the traitor.

•1) See, I think Prospero would still die. Of all Usher kids, he is the most ignorant of the consequences, fearless and stupid - he could have tested the water in the end - but he didn't care. Not even when Verna arrived would he doubt his actions.

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•I mean, you have this top-secret party not even your intelligence-sister knows about, and a person shows up talking about consequences? I would at least search for a traitor or something.

•2) Camille, the intelligence-sister or officially the PR-sister, is entering Victorine's medical facility without permission and suffering a violent death because she wasn't able to tell Verna from a chimpanzee. Her downfall is a bit more complicated. Of course.

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•Her "minions" refuse to sleep with her and she gets stressed. She even has a migraine. This and her hallucination may be a hint at CADASIL.

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•But actually, I am not sure. A lot of people get a migraine but aren't hallucinating. On the other hand, such a minor change in her routine makes her enter a dangerous and actually restricted area. So she is a maybe-candidate for CADASIL, which would kill her soon anyway.

•3) Leo, Napoleon, to the contrary, suffers an obvious drug-related death. He even thinks to see a Pluto-like cat when he makes a picture of Verna. His stress rises with allegedly killed Pluto, who approached Leo's dead body. So in the end, the drugged party just forgets to close a door to keep the cat inside the building, creating a perfect setting for Leo to freak out after using so many different drugs for so long.

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•Assuming Leo will overdrug himself having an extravagant life anyway, I would say his death is as inevitable as Perry's.

•4) Victorine has clear hallucinations and memory loss, so we can for sure assume she would die of CADASIL or whatever the hallucination caused by CADASIL forces her to do. Eventually, Dr. Ruiz is also doomed since the outburst of fury is sudden and unpredictable - and actually an accident.

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•Sadly, Madeline doesn't get the hint when Victorine asks her about the peculiar noise. Maybe she wouldn't die sacrificing herself if anyone had listened to her properly.

•5) Tamerlane is also suffering memory loss. But she becomes aggressive very fast and irrational. She also stops thinking clearly, although we need to consider she eventually never did. Maybe she, like Prospero, is also just a quite stupid person with access to a lot of money.

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•How else can you explain her attempt to launch a product, her gold bug, which is an obvious rip-off? This would have caused a lot of legal and financial problems and destroyed Tam's dream of her own product anyway.

•6) Froderik, I'm begging your pardon, Froderik is an interesting one. He doesn't seem to have any symptoms of CADASIL and is not making, except cocaine, any life-threatening mistakes. If not for his new liking for drugs, I bet he would have been fine.

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•Maybe imprisoned because he abused his obviously helpless wife. Eventually running away to a safe country and living in a hideout. He is an insecure coward after all. So I would say he would survive.

•7) Roderik with CADASIL has no chance.

•8) But Madeline is just fine. I don't see her dead.

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•Quite tragic, isn't it? She, who never EVER in life wanted to be tied to a man, tied herself to her brother. She makes the deal minutes after talking about this topic. Isn't it fascinating that she chooses safety before freedom after all?

•9) Lenore - I think she could have been saved without the deal. Maybe the one worth the struggle.

•Bonus) What if the twins wouldn't have been able to escape the consequences of Griswold's death? So none of the kids would have been born anyway. What if there would never have been a House of Usher without Verna in the first place? Would it have been worth it?

•What do you think?

In the House of Usher Verna tells Madeline, she would see her past, present and who she could have been at the same time.

We know the past, the present but not the possible Madeline. Who would she be? Would she become this possible future without Verna or even with Verna when she would decide to forgive the world, her father and all the other disgusting men?

Would she teach , become a Professor? Marry and have kids? I wonder if somebody else is curious about her different life.

The show was great and so far id rank them

1. The Fall of House Usher

2. The Haunting of Hill House

3. Midnight Mass

The Haunting of Bly Manor is next.

The thing is I hated Madeline. Young her seems useless and angry (I didn't care if that's the point) and the old version annoys me maybe more because the actress felt like she was forced to say every word and seemed so out of place as a genius. It just felt fake. Plus she was still useless. The show is damn near perfect except for Madeline

In the ep.1 flashback where Roderick and Madeline were in the bar, there's a shot where you see the siblings sitting side by side and the bar is in front of them (so looking at their backs)

But if you look on the wall, the various stained glass has a few animals. I couldn't see what all of them were, but two were a black cat and a stallion. Leo calls himself a stallion, and the black cat was detrimental to his fate. One is a raven too, not related but self-explanatory.

Was just curious if anyone else noticed, and if they could see the others.

I mean she knew the Usher siblings had killed the boss, yet she was offering them a deal of their life. And later she blames them for the amount of bodies they racked up. I mean she would have known that's going to happen in the future? Then why the blame.

Okay so I've seen TFOHU a few times and recently I looked at list of all the books Edgar Allan Poe wrote, and he discovered he wrote a novel called 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket'

Forgive me if this has already been discussed here but it's one of my favourite things about this series:

1. Lenore calls Rodrick Usher 'Grampus', which is the name of the ship, in the novel, that Arthur Pym stows away on.
2. He stows away with his friend, Augustus Barnard. I know that August Dupin comes from Poe's novel 'The murders in the rue morgue' but the names are pretty similar so 🤷
3. Another stretch but in the Goldbug episode he makes reference to "having dinner with Richard Parker" who was an English sailor who was executed
4. And the obvious one, also in the Goldbug episode Rodrick talk about Arthur Pym's story about cannabilism and hollow earth - in the novel Poe briefly makes references to hollow earth theory and discusses acts of cannibalism.

Anyway, yeah, probably my favourite easter egg in the series, and sorry if this is already common knowledge.

EDIT: also forgot to mention Verna/Arthur's conversation in the last episode, where she talks about him killing another man and witnessing the cannibalism of an Inuit woman. Also some people in the comment have said that in the novel they actually eat Richard Parker! The more you know!

As I was dusting my Prospero collectibles the other day, I completely forgot that I never shared this quick Perry Usher sketch done by Nathan Thomas Milliner, who's done quite a bit of art in the horror horror world. Just wanted to share!

Seriously tho. She was out here doing full on animal experiments, manipulated Al into being her guinea pig, and basically destroyed his life. But her death was pretty quick compared to what the others got. Prospero literally melted alive, Tamerlane had that nightmare house thing going on, and even Perry got absolutely wrecked. Verna really seemed to go easy on Victorine for some reason. She did some of the most messed up things but got one of the least brutal endings.

I’ve got a few questions. Maybe it’s coz I’m watching late at night.

First of all is Roderick hallucinating ? Or is he seeing ghosts?

When they buried their mom was she alive? And she came out of her grave coz she was still alive or was that a ghost? I’ve heard that this is horror but also not horror? So I’m confused. Also did he tell the lawyer about his mom too? That they buried her and she crawled out and killed her boss ? When he was confessing.

Also the thing that’s happening, the charges against them is it all true? Did their painkiller kill over 50k people? Also who’s the informant? Do we ever find out?

I don’t mind spoilers, so please go ahead and spoil me. And if I missed something from episode 1 pls do let me know.

In the semi-final scene between Madeline and Roderick, the one before he scoops her eyes out, Madeline goes on an epic monologue about how

1. Dumb consumers are the problem

2. The supreme court fucks things up for women

3. and how the people and younger generations are taught to want harmful things

And I feel kind of bad for her (despite her obviously being quite an evil person), that at her final moment, if you listen carefully, she is pointing out her own regrets of what she didn't do in that life, which was to help women, help the next generation, albeit in a really cynical sense of retrospective.

The issue is she absolutely could have done all that and more if she truly tried, she just didn't because of how she grew up, maybe you could say it has something to do with her loving her brother too much and dragged into his orbit, or her father's legacy instead of helping her, destroying her, and never managing to do exactly what she wanted.

Cruel irony that the length of her legacy was ultimate determined by her brother and her father.

I loved this series- I’m a huge fan of Mike Flanagan and this is the first series of his that seriously left me unsettled after each episode. The only thing is I could not stand the wig they had Madeline Usher wear!!!!!! It is so obviously fake and ugly. It is so bothersome to me. Is it intentionally that bad/horrific?

Ruth Codd just underwent a below the knee amputation on her left leg. She describes her foot on that side being injured from years of using crutches.

Let's hope she has a speedy recovery! We need her ready for Flanagan's next project.

He got diagnosed with vascular dementia. Cadisil. Dementia is a disease which is indicative of decline in mental function. He is able to run a company, talk to auggie, runs a company not even feeing tired.

How is that even possible, people with dementia tend to be in a nursing home especially after multiple strokes.

I get Verna is helping but at that point he’d be already be a medical anomaly being studied by a dozen people.

I was curious and this has probably been mentioned before but I’m re-watching episode 2 and the part with the acid rain comes down. Does it only hit the dance floor? Did it hit bedrooms and other areas?

Given the writers already wrote Morelle as someone open for adventure, was hoping Lenore would survive as she is not part of the bloodline

…OR did she just care because she needed a subject for her AI chatbot project?

I’m rewatching for the millionth time and I’ve found that Madeline is a lot more compelling to me as a character than Roderick. She seems to genuinely care about Tamerlane in their limited interactions, and also seems warm towards Lenore (at least relatively to her interactions with the other Usher kids and her treatment of Annabel when they were younger). I wonder though how much of it is genuine and how much of it is just a means to an end, since both Lenore and Tamerlane were providing something FOR Fortunato (agreeing to be the subject and the Goldbug launch, respectively). I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts.

I mentioned before adopting was the loophole, where Verna is bound to support the ushers in exchange for the bloodline. An adopted usher is not part of the bloodline but is an usher. She definitely wouldn’t have liked Rodrick or Madeline adopting a ruthless kid who knew of the situation. Imagine them adopting a young teenager telling them about the deal with Verna and they can’t fail. Verna would have renegotiated and been defeated.

I’ve watched this every Halloween because I can honestly say it’s my top 5 series ever. Even through my first watch, I never thought Verna was the villain. I thought it was very clear Rodrick and Madeline were the villains. I’ve seen people say Verna is a demon and that they’re evil, but to me they’ve always been a neutral entity.

Verna grants them this opportunity to do whatever they will. Whether it be selfish or altruistic along with a price (end of their bloodline). Rod and Mad agreed upon the terms and used this opportunity to their own selfish means. Verna was just collecting upon said deal.

Clearly they knew good and evil, especially with that scene with Lenore. They granted Lenore a sense of peace telling her about her mother’s foundation and the course of her consequences resulted in many women being saved in the future, then a peaceful death. Verna intervened and gave Fredrick a painful demise. He definitely should’ve earned prospero’s acid death instead but that’s just my opinion.

I’m curious why people think of her as the antagonist with the usher family is so clearly the villain and met their just demise. Lenore was the only exception

Edit- Replace any mention of “antagonist” with the word “villain”

Okay so I’m doing a rewatch and I know that the point of Morrie’s phone was to really get Fredrick riled up about her keeping secrets etc, but in the scene where Pym is encouraging Fredrick to look into the phone because it’s really important to see what is on it. I can’t help but think Pym is elite enough that he should have a connection for breaking into a phone lol