The Fall of the House of Usher spoilers follow.
There are many reasons to love Mike Flanagan's work, especially his recent run of shows on Netflix.
Starting with The Haunting of Hill House, Flanagan's uncanny ability to wring emotion and pathos out of the macabre has gripped us every spooky season since across the likes of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club, all of which are terrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure.
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They're also horny as hell in a romantic, often extremely gay kind of way. Bly Manor in particular is the lesbian equivalent of an atomic bomb, devastating everyone in its path — but with his latest series for Netflix, Flanagan may have out-gayed himself completely.
The Fall of the House of Usher is gay in the best way possible
You'd think a show based on Edgar Allan Poe stories from the mid-1800s wouldn't have a whiff of gay about it, but The Fall of the House of Usher is extremely queer across the board.
Twin siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher are co-CEOs of a corrupt pharmaceutical company that's ruined countless lives, including Roderick's six children, who've grown up to be incredibly cruel, selfish and narcissistic in their quest for approval from Daddy Usher. But it's not all bad news. The majority of them turned out to be casually queer, so they have that going for them, at least.
We say "casually" because there are no big coming-out moments or even a need to define sexual identity in House of Usher.
Take the youngest Usher child, Perry, for example. The self-described hedonist doesn't seem drawn to any one particular gender, or even one specific kind of person for that matter.
For the brief time he's on the show, Sauriyan Sapkota's character lusts after pretty much everyone he encounters, including his sister-in-law, his two regular partners and every naked, writhing body who shows up at his doomed, queer rave (not to mention the spectre of death itself, or however you want to define Carla Gugino's presence on the show).
Perry's older brother Napoleon lives with a man named Julius, but very early on, we see him cheat on the poor guy with a woman in the flat they share. Victorine is also in a same-sex relationship with her surgeon girlfriend, Alessandra.
And then there's Camille, a silver-haired, silver-tongued force of nature who beds her two assistants as part of what must be the worst contract anyone's ever signed in the history of business.
It's no spoiler to suggest that these romances don't end particularly well for anyone involved. Well, except for Toby and Tina, who somehow managed to fall in love with each other through the bisexual storm of Camille's bedroom arrangement.
And that's okay. Because yes, killing off queer characters can be risky when they're few and far between on a show. There's a reason why the term "Bury Your Gays" has become a thing, after all. But in The House of Usher, almost everyone's queer in some way, and even more crucially than that, everyone dies regardless of who they're attracted to or how they identify.
There's no preferential treatment given to heterosexual characters, and taking LGBTQ+ people off the board doesn't take away from the show's positive queer representation either — mostly because there isn't any!
Gay or straight, the Ushers are truly despicable, and we love to see it.
There was a time when queer characters were almost exclusively villainised and othered simply for being queer, but now that representation on screen has become so much broader, there's plenty of space for queers to behave badly — to be gay and do crime, if you will.
Why The Fall of the House of Usher is even gayer than you realise
We've finally reached a point where characters can be queer without their queerness being the focus of their story. That kind of representation is just as important, if not more so, than the coming-out stories and endless tales of suffering we've become familiar with over time.
But what makes the LGBTQ+ themes in House of Usher even more impressive is how Flanagan takes the queer subtext of Poe's original work and explicitly incorporates it into the text.
Because yes, Poe might have written at a time when queerness wasn't acknowledged in the open, but it was still there. LGBTQ+ people have always existed, and the Gothic tradition that Poe drew upon in his work is a perfect example of that.
Classic Gothic tales such as Dracula, The Monk and Frankenstein — not to mention everything Poe ever wrote — used supernatural narratives to channel forbidden desires that reflected feelings of isolation and otherness. Some go so far as to suggest that the monsters in these stories directly represented homosexual urges that were deemed monstrous afflictions back then.
Poe's work specifically lends itself to a queer reading even beyond these Gothic trappings he loved so dearly because The Fall of the House of Usher was already pretty gay to begin with.
The unnamed narrator is revealed early on to be an "intimate associate" of Roderick Usher, with mention of his old companion's lips described as "a surpassingly beautiful curve". Throw in secrets that can't be shared, plus anxieties around the future of the Usher bloodline, and Roderick's fixation on the male narrator can certainly be read as queer, whether Poe intended it that way or not.
But in Flanagan's modern remix of Poe's bibliography, there's no need to infer queerness. It's in the show's DNA, although it's portrayed in a far less sympathetic way than we're used to seeing in Flanagan's work. And honestly, The Fall of the House of Usher is all the better for it.
The Fall of the House of Usher is now available on Netflix.
After teaching in England and South Korea, David turned to writing in Germany, where he covered everything from superhero movies to the Berlin Film Festival.
In 2019, David moved to London to join Digital Spy, where he could indulge his love of comics, horror and LGBTQ+ storytelling as Deputy TV Editor, and later, as Acting TV Editor.
David has spoken on numerous LGBTQ+ panels to discuss queer representation and in 2020, he created the Rainbow Crew interview series, which celebrates LGBTQ+ talent on both sides of the camera via video content and longform reads.
Beyond that, David has interviewed all your faves, including Henry Cavill, Pedro Pascal, Olivia Colman, Patrick Stewart, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Dornan, Regina King, and more — not to mention countless Drag Race legends.
As a freelance entertainment journalist, David has bylines across a range of publications including Empire Online, Radio Times, INTO, Highsnobiety, Den of Geek, The Digital Fix and Sight & Sound.
