The Fall of the House of Usher spoilers follow – including its ending.
After seven episodes of death and suffering and hilariously cruel one-liners, The House of Usher has finally fallen. Well, almost. Roderick Usher is the last man standing — or sitting, should we say? He is quite old, to be fair.
Madeline, Roderick's twin sister and co-CEO, is also alive but not well, we suspect, if those noises from the basement are anything to go by. So it's up to C Auguste Dupin — and us — to sit through the last of Roderick's musings and find out what actually happened to the House of Usher.
What's the story behind that ringing sound behind the brick wall? What exactly is Madeline doing down in the basement? And why does Roderick keep ignoring his granddaughter's texts? He was never going to win patriarch of the year, but Lenore's the only child in the family he liked, so that doesn't bode well...
And then there's the biggest mystery of all: Who is Verna?
Join us here at Digital Spy as we explain how the House of Usher eventually fell, once and for all, in Mike Flanagan's Netflix horror.
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The Fall of the House of Usher ending explained
Summarising this epic family saga is harder than avoiding the clutches of death itself, but what you need to know going into the end is that Roderick Usher has decided to spill the beans on everything that's happened to his family, so he's invited an old foe, C Auguste Dupin, over to his childhood home.
There, Daddy Usher recounts the duplicitous ways he amassed his fortune with Madeline's help. Through shifting timelines and what may or may not be hallucinatory sequences, Roderick reveals that the twins once bargained with a supernatural figure named Verna, who promised them wealth and success in return for one thing: the end of the Usher bloodline upon their deaths.
And so we learn of the horrific ways each of his children would go on to die, whether through an ape attack, melting in an acid shower or even by impaling their own "tell-tale" heart.
To save her skin, Madeline convinced Roderick to swallow some pills at the end of the previous episode, but Verna can't "accept his resignation". That's when we find out that the ringing noise coming from behind those bricks is the sound Roderick's former boss made in his Halloween jester costume when the twins bricked him up to slowly die alone while they took his place at the head of the company.
In the present, Roderick's only grandchild, Lenore, dies too. For once, though, Verna takes no pleasure in this. While the others all brought their demise upon themselves, Lenore was an innocent, the only good Usher.
To ease the girl's final moments, Verna reveals that Lenore's mother will go on to survive her injuries and form an NGO dedicated to the memory of her daughter. So by saving her mum when she did, Lenore's actions saved millions of other lives in a butterfly effect. And then Lenore falls asleep one last time as Verna watches on with great sadness.
And those texts Roderick kept receiving from Lenore? They weren't sent by her at all. Before she died, Lenore's personality was used to test a new AI software that could replicate a person's identity online. And that's who was texting Roderick. So, sort of Lenore, but also not really.
That just leaves Roderick and Madeline. Thinking his sister was already dead, Roddy took her body to the basement of their childhood home, where he plucked her eyes out and replaced them with gemstones. Siblings, eh?
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It's actually sort of sweet in a rich, grandiose, twisted way: Roderick prizes Madeline above all others, so he's paying his respects to her as if she were an ancient queen. The only problem is that Maddy doesn't see it that way. She's alive, it turns out, and now, with those gems shoved into her eye sockets, she can't see anything at all.
That banging we heard downstairs this whole time? It was Madeline trying to escape the confines of the basement. Roderick wasn't lying when he said she was down there, but he thought the noises were hallucinations caused by his cognitive disorder and/or Verna's machinations.
Madeline bursts out of the doorway and tackles Roderick to the ground, screaming in anguish. As she chokes the life out of her brother, the Usher home collapses around them, barely giving Dupin enough time to escape.
And with that, the House of Usher has literally fallen. All that remains is Roderick's poor wife Juno, who goes on to beat her Ligadone addiction and dissolve the Fortunato company completely.
Arthur Pym is the only one left still alive to pay for the crimes of the Usher family, so he's arrested and sent to jail for the rest of his life with a little help from Camille's exhaustive recordkeeping of all the crimes the family committed over the years.
Meanwhile, Dupin finds closure with a visit to the Usher grave site, closing the chapter of his decades-long feud with the family for good.
The fate of Toby and Tina, those poor, poor assistants to Camille, is never revealed. But we'd like to think they're loved up somewhere, only taking part in threesomes of their choosing rather than because of any contractual agreement.
Who is Verna?
The only thing left to wrap up is Verna's identity — but it's never explained who or what she is, and the show is better for it.
From Bush and the Rockefellers to even Mark Zuckerberg, photos of Verna hobnobbing with famous, destructive people throughout history suggest that she is ageless. And more importantly than that, she's timeless, too.
Verna often describes humanity as separate from her and even alludes to being around before people existed. That means she must be some celestial or supernatural being predating civilisation and perhaps time itself.
That would certainly explain Verna's various abilities, which include shapeshifting, teleportation and clairvoyance, to name a few.
Fans of Edgar Allan Poe, the writer whose work inspired the show, might have noticed that Verna can be read as an anagram for "Raven". In Poe's most famous poem The Raven, this bird symbolises mourning over the loss of love. That tracks here, too, as Verna's role is intrinsically tied to death and the grief it brings.
But it's not quite as clear-cut as that because Verna also manipulates events by bringing her deal to the Ushers in the first place. Had she not gotten involved, everything that happened across this entire show would have never occurred.
It seems that Verna is fascinated with humanity's ambition and greed, so there's an element of her testing people here to see how far this ambition will take them. And when that goes too far, Verna steps in to mete out punishment in horrific, increasingly poetic ways that match the sins of the accused.
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In that sense, Verna is also aligned with fate and even death itself, so with all that taken into account, she doesn't just stand for one thing. And why would she? Verna is beyond humanity, so the reason behind her existence and what that means would always be too much for anyone to understand fully — us included!
As Verna's the overseer of everything that transpires here, from the rise and rise to the eventual fall of the House of Usher, it's only fitting then that her voice be the last one we hear. And she's reciting a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, no less.
Spirits of the Dead dwells on the connection between life and death and what happens to us when we move between the two. That's a good place for the show to end as we transition between the realm of Poe and Flanagan back to reality, where we're left to ponder the show's message and Verna's true identity for ourselves.
"A mystery of mysteries" indeed.
The Fall of the House of Usher is now available to stream 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.
