Filmmaker Mike Flanagan just dipped his toe into the waters of YA horror for the first time with his new Netflix series “The Midnight Club” (which is currently streaming), but his next Netflix project is another first for him – in the entirely opposite direction.
The “Haunting of Hill House” and “Doctor Sleep” filmmaker just wrapped production this summer on a limited series adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and when TheWrap spoke with Flanagan about “Midnight Club,” he couldn’t contain his excitement for fans to see “Usher.”
“It’s crazy. It is unlike anything I’ve ever done, but in the other direction,” he said. “My favorite way to describe it to people is like ‘Hill House’ is kind of a string quartet, and ‘Bly Manor’ is this delicate, kind of beautiful piece of classical piano music, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is heavy metal. It’s rock ‘n’ roll.”
Not only that, but Flanagan name-dropped the Italian horror subgenre of Giallo and promises there will be blood. Lots and lots of blood.
“It’s the closest I will get to Giallo,” he said. “It’s wild. It is colorful and dark and blood-soaked and wicked and funny, and aggressive and scary and hilarious. I’ve never gotten to work on anything like it. We left everything on the field with it, and it’s just bombastic fun. I’m really excited for that to find its way out because I especially think both ‘The Midnight Club’ and ‘Usher’ just go off in their own drastically different directions, and next to each other they’re fascinating to me.”
The show is based on the short story of the same name but also folds in other works from Poe, just as Flanagan did with the work of Henry James in “Bly Manor” and Christopher Pike in “The Midnight Club.”
Bruce Greenwood stars as Roderick Usher (replacing Frank Langella), and he’s supported by a stellar ensemble cast of newcomers and Flanagan regulars that includes Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell, Mark Hamill, Carl Lumbly, Samantha Sloyan, Rahul Kohli, Henry Thomas, T’Nia Miller, Zach Gilford and Kate Siegel.
Flanagan directed four episodes of “Usher” and the other four episodes are directed by Michael Fimognari, who served as Flanagan’s cinematographer for most of his career and also recently helmed the “To All the Boys” sequels and two episodes of “The Midnight Club.”
Netflix has not yet set a release date for “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but given the trajectory of Flanagan’s other Netflix series, we can reasonably hope to expect it sometime in the late summer or fall of 2023.
