‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Episode 2 Recap: Hell Is for the Horny

Okay, I’m calling it: This show fucks! Somewhat literally! Titled “The Masque of the Red Death” after the Edgar Allan Poe story upon which it’s loosely based (Is that how this is gonna go? It’s a stealth anthology series with an overarching storyline?), this episode of The Fall of the House of Usher is one of the horniest episodes of television I’ve seen in a while. And I covered Season 2 of Foundation! Honestly, it takes me back to the the bone-deep kinkiness of Alice Birch and Rachel Wesiz’s Dead Ringers, a show with which Mike Flanagan’s Usher has some stylistic as well as narrative similarities. Those similarities now also include the desire to rev your engine.

But it doesn’t stop there. The episode ends with what is, again, the best thing of its kind I can remember seeing on TV quite some time: absolutely disgusting body horror. We’re talking nauseating, goopy, melty, sizzling practical-effects splatter, the kind where the actors and filmmakers involved try to make everything look and sound as painful as possible. The kind where human remains wind up as this sort of smeared expressionist-painting puddle on the ground, where practically disembodied mouths still wheeze and groan in agony. Just some of the most tremendously disgusting stuff of the season — and all directed at rich assholes and nepo babies and pharma heirs, as the spirit of the Red Death (in the form of Carla Gugino in lingerie) explicitly whisks away the working-class security guard and bartender to leave the suffering to the wealthy.

I mean, I’m saying hot damn before we even get to some of the other stuff layered into that climactic sequence, in which club promoter and budding blackmailer Prospero’s moronic plan to use one of his family’s condemned testing facilities as the site of a wet rave goes exactly the way you’d predict it to. The inspiration from “The Masque of the Red Death,” one of my favorite Poe stories, and one of his bluntest allegories. The references to Eyes Wide Shut (via the masked orgy and a shared use of Chris Isaak on the soundtrack) and Blade (the blood rave idea) and Society (the goopy mass of aristocrats) and more b-movie horror than I could even start to list. Absolutely fantastic red lighting on Gugino and Sauriyan Sapkota, whose beautiful faces and bodies and garments all look like they were sculpted to hold that crimson glow; the resulting compositions evoke Nicholas Winding Refn, which is high high praise in my book. 

The sex stuff doesn’t stop with Perry’s hedonistic, omnivorously sexual lifestyle and would-be orgy. I think special attention should be called to the very hot bluntness with which he persuades his sister-in-law Morelle to attend, a master class in aggression as seduction. There’s also Tammy and her elaborate cuckquean fantasies, writhing in impeccable clothing as her husband mimics being a supporting spouse to a sex worker made up to look like her. Juno getting rogered by Roderick behind his big desk until his granddaguther Lenore pops in, at which point she impulsively recounts thanking Roderick for inventing his highly addictive opioid by sucking him off in her sickbed after a car wreck. 

Camille employing her personal assistants Toby (Igby Rigney) and Tina (Aya Furukawa) as sex slaves. Whatever the hell is going on between young Roderick and Madeline and and Roderick and his gorgeous wife Annabel (Katie Parker) in the flashback that shows him unsuccessfully pitching his awful wonder drug. Just the site of Mary McDonnell twirling around one of those picks the ancient Egyptians used to pull the brain out of a corpse’s skull. Is it hot in here, or am I the only one willing to admit it?

Along the way we also learn that Roderick suffers from vascular dementia, which explains his insistence that Victorine accelerate the schedule for her experimental heart mesh, despite the fact that it’s killing the chimps it’s been implanted in. (It’s giving “Murders in the Rue Morgue” even before you learn the place used to be called Roderick Usher Experimental and was nicknamed “the RUE Morgue” by the kids.) It may also explain the apparently supernatural nature of some of the phenomena occurring — as could Perry’s drug use, for that matter, though the odds of both father and son hallucinating the same spectral woman seem pretty long to me. 

But I don’t see the point in trying to get to the bottom of anything. Usher feels designed to be like a haunted house, or even Prospero’s party — a new wonderful and terrible thing to see behind every door. Based on the work Flanagan and his cowriter Emily Grinwis have done here, I’m content to see each door get opened in turn.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.