With Mike Flanagan‘s Midnight Mass turning out to be a success for Netflix, the streamer wants more horror where that came from. The company has officially ordered The Fall of the House of Usher, an 8-episode series based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story of the same name published in 1839. A Gothic fiction tale, the story was previously explored in the animated anthology Extraordinary Tales with Christopher Lee narrating, among many other adaptations. Flanagan will lead development on the new series.
There’s more horror coming from Mike Flanagan to Netflix.@flanaganfilm and Intrepid Pictures are creating a new 8-episode limited series titled THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. pic.twitter.com/04cHQ0Z03Q
— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) October 6, 2021
There’s not much else that’s been revealed about this new series from Mike Flanagan. No cast members have been announced, and the company also notes that the series will delve into “multiple works” by Poe. This would suggest that more stories beyond The Fall of the House of Usher will be worked into the show, but no other titles attached have been revealed. What we do know is Flanagan is producing along with his Intrepid Pictures partner Trevor Macy, and Flanagan also shares directing duties with Michael Fimognari.
Netflix has had plenty of success with Flanagan already. He created, produced, and served as showrunner on The Haunting of Hill House in 2018, and that show quickly became very popular with viewers. He followed this up with The Haunting of Bly Manor in 2020, serving as director, writer, and editor on both shows. More recently, he created and directed the miniseries Midnight Mass which debuted on Netflix in September.
Midnight Mass stars Zach Gilford, Kate Siegel, Hamish Linklater, Samantha Sloyan, Rahul Kohli, and Henry Thomas. The show is set in an isolated island community that falls victim to supernatural events after a mysterious priest arrives. Like Flanagan’s other work at Netflix, it has done well with critics and viewers, and it was a matter of time before Netflix ordered more horror from the filmmaker. Turns out the wait for that wasn’t very long.
“It is certainly the most personal of the projects for me, in so much as it deals with a lot of what I think about faith and religion and what it means to be alive in the world and what the hell happens when we die, and all the little questions like that,” Flanagan said of Midnight Mass, per Daily Dead. “And I think it also was born from a deep anxiety I had before I had admitted that I had a drinking problem and found sobriety. And I think I see cries of that throughout a lot of my past work, but this is the oldest, and it’s so embedded into it.”
Meanwhile, Mike Flanagan has also found success on the big screen. In 2019, he released Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining, and while the box office performance fell short, it was a big hit with critics and the horror fans who went to see it. He’s also directed other genre movies like Hush, Before I Wake, Ouija: Origin of Evil, and Gerald’s Game.
There’s no release date set for The Fall of the House of Usher at this time. For now, you can catch Midnight Mass along with Flanagan’s other horror shows on Netflix. This news comes to us from Netflix Geeked on Twitter.