The Prestige TV Podcast - 'The Fall of the House of Usher' Recap

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

JoVanna makes their triumphant return to the feed with Netflix’s spooky season miniseries ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ which they recap in full. They break down Mike Flanagan’s body of work and their love for Edgar Allen Poe’s work, and talk about their favorite horror short fiction. Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Van Lathan Producer: Sasha Ashall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, this is Ben Lindbergh. And Jessica Clemens. And we are the hosts of Buttonmash, the ringer's video game podcast on the Ringerverse feed. We are in the midst of the biggest blockbuster gaming month, either of us can recall. We're talking about Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros, Alan Wake, Five Nights of Freddy's, Assassin's Creed Mirage. We will have our hands full, you can have your ears full with us talking about these wonderful video games. On the Ringerverse feed, weekly throughout this month, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. To the Prestige TV podcast theme. You thought it was dead, but it's not. It's alive. I'm Joanna Robinson joining me today. It's my favorite person to talk about spooky season with. It's Van Lathen Jr. Hi, Van. How are you doing?

The Jovaney Experience Rod's again, Joe, I am fantastic. Here we go. If you guys don't know our origin story, the very first thing we ever did was over on the ring of verse, like two years ago talking about Halloween and like spooky. movies. Spooky movies. Spooky movies. That was our very first podcast we ever did together. Since then, there's been a little bit of a crater in my spookiness. I haven't done as much spooky stuff. Do you feel like the show we were about to cover today, the fall of the house of usher, is this fulfilled your spooky quota? All the way up, baby. All the way up. All the way up. We are here to talk about the Netflix miniseries, The Fall of the House of Usher. We're here, spoiler warning, we're here to talk about all of it, right? Don't listen to this if you haven't watched every single episode of the fall of the House of Usher.

Is that right, man? Absolutely. Correct. This is the latest joint from the great Mike Flanagan, and Mike Flanagan does a sort of spooky season show for Netflix almost every year since The Haunting of Hillhouse. He did The Haunting of Hillhouse. He did Bligh Manor. He did Midnight Mass, which is my personal favorite.

And this is the fall of the House of Usher. He's also done a number of Stephen King adaptations. And this guy is just like preoccupied with horror, with spookiness, and very specifically with the nature of evil, which is something we're going to talk about a bit today. The way that these anthologies that he has put forth work is, haunting of Hillhouse is loosely based on the Shirley Jackson book, Haunting of Hillhouse. Bly Manor loosely based on a number of. of different Henry James stories specifically,

turn of the screw, and Fall of the House of Usher is all about Edgar Allan Poe. So this is sort of like American Horror Story for English majors, if you want to put it that way. And I say that as like a compliment to the best of American horror story and also just a way to shout out that another thing that marks a Mike Flanagan project

is that he likes to use the same actors over and over again the way that Ryan Murphy likes to over an American Horror Story as well. Where are you and Mike Flanagan in general, Van? What else have you seen by him? Never heard of him. Never heard of him. You didn't even see, did you see the Dr. Sleep adaptation he did with Eum McGregor, the sort of shining sequel than he did several years ago, Rebecca Ferguson,

Hugh McGregor? No? Nope. Not a thing. Never heard of them. So you came in fresh for the fall of the House of Usher. What made you want to check this one out when you hadn't seen the other ones yet? Two things.

Netflix and Poe, Netpo. This is what happened. Scrolling through Netflix. Yeah. And I see the fall of the House of Usher. And I'm like, I know that. I know that. Where do I know that?

Then I'm thinking, oh, Edgar Allan Poe. I remember that from my literary journeys as a kid. What is this show? What is the deal? What's happening? They made it with Vincent Price back in the day. What's going on? I remember he was a,

I don't know if I ever told you about Vincent Price story as a youth, but I think you probably know about it. But so I decide, you know what, Kalika, we're going to look at this. And then I see the episode titles. We're poeing it up. Yeah.

We're getting some deep poe, all into poe. So I'm like, you know what? I'm in. Let's give it 10 minutes. And boy, did the show hit. I wasn't in on Flanagan. now I'm going back and getting flannerized.

I had no clue who he was. It wasn't a thing, but this show was good for me. Excellent. I won't spend too long on the other shows because you haven't seen them, but I will say that, like, haunting of Hill House, I think a lot of people consider it his best. That's the first one that he did. It's deeply good.

My favorite is Midnight Mass, which is the one that's not based on another property. That's the one that I would recommend. menu check out first. If you're going to go get flannerized, I would say go watch Midnight Mass. That show is so good and has such a good, because something we talked about when we talked about spooky season movies in our very first podcast we ever did together was sort of like what it means to have like a religious background or upbringing or environment and to engage in spooky season. And I think the sort of Catholic trauma-ness of Midnight Mass is one of my

favorite, I mean, I'm an atheist, but it's one of my favorite things that I've ever seen in my life. It's so good. What is Midnight Mass about? Midnight Mass is about a young man who went to jail for basically drunk driving, killed a woman from a drunk driving incident, comes back to his very tiny island where he grew up. It's a very insular community on this very tiny island. and there is a mysterious new priest on the island, and all the residents on the island start getting healthier and younger,

and you don't know why, all the people who go to Midnight Mass, who go to Mass, with this new priest. And it's about guilt and redemption and trauma and sin and all this juicy stuff, and there's all these really juicy monologues, and I just, I really, really love that one. That one is so good. And then Haunting of Hillhouse is the perfect combination of, like, a really spooky ghost story, plus, like, the best family drama you've ever watched.

Really, really good. Interesting. So I just think it's interesting that Flanagan is taking these various authors. Again, he started out with, like, some Stephen King adaptation, Cheryl's game, Dr. Sleep, etc. but taking these various authors who are known for exploring the idea of evil and ghosts and all that sort of stuff, and sort of digging into what their unified idea of evil is. So let's talk about Fall of the House of Usher. Because as you said, when you look at the episode titles, we're getting into the telltale heart,

we're getting into murder in the room morgue, the mask of the red death, like all these very classic post stories are wrapped in together into this thinly veiled exploration of the Sackler family, the infamous family behind the oxycontin-slash-opoeid crisis. How does it work for you to watch something like this that is both examining a real-life, very contemporary, evil part of our own society sort of through the lens of these post stories? I think it's a really smart choice. and the reason is because when you're asking moral questions,

the way to get people to buy into the characters that are asking and answering these questions is to wrap them up in stakes that they can understand. The stakes and the circumstances surrounding these questions, they're always the same morally, but the details change based upon the times that we're in. And to see a young man, a family that's essentially rising up through the ranks of a company

It's something that everybody can sort of understand and relate to. But then the opioid crisis throws a curveball into it to where that's something that a lot of people already know the consequences to. And when you're diving into something like that, without having Carla Gagino come in as a Satan-esque Faustian character to ask you whether or not you want to sell your soul. it's implied and inherent that if you jump into that industry, you are selling your soul. So it works as a device because of that. I love that. So Carla Gugino, who has been in a number of these Flanagan joints, is this raven slash devil figure. And it's something that forced you to think about this is how Poe thinks the devil is real.

Po, who himself was an opium addict and an alcoholic and died quite early because of his substance issues, believes in a real devil. And this is a question of, like, what I think about this idea of evil, I think that there are kind of two ways that these various writers deal with the idea of evil, which is evil inside of us, intrinsically inside of us, are we by nature evil people? do we have evil natures? Or is evil something external to us? Is there a figure of something external to us tempting us? I guess so the third option is, is it some combination of the two? And something of that, I love that we see over and over again. What makes this a slightly different and tougher watch from me than some of the other Flanagan stuff is that it's hard to root for anyone in this story because all of these people are terrible and horrible rich people. So there's like a shot in Freud.

These rich assholes are getting what they deserve element to it. But you're also like I other than like the granddaughter, who do I have to like root for and care about in all of this? But I think that it's interesting how again and again we'll see the Carla Guggena character, Werna is what she's called, which is an anagram of Raven and she's the devil or whatever, show up and say to a character, you don't have to do this, or you can still stop this, or you don't have to be here. And then the person will do it anyway. And it's saying two things, that there's an external devil figure here demanding that this price be paid for this Faustian

bargain that we get in that bar back in 79. But also, also that there's something inside of all these people that makes them unable to choose differently than the way they do. It's their flawed human nature that makes them, you know, explore that lab or throw that rave or do whatever it is that leads to their really grisly demise. Is that interesting to you, this idea that, like, evil is intrinsic to us or evil is external, or what do you think? It is. It's interesting because the last monologue from the devil's advocate. As a good Christian boy,

I'm not supposed to say that he was spitting in that situation, but he kind of was. Okay? Look, but don't touch. Taste, but don't swallow. Okay? All of that stuff.

And sometimes... You're talking about Pacino, literally Pacino. I'm talking about Pacino. Yeah. So sometimes there's this urge that you have as a human being to do things. And the question of being,

a person is, does that urge make me evil? Or does the denying of that urge make me good? Does having the urge make me evil? Does denying the urge make me good? Is that the difference between good and evil? Or is it somewhere in the middle? Sometimes you click enter the website. Sometimes you don't. Okay. So it just depends on what you... Is this your confession about your journeys to the dark web, man? No. Not enough. But in this show, it's interesting that every single person gets the same opportunity out of whatever it is they're doing except for one, Lenore. And Lenore gets a monologue or an explanation of what her goodness led to. Even as she's suffering the fate that was destined for her because of something that somebody evil did.

she gets the entire rundown of what one good act can mean for so many people, even though she has to die, which also is based in Christian religion. It's also based in martyrdom. It's also based in dying for the sins of a bunch of other people. It's also based in, forgive me, Father, for I know not what they do. It's all wrapped up in kind of the same thing. One more thing I'll say As I think one of the most interesting choices Was When the

Raven Carla Gagino character Tells Henry Thomas's wife To leave the rave Yeah And she doesn't At this point I don't really know what's going on with the show

I'm just like fucking Going with it Yeah Like whatever I don't know who she is I don't know what's happening There hasn't been enough I'm just oh wow this is spooky It's crazy

Pit is Perry character is crazy, whatever, and she doesn't. And the moment that she doesn't and everybody else does and she gets burned up in the acid, but she's surviving, the show had me. I'm like, how is this going to come back? Why keep that character alive in the state that she was in? What happens?

What story are they trying to tell? What are they trying to say? Those are the little things that got me to stick around for eight episodes and really be invested into the narrative that they were telling. Well, I think what's interesting is that all of the characters have this opportunity. to leave, but it's not, it's a, it's a false choice because they were all going to die one way or another.

Right. Because, so it's an, it's like it's having, trying to have it both ways where it's saying they all had the, just like they all had the opportunity to just not do the shit that they did, not drive their husband away and then, you know, wind up slicing themselves off like to death with their mirrored ceiling, not go ahead with a cardiac procedure that. that they know is not going to work, not, you know, fuck around with the black cat and find out, like, all this sort of stuff. And, but it was all going to end that way anyway because of the bargain that their father made.

And I think what's fascinating to me, one of the things that's really fascinating to me about this whole premise is, A, how this ties into the larger, like, Sackler metaphor, this idea of, like, consequences deferred, right? Like, I'm getting mine now, whatever happens to the next generation, B, day. Right? So like this idea that these siblings, you know, as played by Bruce of Greenwood and Mary McDonald, make this bargain to say, okay, we'll have several good decades and and rationalize their choice. But then for Madeline Usher to decide to never have kids and for Roderick Usher to keep fathering children knowing the bargain that he's made is, I think,

Of all the evil things he did the most evil thing that he does, right? And he explains it with like, I am who I am who I am or I was who I was, you know. Couldn't stop himself. That's the thing. That's frailty. Yeah. Couldn't stop himself. Right.

Couldn't wrap it up. Couldn't wrap it up. Flight attendants. Yeah. Couldn't flight attendants, blackjack dealers, whomever, couldn't stop himself. Almost as if he was punishing himself for the decision that he made. Almost as if he wanted the pain in some sort of way. He was, at that point, he had come so, he had understood his ability to destroy so much.

Think about everything that he was destroying. He was destroying people from country to country, continent to continent across the world. Right. And part of his, the way that he destroyed people was to pretend that he was making them feel good. Right. And for them not to know that what was going to happen in the end was that they would be addicted to this drug. would have all types of side effects on them like it was having on his wife. And that's essentially the same thing about his children. They thought that they were getting this amazing, wondrous life.

A lot of these kids didn't meet this guy until they were 18, 19, 20 years old. So that's a fairy tale. They think they've hit the lottery. They think all of their pain has been taken away. They can do whatever they want. Right. But they don't know that there's a trap door that is coming. That's what his whole life was. His whole life was prioritized. whoever, whatever, the pain that was right in front of you, taking that away for a greater pain later. And it kept happening over and over and over again. So it happened to him.

It's a poison pill, this idea of like the, here's all this privilege, and it's a poison pill. It comes with this cost. And that's the pill you're swallowing when you're swalling Oxy. I want to talk about some of the sort of Flanagan players. Like, I'm excited to talk to you when you've, watched more Flanagan stuff so that you can see that he uses like the same actors over and over again. But I want to start with Henry Thomas, who like, if you haven't watched him and all this

Flanagan stuff, perhaps this is like, you're like, holy shit, Henry Thomas. Like, what are you up to? What are you doing? Like, what was your experience watching Elliot from E.T. do all the stuff that he does in this series? It was fucking with me a little bit. Yeah. Because I haven't seen him in very much. And I'm like, oh, wait, it's one of those faces that's familiar and you go, where? Oh. Of course. And then I look at it and I'm like, God damn, what a sniveling.

They would make him it's a goddamn Kendall Roy. That's so funny. I was thinking Donald Trump Jr. But sure. Same thing. One in the same, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he gave this sinister weakness.

Yes. Yes. A body and a voice and a form. I thought he was good in it. He's been so good in every Flanagan joint. He and Carly Gino, I think, are like two of the standouts of all of his stuff. He does this, though, with these casting expectations he sets around these actors that he reuses. I think that's a really clever thing he does with Henry Thomas.

Zach Guilford, good old Matt Saracen from Friday Night Lights, who shows up here as young Roderick Usher. He's also sort of one of the main characters of Midnight Mass. I think the way that he weaponizes our affection for Matt, our built-in affection for Matt Saracen in the way that he uses that actor and the indie's characters is brilliant, honestly. And when Zach Guilford showed up in Midnight Mass a couple years ago, that was the first time I had seen him do something outside of Friday Night Lights where I was like, oh, he has something in him because he played Matt Saracen in Front of Night Lights. And then he's done a bunch of other things, but nothing that gave me that same, like,

oh, I care about this person, this character, until he showed up at Midnight Mass. And then he shows up here as Roderick Usher. And, like, here he is, this, like, young poet who's, like, desperately in love with his, like, you know, young wife and they've got these kids and they're poor, but they're happy. And then he slowly corrods and make these little decisions that lead him towards the path to becoming one of the most corrosively evil figures that the devil has ever met. And that is, you know, Bruce Greenwood is great as older Roderick Usher.

I love Bruce Greenwood in general, and he's great. But I think casting, Brickon Matt Saracen as young Roderick Usher was a stroke of genius in this cast. The interesting thing about him is that the journey that the character goes on, at first, I mean, you know what happens. to them. Yeah. So you just want to know how, right? Yeah. And so at first, the wife, Annabelle Lee, strikingly beautiful. Yeah. You want to know how it's going to happen. You want to know.

And his sister is obviously a terrible influence. Right. Maybe the most purely evil character that I've seen in a while on a television show, just blonde anger. Just blonde, seething anger. All of this stuff comes from the fact that they knew that they're father was the head of the company and their mom and all of that stuff, just this trauma that's turned inward, this anger that's turned inward that is, that's powering her. Got to have it. Got to live their birthright. Got to do all that stuff. When Augie comes to him, that is essentially the choice before the choice there. Because what he is confronted with is now the reality. It's not the thought. It's the real of what the company is. And that's his opportunity to

stop himself to say, hey, this is bad, let me take it down, or to transform into a full rat and run the rat race. And Augie, who is a, you know, by all intents and purposes are pretty pious, pretty straight up and down, clean character. Yeah. Fuchs around a little bit. At the end, we know that he did some fucked up shit. But for the most part, his moral compass is pretty, pretty pointed north. Yeah. He stands right then as a foil to R. Roderick. Upstanding, bright, he's perceptive, looks at all of the stuff.

The honey, dried honey on the floor. Oh, yeah. Like the whole night. It's more a cup of coffee. You were both up at night. I'm like, what is this nigga on? I'm like, who is this Sherlock Holmes? Exactly.

Like what's what's going on here? That's a really fun. I mean, there's so many, like, fun little Poe references. But Dupant, Augie, Dupant is, that character is from Murder in the Rue Morg, which is considered one of the first pieces of detective fiction ever. Oh. And so you're letting me know. I didn't even, I wasn't up on the Rue Morg. Yeah.

So he's like the quintessential. detective. Like before Holmes, it's this guy, DuPin. And so, like, I feel like that little dried honey on the floor moment

was, like, giving him his little, like, Sherlock Holmes moment when, like, most of the time he's a lawyer in this show. And I thought, again, casting-wise,

Malcolm Goodwin, who plays the younger version of him, I know from Eye Zombie, a show that Flanagan keeps casting people out of, so I wonder if he was a huge eye zombie fan.

But Carl Lombo, who we very recently saw in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but also as an alias and a bunch of other stuff. There's just so much, like, damn gravitas to Carl Lumley. So to put him in that room with Bruce Greenwood in that, like, raggedy house, house of horrors, the house, the literal house of Usher that literally falls at the end of the story. I guess that's your tension, is you're like, we know that all of these kids, once the first couple of kids, kids start dying. You're like, all the, well, they'd say at the beginning, all the kids are dead.

So all the kids are dying. It's not a mystery. You're just going to find out how. Like, you're like, everyone's going to die. Let's just find out how it's not if they won't, will or won't. It's that they will. So then the tension is, does Dupin make it out of his house with his life or not, I guess, at the end of the day. So here's the thing.

Yeah. Malcolm Goodwin played basketball with me. Really? Yeah, we used to play. Shout out to Malcolm. I'm happy. He's good at it, right? He's fucking fantastic.

Yeah. And when we were playing basketball, it was back in the day, so it was always that he had been in American gangster. That was this big thing. Back then it was like, oh, man, that's a guy from his friend, my friend Cameron Fife. Cameron Fife is a great, talented man that could hit corner threes and making all kinds of amazing stuff.

I saw Cameron at the NAACP Awards. He's lighted, but I still saw him there. Malcolm, everybody's friends, great situation. situation, here's the deal. Every performance in this, not that out of the part. Yeah. Young Augie, old Augie, Bruce Greenwoods, that monologue, there's only one monologue in a recent TV that's fucking with that monologue. You know what it is. What is it? Oh, and or?

Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty, that's pretty tough to be. Yeah. For a future that I've never seen, I'm in my a soulless place. Like that's pretty tough to be. Whatever sacrifice? Everything. That's pretty tough. That's tough.

But I actually try to screen record my Netflix to post it, but you can't do it. Like Netflix has the technology to where you can't screen record it. But I'm like, this is so fucking hard. This is so. hard, like super duper hard, right? And so in all of that, you know, that's taking place with this in the house. And I feel like those scenes were the first things to where I was like they're doing something different here. Because when he's talking about his mom at first and he goes, well, she's right behind you. And then you turn around and then the mom, the mom is right

behind. Me and Kalika freak the fuck out. Then guess what? We rewounded to watch it again and we noticed that the mom comes into frame the scene before he says she's right behind him and we didn't notice it which made it even

more scary when you rewound it. And I'm like, oh, well this show, because I didn't know that the show was going to be full of horror. I didn't know it was a horror show. I thought it was some kind of dramatic interpretation of the fall of the house of usher, which I know is horror stuff, but I didn't realize it was going to be as horror as it was.

And so we're watching it getting scared. And then, and then, like, you watch the rave and everyone gets there, like, turns to goo, and you're like, oh, it's like this, right? I feel like we set the bar pretty high when we turn an entire rave into, like, goo. After that, you know what you're in for. Yeah, I mean, that's, like, some saw-type shit. Yeah. If you ever, if you get around to watching Haunting of Hillhouse, which you, I really recommend,

he puts all these ghosts in the background shots, like in the background of shots and Haunting of Hillhouse, in a way that you have to go back over the fine tooth comb to find all of them when you do, and they're just standing there. And when you see them, it is so scary that they were there the whole time. And they were just standing in the background of like,

you know, in the corner of your eye, essentially, in various shots. It's horrifying. This is actually way, this is the least amount of, of ghostiness that he's ever put into one of his projects, I would say. But I think that, yeah, every performance is incredible. Like, Ruth Cod, who plays Juno Usher, his young wife, who is addicted. Like, she's such a singular performer.

And I first saw her in Midnight Club, which is a Flanagan show that he did last year. And she was so interesting in that. And she's so interesting in this. She's just, like, hard to take your eyes away from. Couldn't have been cast it more perfectly, right? Yeah, yeah. And she seems she's wearing her frailty, like, way out in front of her. She seems like it just, you couldn't, it cast it perfectly once again.

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Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can be. can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-97579 or visit zepbounds.lily.com. Is there an episode that stood out to you as like your favorite, the best one? Interesting. I particularly like the Telltale Heart. That's one of my favorite post stories. Yeah. It just gets to me. And I think watching that character unravel was one of the most interesting ones. Calica, by far, by far like the black cat. The black cat was by far her favorite one. The cat was driving her crazy.

She was laughing at the guy with the cat. The whole situation with the cat and him going nuts, the cat scratching him, the cat popping up, the cat in the walls, the whole thing. She was loving that episode. I wish that Perry would have been around longer. Oh, yeah. I liked Perry.

so much. The prince. I loved Perry so much. I wish Perry would have been around longer. But my favorite was the Teltel Heart. The Black Cat was second to me. What about you? Yeah, both of those are really good.

Tenaena Miller, who plays Victory in the lead in Tailedale Heart. I first saw her in Bly Manor, which she's so good in. And Role Coley, who's also from my zombie, who is the lead in Black Cat, all the also really, really good in Bly manner. But I think my favorite was actually Goldbug, because that character of Tamerland, she's one of my favorite Flanagan actresses. And she, again, like you're saying,

that idea of that vulnerability sort of radiating off of them, their damage, they're just, you know, and you're watching her, and you're just like, just like, get some sleep, connect with your husband who seems to actually care about you. The fact that she has this whole situation with call girls where she's just like, these sex workers come to cosplay, like, emotional intimacy is so disturbing and so good that I just, and then like, the story that it's imitating, which is not Goldbug, which is the

name of another Edgar Allan Poe story, but William Wilson, which is this Edgar Allan Poe short story that always scared the shit out of me because it's about this young man who like sees this double and this evil double of himself everywhere. And then eventually he kills him, but you find out that he just cut his own throat in the mirror. And that idea always fucked with me, like, forever. It's essentially what she does to herself. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's just sort of like that idea, because there's evil in Poe. Poe is fascinated and preoccupied with this idea of like things in the walls, things being walled up behind and dying and people finding out the smell, the pounding. of the heart below the floor boards, like things buried just under the floor, in the wall, something you can smell, something you can hear, something you can discover, which I guess was like a thing that was sort of all the rage in fiction at the time, but I'm fascinated why. Like, I don't know why this was like a popular trend in like horror fiction or whatever at the time, this idea of like, I guess the horror is just inside, just around the corner inside your

wall underneath the floorboard is waiting for you, the guilt, the things that the, the the thin facade we put, the thin layer brick we put in front of our own sin and our own horror. I think that's really fascinating. And you get it again and again in these stories. But there's something about that one where it's like you see an evil version of yourself and you kill it and you've actually just killed yourself because you can't acknowledge the own evil inside of you or something like that or can't reconcile two sides of yourself. That one always really fucked with me ever since I read that story. So what's the scariest short story you ever read?

Do you have any answer for this? I do. What's yours while I think of my? The Night Flyer. What happens to the Night Flyer? Oh shit. The Night Flyer is, so I went through a whole horror short story phase. Okay.

They do horror short stories and you're a kid. And it was like all of these stories. A little story about the lady and she had the sash on and she took the sash off of her. fucking head fell off. Yeah. That's what it's called. Who wrote that one? I don't know.

That's like an old, old story. Like, I think it's been like sort of redone a couple different times. Okay, cool. That one fucked me up. Yeah. The Nightflyer is by Stephen King. Yeah. And it's about a goddamn vampire who's flying around.

And there's one guy who is trying to like a reporter or whatever. He's tracking the vampire. And the vampire is like a, he's an aggressive vampire. vampire and he's flying around, ripping shit up. And it just, it fucked with me very bad. Because the guy kind of, he's on the trail of the vampire. At first, he feels like the vampire is like a serial killer. And then he realizes it's a vampire.

And then it goes all crazy. It's nuts. It's a nuts situation. It just fucked with me. It's fucked with me bad. I think they made it into a movie. But I never watched it because I didn't really know whether or not I was going to be able to deal with it. But yeah, that's the scariest.

one that I read. I think that there's, so there's a Stephen King collection called Different Seasons, and it has Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Aptuple, the Body, which is what they turned into Stand By Me, and the breathing method are the four novellas in this collection, so three of which were turned into pretty incredible movies. Aft Pupil always really fucked with me. Aps Pupil, which was made into a very disturbing movie.

I guess it's more disturbing than scary, but I think disturbing usually sticks with me longer than scary does. Do you mean? I can talk myself out of scary, but disturbing, unsettling is, yeah, it's not, it's not something I easily forget. You like after pupil. Yeah. Ian McClellan? Yeah. Brad Renfellon?

Brad Renfro had a moment. Her body and other parties is a, if you're looking for like a disturbing collection of stories, that's by Carmen Maria Machado, her body and other parties that came out a couple years ago. That one really stuck with me as well. But I don't read a lot of horror. I've read some Stephen King, not a ton of Stephen King, but I've read some Stephen King. I've read like these classic horror like Poe and Henry James and Shirley Jackson. But I'm not like, I don't, I don't like chill in the horror section.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Generally. It's tough because I think this show is just the right amount of jump scares. and this is a jump scare heavy show. At a certain point, I was on edge almost every fucking frame of the show. You never know when a jump scare was going to come. There was a jump scare that was the mother behind him.

But then there was another jump scare with the fucking clown in the limo. And that's when I thought that the jump scares were kind of over. Yeah. I thought they had got them out of their system. Yeah. And it fucked with us. I think that, um, What I didn't realize, what's sort of fun if you know the Poe's stories is when you hear like the title of an episode and you kind of like, I didn't realize until halfway through the mask of the red death that that episode was called that. And once I did, I was like, oh, oh, we're doing the mask of the red death. And that's when I realized that like each episode was named after a story that would give you a hint as to like how this kid was going to die. But yeah, it's, I mean, it's,

horrifying. But I mean, did you get, do you get any sense of Schoenfreude by watching these rich assholes get got? Is that something that you experience or not? Not really. I'm not like that. Okay. You know, it's like it.

I am. Yeah, I could tell. You like to eat the rich. You like to eat them up. What was that one tells her the dark side where she was trying to cook the little boy? And that was the wraparound story. It tells her the dark side at the movie. You probably want to do that to rich people, put them in a gumbo of some sort.

What happens is I start to get wrapped up in the family dynamics of stuff, you know? So when I start to see these people and kind of what it is that they're going through, it starts to be like, oh, there's a brother, there's a son, there's a sister. They all have these fucked up relationships with their dad, particularly the kids. Yeah. They almost get it out because they were raised in such a terrible situation that they had no chance to be anything other than assholes. So I don't know. And even with the, with Roderick and Madeline, they really put you in a moral quandary

when they start to show by watching their mother kill their illegitimate father. It's like at this point, what are they supposed to expect out of life? Right, and then the guy they wall up, I mean, like, is a terrible person who tried to take advantage of them. The character that I wish, to that family,

dynamic point, the character that I wish had stayed around longer was Camille, who was the PR sibling who dies second. Played by Kate Siegel. Kate Siegel is Mike Flanagan's wife. She has been in like every single one of his projects. Which one is his wife? She plays the PR. Oh, Gold Bug Lady.

No, not Gold Bug Lady. The other lady that was spinning everything for the family got killed by an orangutan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's his wife. And she's in a really good little war movie. She's in a really good... It's okay. That's all right. I support you. She's in a really good little horror movie that he made called Hush, where she plays a woman who can't hear.

And it's like a little home invasion horror movie where it's like, how is this woman who can't hear is going to survive a home invasion? It's a good little, it's a tight little, cheap little horror movie that he made like sort of early in his career. But I thought she was really good in her dynamic with Victorine, the woman. in the Tell Hill Heart episode, her sister, that her preoccupation with her, why do you hate her so much? The whole speech that Carla Gugino gives her right before she turns into an ape and kills her,

that family dynamic was really interesting to me and I wish those sisters, I wish I understood that even better than I found like I did. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like those sisters, why did those siblings hate each other? And this idea of like there's the legitimate, quote unquote,

children and then the bastard children and the different classes of kids in this family. That's all very succession. Like, how much does this, like, veneer succession hit you when you're watching something like this? It's a succession show with horror elements. Yeah. He's even Logan, speeding his kids against each other. He's putting bounties on people.

It's the whole nine. And there's, like, a perverted Jerry character there in Madeline. It was very much that. And particularly in this era of unchecked, rampant income inequality, these commentaries on rich people and their family dynamics are hitting home with a lot of people they are. Say something else about the show. Yeah. Okay.

Shout out to Roger Usher for one thing. What a diverse family. Roger Usher doesn't care. He has a broad taste. A broad taste everywhere. Yeah. And I like the fact, we're talking about the family and everything bad about it. don't we throw something awesome towards the family?

They were represented all across the goddamn spectrum of, like, sexual orientation, of race, of all kinds of stuff. They even went interracial, again, with Henry Thomas and his wife, they had this crazy. It's like a Target commercial. You know how all of these Target commercials is always an interracial family now? There's no black family or no white family that goes to Target. That doesn't happen.

The only people that go to Target now are white guys that are married to black ladies or black ladies that are married to Asian fellas. Those are the only people who go to Target now. Now, that's it, right? Everybody else stop going. It's amazing. Last and least, we cannot go without talking about your guy, your number one guy of all time. Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Campbell.

Pim Reaper. How did Hamill hit for you on this? He actually played a character. I know. He was unrecognizable as Luke Skywalker or Mark Hamill in this. Because he's a very talented voice actor. So he changed his voice for the role and really got gruff and into it. It's an almost awards-worthy pop-in, pop-out for Mark Hamill throughout the eight episodes

that this show runs, he was really awesome. He did. They pull it off. The whole sinister situation, when it's time for him to take his medicine at the end, he's, I've never been leveraged before, and I'm not going to be leveraged now.

I love that scene. I love you too. I love you too. That scene with Carla was so good. Yeah. And the way that she, I mean, we should speak a little bit more about her. Like, Carla Gugino is one of our,

I think, most underrated actresses. And she's, this is like a really fun tour force for her where she gets to play all these different flavors, where all these different fucking wigs, all these different incredible outfits, and to play the kind of devil that has a moral code, a devil with a moral compass and a devil who doesn't, who is driven by curiosity in human nature more than like a desire to destroy or a desire to do evil or a desire to, you know what I mean? It isn't like a mustache twirling. There is sorrow. there is empathy, there's all this stuff that comes with her.

I don't know. How does that depiction of the devil work for you? Great. I thought everything she did was right on top of it. And let's tell you what I mean. She played the assertive devil character perfectly. She played the seductive devil character perfectly. She played the educational animal person coming in there where she's just kind of like,

on the thing perfectly. Every time she showed up, she showed up in different incarnations, which were directly related to the personalities, fears, and desires of the people that she was in front of,

which is precisely how a Faustian devil character would appear. Appears to you, if you like to party, party animal, if you're super diligent, it comes as a work person,

like whatever. And she nailed, that in a really, really refreshing way. And honestly, this was, to your point, one of the things that she's been in just recently where she has been able to flex her talent the most. When you watch all of Flanagan's stuff and enjoy Hill House, she's so good at Hill House, she also did a Gerald's game, which is this really, really creepy Stephen King story about a woman who is having,

this is the premise of the story, so it's not a spoiler. She's having like a sexy vacation with her husband. He handcuffs her to the bed. He dies. And the rest of the story is sort of what happens to her as she tries to like free herself from this bed that she's handcuffed to.

That's Bruce Greenwood and Carla Gugino is one of Mike Flanagan's first, it's his first Stephen King thing. And it's just like most, mostly that movie is just the two of them, and it is incredibly, incredibly good. So I love Mike Flanagan for realizing that Carla Gugino is like an incredible talent in using her that way. This idea of the devil, though, because the devil doesn't really exist.

There are like devils in some of his other projects, but I was thinking about like horror writers who actually think the devil exists and how they write them, because Stephen King's very famous devil character is Randall Flag, right? This is a character that crops up in a bunch of his stories. The Stan, the Dark Tower series. That flag is crazy. Matthew McConaughey, among others. And I was reading, I was Googling sort of like the nature of evil in all of these different authors' works. So Stephen King wrote this essay about Randall Flagg, right? And he says, about him, he says, this guy, this guy who's like an embodiment of everything that goes wrong with us, all the impulses, the bad feelings. Every time, you know, there's a quarrel and it goes beyond words or

somebody gets hurt or gets killed. And I want it to embody that kind of mindless rage and anger, evil, if you like. I'm troubled by the question of evil and I always have been about whether it comes from inside us. And if it does, why we're programmed that way to do really shitty things to each other, or some of it comes from outside. And I've never been able to entirely solve the question. And that I think, even though, like, Stephen King is a preoccupying force with Mike Flanagan. That, I think, really sums up how Flanagan seems to understand the devil and Poe. Evil is something that is inside of us, but it is something that is teased out of us also by this external force. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I have thoughts. Tell me. Evil is no different

than talent. Tell me why. Talent is something that you're born with, but you have to realize it. There are a whole bunch of people that are walking around that have all of these talents, but they don't realize it. Think about these little quandaries I spend in my head. I'm sure other people do too. So do you know who Kevin Durant is? I do. Even I know who Kevin Durant is, man. Okay.

So Kevin Durant is about seven feet tall. Yeah. He's got an exceptionally long wingspan, ridiculously good feet. he's hyper athletic for his size to be able to move like that and do all that stuff. And he's a great shooter. He is essentially born to score the basketball, born to score. Yeah. Born to score.

If you're building someone and you're going to say, hey, that guy's going to get buckets, that's him. Born to score. What if basketball didn't exist? What would Kevin Durant be born to do? Kevin Durant's talent for basketball is in direct relationship with the existence of basketball. Evil is almost the same way. Evil, our ability to do evil and commit evil is in direct relationship with our sort of proximity, relationships, wants, and creations that we've made in society.

things are bad a lot of times because we created them. Things are good a lot of times because we created them. Like we created both money and theft. We created both marriage and adultery. We created the ability we have innately the ability to give life and we created the ability to take life. So it's not necessarily that evil is teased out of us. It's a condition of us.

Talent is a condition of humanity. Evil is a condition of humanity. That's why the best thing that you can do as a person is to stop yourself from doing bad stuff, even when you think about it. Like if Kevin Durant never had basketball, he'd be a nigger with terrible knees trying to fit into a Nissan Sentra

and get to his job as a rapper or an accountant. Okay. But there's something that we created that makes his talent usable and worthy. And we make evil worthy all the time. So I think, I thought about it a long time about why people do bad stuff. Of course, sometimes people are just wired wrong.

But I just think shit happens. I also think to your point, the way that you described a lot of these actors, I think really opened something for me, this idea of like how so many of the evil, self-destructive can't help, ourselves choices that we make come from vulnerability, right? Come from frailty, come from not, I don't, I don't love the phrase hurt people, hurt people because that implies something that I don't

want to imply. But I just think that so often in the best depictions of evil, and I think this is true of a lot of what works in Edgar Allan Poe is he forces you into the perspective. When you think about the telltale heart, if you think about the telltale heart, you're in the perspective of the murderer, who has done ev foul and evil murder. But you're forced to be inside this person's head panicking as their guilt literally thumps below the floorboards. And you are forced to empathize with the evil doer in a lot of these stories. That is something that is fascinating about Pope because you're not often in the head of your

noble detective character or you're a noble whatever you are with the murder you are with the person who is slowly being driven mad because I mean like because that's Poe is like driven haunted by the alcohol and opium and all the like demons that he pursued and

he just like put it put himself and put all of that onto the page and there is something so evocative about that choice and also while he does it and this is something that sometimes doesn't work for me and follow the House of Usher. Something that makes Poe's work so

indelible is the lyricism of his language. The Raven, like his poetry. So it didn't always work for me for them to like literally quote snatches of Edgall and Poe's poetry and make like Annabelle Lee, which is a famous Edgall and Poe

poem, like have him recite that to his wife or pieces of the Raven or all these other pieces like that. Naming the character, Lenore and all that. Yeah, it stuck out a little bit to me, but you can't do Poe without the lyricism of his language. And that, again, is another thing that has made Poe stick for as long as it has because his language is so beautiful and elegant,

and his subject matter is so grisly and disgusting. And that combination is just irresistible down the ears. So, you know. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Look. Okay.

All right. Okay. Joe, I have to, I have to admit something. What's that? I'm not feeling great about the whole talent, evil, Kevin Durant thing that I did a second ago. I felt like I was trying to have a lemon slash and or a moment. And it started off good, but then it peered out. I knew where I wanted to go.

Yeah. Because I've thought about this a lot. Do you want to do it again? No, I don't because I want everybody to live in the error. You know, I want everybody to take me as I am. I thought I was cooking for a second, but then I realized that I was running out of ingredients. I literally was running out of words at a certain point. Just know that evil is not great.

Evil's like basketball, though. Evil's like Kevin Durant. Maybe I should go with Joe Montana. Do you know who that is? Of course I do. I'm from the Bay Area. Okay, maybe evil is like Joe Montana. Or maybe I could go to rap.

Evil is like Jay Cole. Okay. Like it's snapping when it's with somebody else. But on their own shit, sometimes you can fall asleep. No, it's a joke. It's a joke. That's a second drive. That's the second drive.

Charles came for the Midnight Boys. I love Jay Cole. You guys are feasting. I love Jay Cole. It's a joke. I think his last show. was some of the best shit that I've ever heard. It's so funny.

All right, so before we go, which Mike Flanagan thing are you and Kalika watching next? Should we watch Doctor Sleep? She watched The Shining with me. Yeah, if you do, two things. Number one, I insist you watch the director's cut. You have to watch the director's cut. It's on HMOX.

It is so much better than the theatrical cut. And number two, Henry Thomas is really good. Dr. Sleep, man. He's really good. He's in it? Yeah. He's great. So what happens in Dr. Sleep?

This is about the little boy from The Shining, right? What does he do? Like, what he's, is he fucked up too? Like, what's the, what's going on? Yeah, Danny from the Shining, right? Like, he has an ability. And how does that haunt him? And there's another, a new elemental evil played by the absolutely fantastic Rebecca

of Ferguson, absolutely killing it in this movie. So yeah, it's E. McGregor, haunted by this thing that he, the shining that he has. So how would Danny Torrance live as an adult? What does he need to do to numb the thing that he has been burdened with? And how does he navigate this new elemental evil that has rolled up into his life? You want to talk about the original shining and Shelley Duvall's? treatment on the set. Sure.

Terrible. Stephen King hates that movie. Stephen King hates that movie. Really? Yeah. Why? Because they were so mean to Shelley Duvall? No.

I mean, I doubt that that is his primary concern. I wish it were. I think he felt like he didn't get his story. Have you ever read The Shining before? Yes. I'm going to read it now. I'm going to start going until you guys can call me horror monologue van, HMV.

What I'm going to do is this. For everyone. I'm going to perfect my Kevin Durant. Talent is evil. Talent evil monologue. And if you want to hear it, you have to come to the Midnight Boys to hear it. Or maybe I'll do it at the live show. But I'm going to perfect it because I've thought about it, but I can't get it.

I can't nail it. Did Kalika like The Shining? She thought that the Shining was by far the hardest thing to watch that I've ever asked her to watch. she was like just watching someone descend into mania that way for her, for some reason, was deeply troubling. And she said the movie has absolutely no lightness to it. She's like there's not. She's like it's just all craziness with a weird old black guy.

And she just didn't, she didn't fuck with it. It wasn't her thing. So I wouldn't make her watch Dr. Sleep then if she didn't fuck with the Shining. You know what I mean? She'll watch it. Okay. Well, you Please watch

More Mike Flan again And get back to me on it And tell me which one you like the best If you're listening to this And you've only watched the Fall of House of Usher My recommendation would be Midnight Mass, Dr. Sleep, Directors Cut,

And Haunting of Hell House. Those are the top three that I would recommend. All right. Anything else you want to say About Kevin Durant Or Jay Cole or Joe Montana? Be on the lookout. I'm going to nail it.

Okay. I want to write a whole thing. It's going to come out. Crispy and clean. Fall of the House of Usher was great. You guys have a great spooky season. There's a lot of stuff out there for you to watch. We're going to be back with more Presti-Shevi. I'm not sure

what or when, but the feed she lives. She is not dead. Fargo's coming. True Detective is coming. Shogun is coming. The crowd we are definitely covering in November. The crowd. Really?

Yeah. It's a final. It's a final. It's a final season of the crown you got to yeah it's like i don't know why why would you don't watch it who cares right cool i'll be here covering the crowd without man this episode was produced by the great sasha show see you all then oh bye