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You need to watch “The Fall of the House of Usher” (2023).

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“The Fall of the House of Usher” (2023) is goddam terrific.  I have never thanked a college buddy as enthusiastically for inviting me to watch his Netflix with him.

It’s unflinching and unfailingly loving of its Edgar Allan Poe source material.  (The eight-episode miniseries actually draws from a number of Poe’s works — not just the eponymous 1839 short story.)  The acting is top-notch — particularly from leads Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood and
Mary McDonnell.  The dialogue is priceless.  And it is genuinely scary!  (Yes, a lot of us really love Poe, but you must admit that it is challenging to make his works fresh and truly frightening to a modern audience.)

I almost said that I loved it more than “The Haunting of Hill House” (2018), another superb horror miniseries by director Mike Flanagan that employs much of the same cast.  “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be considered an unofficial sequel to both the 2018 miniseries and 2020’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor.”

My heart still belongs to Hill House, though — although “The Fall of the House of Usher” is Flanagan’s best, in some ways, I think “Hill House” tells more a human story, with redeeming, realistic characters that we genuinely worry over.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a close second, though.

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That poem in the penultimate episode of “The Fall of the House of Usher” (2023).

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So, just like a lot of other people, I am absolutely loving “The Fall of the House of Usher” (2023).  A college friend has Netflix and fairly implored me to watch it — and I’m glad he did.  (I should have known to trust director Mike Flanagan.)

Anyway, neither of us recognized the Edgar Allan Poe poem recited by Carla Gugino in the second-to-last episode.  It is none other than “The City in the Sea” — though it was abridged a bit for the episode.  (Julio Bardini gives us a great rundown of it over at Collider.)

The poem itself is below.

“The City in the Sea”

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

usher