Streaming services, cable TV and Primetime television are fighting for your viewership now more than ever. UNBINGED is here to help you weed through it all, with reviews of the latest shows that highlight what we love, what we hate and what we love to hate-watch, too. The Halloween season is upon us, and with it comes a new crop of scary new series, specials, and shows poised to get audiences in the morbid mood. For this edition of UnBinged, we take a gander at new works from a few masters of horror: Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Don Mancini’s Chucky, and John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams.
The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix)
Master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe is a grim fabler of gothy goodness who has been thrilling dark-hearted English majors and black-lipstick wearers ever since he put a pen to paper. So when word got out that Netflix’s golden boy Mike Flanagan was going to adapt his work The Fall of the House of Usher, it seemed both fitting and perplexing. How does one adapt a sordid short story into a multi-episode series?
Well, you don’t. Instead, you use the tale as a foundation for a series weaving Poe’s work into an eerie amalgamation that stands on its own. The Fall of the House of Usher is not an adaptation but a transformation of the writer’s body of work using the cursed family as the central focus. In this version, Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) is far from the sickly figure from the original tale, but rather a titan of industry with six highly-accomplished, awful children who are doing their very best to serve their own self interests. And this is the story of their demise.
Flanagan pulls references and characters from classic Poe works to create complex and modern morality tales. Recalling Hammer films of yesteryear with a smattering of Tales from the Crypt, the adaptation maintains the foreboding flair of the original work as characters and…
Read the full article here
