MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

The latest TV mini-series horror effort from director Mike Flanagan is The Fall of the House of Usher, which is ostensibly a modern-day adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 work of the same name, but which also draws inspiration from and makes reference to numerous other Poe works, including The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold-Bug, and The Pit and the Pendulum, among many others. The show stars Bruce Greenwood as Roderick Usher, the corrupt elderly billionaire CEO of a pharmaceutical company, whose six children – heir Frederick, entrepreneur Tamerlane, surgeon Victorine, gaming mogul Leo, PR head Camille, and socialite Perry – have all died in a span of two weeks. Fearing that his own death is imminent, Usher invites Assistant US Attorney Auguste Dupin – who has been trying to prosecute him for decades – to his crumbling childhood home to finally confess his crimes, reveal how his children died, and so much more. The show is an excellent exploration of power, corruption, and greed, filtered through the deliciously macabre lens of Poe’s horror stories, and was one of the most popular successes of Netflix’s 2023 fall lineup.

One of the most interesting things that Mike Flanagan has done over the course of his career is put together a little repertory company of actors who appear in multiple projects – TV series such as The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass, and movies like Before I Wake, Gerald’s Game, and Doctor Sleep. In addition to Bruce Greenwood, The Fall of the House of Usher features an excellent ensemble cast drawn mostly from this ‘Flanaverse’ repertory, of which Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell, Henry Thomas, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, and Mark Hamill are real standouts.

Interestingly, this repertory company also extends to his behind-the-camera talent, which for the purposes of this review means composers John Grush and Taylor Newton Stewart, known collectively as The Newton Brothers (despite them not actually being brothers at all). The Newton Brothers have now scored 11 Flanagan projects since they first worked together in 2014 on the psychological horror film Oculus, but for the most part I have never really fallen in love with anything they have done. Parts of The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass were very entertaining, but others never really captured my attention. However, for me, The Fall of the House of Usher is their best score – not just in terms of their work for Mike Flanagan, but of their entire career to date.

Right out of the gate, the thing that stands out in the music is how lush, and grand, and opulent it all is. One of the themes that runs through a great deal of Edgar Allen Poe’s work has to do with the idea of wealthy luxuriousness being ravaged by time and neglect, and that’s how this score also feels to me. It’s old fashioned, in all the best ways; the music seems to speak to both the classical musical conventions of Poe’s own time in the 1840s, as well as the many ‘classic Hollywood’ adaptations of Poe’s work, which invariably contained bold, Gothic orchestral scores that enhanced the sense of melodrama. But then these inclinations are tempered by the use of more contemporary horror movie scoring techniques, orchestral stingers and moments of extreme dissonance, as well as some brief and tasteful use of modern electronic textures to reflect the show’s present-day setting.

“At Last” is a perfect example of the score’s wonderful dark romance; a rich bed of surging strings, elegant classical violin passages, and clear, prominent thematic content that grows over the course of three minutes into something bold, sweeping, and magnificent. A moodier sequence for eerie, but gently romantic woodwinds bisects the piece, before it returns for a final flourish, in which the powerful strings are accompanied by rolling, dramatic textures for piano, harp, and an almost subliminal church organ. This style of writing appears in numerous subsequent cues, usually in scenes of significant dramatic weight, or which underscore a particularly poignant death – cues like “Burial,” “Candy,” the intense “Camille,” “The Raven,” and the evocative “The Most Important Employee” spring to mind. I especially like the in-context application of this style in “Quite a View,” which accompanies one of the most memorable scenes in the show where Roderick is having a vision of the bodies of all the people his pharmaceuticals have killed falling like rain outside his office window.

There is a hint of classic Christopher Young to a lot of this writing – which is of course for me a massive positive – but I also can’t help but notice the superficial similarities between the writing here and the score that Nicholas Britell wrote for the massively popular HBO series Succession – the dramatic parallels between the feuding Usher siblings, and the equally devious Roys, are such that the musical similarities seem less than coincidental.

As I mentioned, the moments of pure horror are usually accompanied by orchestral stingers and outbursts of extreme dissonance – these are notable in tracks like “Mother,” “Aftermath,” the abstract and unnerving “True Nature,” and the terrifying “Water Under the Glass”. Even here, though, there is an impressive amount of technique and compositional sophistication that allows it to rise above the noise of most other contemporary horror scores.

And then there are the quieter, more intimate moments of sadness and self-reflection, in which characters will occasionally acknowledge their own corruption and self-absorption before being brought back to the ‘normality’ of their twisted lives and obscene wealth. There are some gorgeous, refined string passages running through cues like “Secretary,” “Rumors,” the appropriately magical-sounding “Fairytale,” and others. Elsewhere, there are unexpectedly playful woodwinds backed by dancing cellos throughout the wonderfully elegant and almost dance-like “Fuck Blippi,” the more calm and introspective “Opportunity,” and the pretty “Trowel,” while “A Shorter Elevator Ride” and “I’m the Candy Man” both contain a beautiful piano solo version of the main theme. There’s even a quick burst of intense classical action music in “Goldbug,” which is very entertaining.

The finale of the score – especially cues like “Who Am I,” “You Are My Perfect Creation,” the graceful “The City in the Sea,” the devastating “Compass,” and the satisfyingly sweeping “Folie a Deux” – really lean into the gothic grandeur style with a great deal of power and emotional depth, as the long-buried secrets of Roderick Usher’s life are finally revealed. The score revels in this monstrous, operatic tragedy with music that seems larger than life, while also allowing the viewer to almost empathize with the poignancy of how Usher’s life unfolded.

The album concludes with a spooky cover version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” performed by American singer/songwriter and actress Daisy Gray, and that’s another thing worth mentioning: the fact that the show also has an excellent song soundtrack, featuring tracks from artists as varied as Nine Inch Nails, Pink Floyd, The Doobie Brothers, Bonnie Tyler, Amii Stewart, and many more. I also want to mention, again, that although the music is uniformly excellent, the score album is much too long, clocking in at almost 90 minutes. Many of the tracks are repetitive, and I feel like a tighter curated album with a leaner running time of maybe an hour might have served the music better. Again, I want to reiterate that as *actual music* the score is superb, but the album release would have benefitted from some pruning.

Despite them having been around for going on fifteen years, and despite their work on scores like The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and others, containing some outstanding sequences, I feel like The Fall of the House of Usher is could be a turning point for The Newton Brothers. This score feels complete; it has a clear narrative flow, a deep emotional core, and a rich and sophisticated orchestral sound, and although a lot of their previous works have contained one or more of these elements to some degree, it has never really fully come together as well as it has here. Fans of beautiful orchestral gothic horror will find The Fall of the House of Usher very much to their taste.

Buy the Fall of the House of Usher soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• At Last (3:36)
• Secretary (3:18)
• Burial (1:01)
• Mother (1:59)
• Fuck Blippi (9:16)
• Aftermath (1:27)
• Rumors (1:06)
• Opportunity (1:47)
• A Shorter Elevator Ride (3:21)
• Trowel (2:03)
• Candy (2:54)
• True Nature (2:16)
• Camille (0:42)
• Uncanny (1:25)
• At War (2:05)
• The Raven (2:28)
• Honey (1:58)
• I’m the Candy Man (2:12)
• Scorpions (1:03)
• Fairytale (2:19)
• There Is No Going Back (0:59)
• Quite a View (2:38)
• Arthur Gordon Pym (3:11)
• Water Under the Glass (0:53)
• Important People (2:38)
• Goldbug (1:11)
• The Most Important Employee (4:52)
• Who Am I (1:25)
• You Are My Perfect Creation (2:04)
• The City in the Sea (3:45)
• Legend King (2:12)
• Compass (6:49)
• Folie a Deux (1:27)
• Foundation (2:11)
• Wicked Game (written by Chris Isaak, performed by Daisy Gray) (4:09)

Running Time: 88 minutes 40 seconds

Netflix Music (2023)

Music composed by John Grush and Taylor Newton Stewart – The Newton Brothers. Conducted by Mark Graham. Orchestrations by Mark Graham. Recorded and mixed by Lewis Jones and Jonathan Wales. Edited by Brett Pierce. Album produced by The Newton Brothers.