11 details you might have missed in Netflix's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

• "The Fall of the House of Usher" follows the downfall of a wealthy elite family.
• Mike Flanagan's latest horror series is inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
• Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Several characters are named after real people from Edgar Allan Poe's life.

"The Fall of House Usher" is crammed with characters and storylines that are inspired and influenced by a lot of Edgar Allan Poe's writings. But some of the figures in the Ushers' story are named after real people in Poe's life.

Audiences are introduced to a young Roderick Usher (Lincoln Russo) and his sister, Madeline (Kate Whiddington), in the first episode.

They're raised by Eliza Usher (Annabeth Gish), a single parent who works at the Fortunato pharmaceutical company. Eliza is named after Poe's own mother, Eliza Poe, who died at the age of 24.

Early in episode one, it's established that the Usher siblings' biological father is actually their mother's boss at Fortunato, Mr. Longfellow (Robert Longstreet). He's named after the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom Poe famously accused of being a plagiarist in the 1840s.

As the series progresses, there are numerous flashbacks to when an adult Roderick (Zach Gilford) is working for Rufus Griswold at Fortunato in the 1970s. Griswold is also the name of the poet and critic who published some of Poe's work in 1842.

All of the Usher children are named after characters in Poe's works.

Every single one of the Usher children has a name taken from Poe's fiction or poetry.

Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) is named after Prince Prospero, a wealthy nobleman who throws a masquerade ball for the rich amid a gruesome plague in "The Masque of the Red Death."

Napoleon (Rahul Kohli) gets his name from "The Spectacles," a story about a man who ends up marrying his own great-grandmother. 

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" features a character named Camille L'Espanaye, which is also the name of Kate Siegel's character.

T'Nia Miller plays Victorine LaFourcade, whose eponymous character is in "The Premature Burial."

The "Midnight Mass" alum Samantha Sloyan stars as Tamerlane, which comes from Poe's poem about the 14th-century conqueror of the same name.

Roderick's eldest child, Frederick (Henry Thomas), is named after the main character of "Metzengerstein" who clashes with a rival family.

Carl Lumbly's assistant US attorney is named after a recurring character in Poe's stories.

The star of "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" Carl Lumbly plays C. Auguste Dupin, an assistant US attorney who's been investigating the Usher family and the Fortunato company since the 1970s for corruption, murder, and a litany of other crimes.

Dupin is inspired by a detective of the same name who's a recurring character in three stories written by Poe. The character made his debut in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which sees Dupin figure out who killed Camille L'Espanaye and her mother.

The detective shows up again in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" when he tries to solve the mystery behind a body that's discovered in the river Seine. Poe's third Dupin story, "The Purloined Letter," sees the detective tackle a criminal who's blackmailing the French queen.

Verna, the name of Carla Gugino's character, is an anagram of Raven.

The creator of "The Fall of the House of Usher," Mike Flanagan, reunited with his frequent collaborator Carla Gugino for the new series, after working with her on "Gerald's Game," "The Haunting of Hill House," and "The Haunting of Bly Manor."

In the new series, Gugino plays Verna, a mysterious entity that forces the Ushers to face their sins and pay for their crimes by killing them in a variety of gory ways.

The name "Verna" is an anagram of Raven, which is fitting considering how the character taunts the whole family in a similar way to how the bird torments the student in Poe's original poem.

Most of the episode titles are names of Poe's short stories.

Most of the episodes in the series are named after Poe's short stories, and each one relates to what happens to the Usher child it focuses on. For example, in episode two, "Masque of the Red Death," Prospero Usher throws a depraved masked party/orgy in an old Fortunato warehouse.

But when the sprinklers are turned on to douse the partygoers on the dancefloor, the leftover chemicals in the building severely burn the attendees in a grisly scene.

This idea is (loosely) taken from Poe's short story of the same name, where Prince Prospero holds a "safe" masquerade ball for the wealthy in the middle of a plague named the Red Death. The story ends with Prospero and his guests all contracting the disease and abruptly dying.

The other episodes that match Poe's short stories are "Murder in the Rue Morgue," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart,"  "The Gold-Bug," and "The Pit and the Pendulum."

But the premiere and the finale titles are taken from Poe's most famous poem.

While six of the episodes get their titles from Poe's short stories, the premiere and the finale are each taken from Poe's most famous poem. Episode one is named "A Midnight Dreary," which is part of the first line of "The Raven."

The poem from 1845 revolves around an unnamed student who is taunted by a raven while grieving for his late lover, Lenore.

The final episode of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is simply called "The Raven," to honor Poe's famed work.

Camille L'Espanaye is killed by a chimpanzee, which is almost exactly how her eponymous character died in Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Not all of the Usher siblings' deaths correspond to what happens to the Poe characters they're named after, but Camille's does.

In the show, Camille L'Espanaye runs Fortunato's PR department and manages the family's public image during numerous crises. But she's not immune from the tragedies that plague the family, and she ultimately meets a brutal end herself. 

When she sneaks into Victorine's lab (conveniently also named RUE Morgue) to dig up dirt on her half-sibling, she encounters Verna disguised as a security guard at the facility. After Verna releases one of the caged chimpanzees that Victorine had been experimenting on, the creature flies into a rage and savagely mauls Camille to death.

In Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Detective C. Auguste Dupin (the eponym of Lumbly's character) investigates the deaths of Camille L'Espanaye and her mother on a street in Paris named Rue Morgue. He eventually discovers they were both brutally killed by an orangutan that had escaped after being brought to the city by a sailor.

The producer of "The Bachelor" Elan Gale has a cameo in episode two.

The former "Bachelor" producer Elan Gale has a cameo in episode two as the bartender speaking to Prospero about setting up the sprinklers in the abandoned warehouse before the ill-fated party. Gale isn't an actor, so this appearance may seem random. But he and the series creator, Mike Flanagan, have actually been friends for years after tweeting about their admiration for each other's projects and later meeting in person.

The two have worked together several times before on other Flanagan projects. Gale was a producer and writer on two of Flanagan's previous Netflix shows, "Midnight Mass" and "The Midnight Club." Although he didn't produce "The Fall of the House of Usher," it's cool to see that Flanagan gave him a cameo — he did the same with "The Haunting of Hill House," where Gale briefly appeared as a mold remediator working on Hill House.

Interestingly, one of Prospero's partners, Jenny, is played by the "Castle" alumni Molly Quinn, who's engaged to Gale. The pair started dating in 2015 and were together for four years before Gale proposed to the actor in 2019.

Tamerlane's app, Goldbug, is the name of another story by Poe.

Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan) and her husband William (Matt Biedel) run a fitness company named Billt. William is the face of the company as a fitness influencer, and he leads the virtual gym classes that subscribers get access to.

Throughout the series, Tamerlane is developing a new app named Goldbug, a Goop-like company that blends the fitness side of Billt with health and beauty products. The Goldbug name is also pulled from (yet another) short story by Poe.

"The Gold-Bug" follows two friends who discover a bizarre insect seemingly made out of gold, which sends them on a quest to discover buried treasure. 

Arthur Gordon Pym claims he once traveled to Ultima Thule, a mythical land with a Nazi connection near the Arctic.

In episode six, Roderick opens up to Dupin about the mysterious family lawyer Arthur Gordon Pym (Mark Hamill). He explains that Pym set out on an expedition around the world when he was younger, and he used to tell the Usher children stories about his adventures.

Roderick says the Usher children used to make up their own ideas about Pym's travels because he never told them all the details. He also recalls that when Tamerlane was young, Pym told her he found a mythical island in the North Pole called Ultima Thule. Pym claimed that it was home to a race of creatures who lived "beneath us out of time, out of space."

While there isn't really an island called Ultima Thule, the name actually was a Latin term used to refer to a place that was so far away it was considered unreachable. The Nazis also believed that Ultima Thule was "a prehistoric Aryan utopia that collapsed because of racial miscegenation," the history professor Eric Kurlander said.

NASA had named an object in space after Ultima Thule but decided to rename it Arrokoth after backlash over the title's Nazi history.

The movie Lenore and Morrie watch in episode six foreshadows Frederick's death in episode seven.

Also in episode six, Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) is watching an old black-and-white movie with her bedbound mother, Morella (Crystal Balint), while Morella recovers from the horrific chemical-burn injuries she got at Prospero's party.

The quick clip of the movie seems to be a version of Poe's story "The Pit and the Pendulum," where a swinging blade threatens to cut a man in half.

This blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment foreshadows how Lenore's father, Frederick (Henry Thomas) is killed in episode seven. 

Frederick's the eldest of the Usher children, and he personally takes it upon himself to be there when Fortunato demolishes the doomed old warehouse that Prospero used for the masquerade party.

But Verna punishes Frederick for torturing his helpless wife by ensuring that he gets trapped in the building when it starts to come down, and he gets bisected by a swinging piece of debris.

Correction: October 18, 2023 — An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a character in "The Fall of the House of Usher." It's Camille L'Espanaye, not Camille L'Espanye. It also misspelled the names of two actors in the series. They're Kyliegh Curran and Crystal Balint, not Kyleigh Curran and Crystal Ballint.

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufonynrculZKieXam1pnnHqKysnV2ks27B0qGcq2WemsGnuMixZJ2dpJa2rb%2BMqaaeZaKas6a%2BxKeanqtdmq60wMSrZJ6fl6h6c3yRbGRqaA%3D%3D