Each episode of The Fall of the House of Usher features the grisly demise of a member of the wealthy family but which of their deaths is the most gruesome?
*WARNING: Spoilers ahead for The Fall of the House of Usher* — Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher is undoubtedly his goriest and deadliest horror show to date as each episode features the death of at least one member of the titular Usher family and while some of their fates are quite tame, others are disturbing enough to provide some genuine nightmare fuel.
Every death in The Fall of the House of Usher ranked
The fate of the Usher family is the result of a sinister deal that twin siblings Roderick and Madeline made with the mysterious Verna on New Year’s Eve 1979.
This gave them all the wealth and power they could have ever dreamed but in return, they will have to make an unimaginable sacrifice when the time comes.
This leads to the deaths of all seven of the Usher offspring as well as the twins who have led the family for so many years.
Before we begin, it should be noted that we’re only including the deaths of the main Usher family members in our ranking, so the grim fate of Rufus Griswold, for example, who Roderick and Madeline buried behind a brick wall is only worthy of an honorable mention.
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9. Lenore Usher | Episode 8 – The Raven
Roderick’s 16-year-old granddaughter Lenore was his favorite member of the family as she was the only one who wasn’t obsessed with material possessions and the family’s wealth.
Despite being an innocent party in the affair, Lenore is still an Usher meaning her fate is sealed but even Verna takes no joy in her death and peacefully puts her to sleep for a painless death.
8. Roderick Usher | Episode 8 – The Raven
Despite being at the head of the Usher family and the Fortunato Pharmaceuticals corporation, which caused the deaths of thousands with its opioid painkiller Ligadone, Roderick gets off surprisingly lightly.
His death comes in the final moments of episode 8 when he is crushed as his childhood home collapses on top of him and Madeline, who had been trying to strangle him after he attempted to kill her himself – more on her fate later in the list.
7. Victorine Lafourcade | Episode 5 – The Tell-Tale Heart
Victorine’s demise isn’t as gruesome as some of the other Usher offspring as she stabs herself in the stomach in what is a largely gore-free death.
However, while Victorine’s death isn’t so bad in the context of what is to come, the scene itself is a particularly grisly one as it comes after she killed her own girlfriend, the surgeon Alessandra.
If Alessandra was an Usher, her death would certainly be quite high up on this list as Victorine operated on her in an effort to fit the prototype heart pump to revive her. it doesn’t work, of course, meaning we’re greeted with the sight of Alessandra’s lifeless corpse with a gaping hole in her chest and accompanied by the metallic chirping of the mechanical heart.
6. Tamerlane Usher | Episode 6 – Goldbug
Tamerlane’s death in episode 6 is grim viewing mostly due to her descent into madness and the various injuries she suffers before her fate is finally sealed.
After encountering Verna earlier in the series, Tamerlane becomes convinced that the mysterious woman is having an affair with her husband, so much so that her paranoia derails the launch of her Goldbug company and leads to her trashing her apartment by smashing every mirror in sight after seeing visions of Verna appearing in them.
The countless pieces of smashed glass do a number on Tamerlane as she walks barefoot around her home, with her final act coming when she smashes a ceiling mirror about the bed. In her efforts to reach the mirror, she falls and is impaled by the shards of falling glass.
5. Camille L’Espanaye | Episode 3 – Murder in the Rue Morgue
After attorney Auguste Dupin claims that he is working with an informant within the Usher family Camille begins to suspect that her half-sister Victorine may be the traitorous snitch and so she attempts to dig up some dirt by sneaking into Vic’s laboratory.
She finds her way into the room where Vic’s chimpanzee test subjects are kept where she has a confrontation with Verna but upon taking a photo of the woman, it’s revealed that she has been standing face to face with an angry ape that savages her to death.
Camille’s death itself takes place off-screen but the following morning, two lab workers enter the room to find the floors smeared with blood before laying eyes on her mangled corpse.
4. Napoleon “Leo” Usher | Episode 4 – The Black Cat
Pet lovers out there will argue that Leo had it coming following his death in episode 4. After waking up from a drunken and drug-fuelled bender, he discovers that he has brutally murdered his boyfriend’s black cat Pluto in the night.
Leo finds an almost identical feline to replace Pluto at an animal shelter run by none other than Verna. It’s not long before he starts to regret bringing home this new moggy as it turns out to be his worst nightmare. It scratches him at every opportunity and starts to bring dead blood-soaked animals into the apartment, even hiding a dead rat under his pillow.
After finally reaching the end of his tether, Leo starts to trash the apartment in an effort to find and kill the cat, even gouging out one of its eyes, before making a fatal error by charging at the feline while on the balcony and plummeting over the edge to his death.
3. Frederick Usher | Episode 7 – The Pit and the Pendulum
Roderick’s oldest son Frederick seems mostly harmless throughout The Falls of the House of Usher, that is until he takes a pair of pliers to his wife Morella’s teeth while she was bedridden after a stint in hospital as he believed she’d been unfaithful to him.
In a final meeting with Verna, she reveals that she was originally planning to let Frederick die a fairly innocuous death, most likely a heart attack caused by his cocaine habit. However, following the teeth-pulling incident, she intervened and took action herself.
She caused Frederick to lace his cocaine supply with a nightshade paralytic which led him to collapse while overseeing the demolition of the warehouse where Perry held his party in episode 2 – more on that in a moment.
As the building collapses around him, a huge piece of sharp metal starts swinging from the ceiling like a giant pendulum, getting closer and closer to Frederick with each swing until it slices open his stomach while he can do nothing else but lie there.
2. Madeline Usher | Episode 8 – The Raven
Madeline and Roderick’s fates have been intertwined from the very beginning of The Fall of the House of Usher and so it’s only fitting that the twins who came into the world together, leave it together.
As mentioned earlier, Madeline and Roderick die when they are crushed beneath their collapsing childhood home but that came after Roderick attempted to murder Madeline first.
He poisoned her before attempting to give her a pharaoh’s send-off by carving out her tongue and her eyes and replacing the latter with a pair of dark-colored stones.
What Roderick did not realize, however, is that he hadn’t actually killed his sister, leading to the horrifying moment where an eyeless and tongueless Madeline comes clambering upstairs from the basement and attacks her brother before the building collapses in on both of them.
1. Prospero “Perry” Usher | Episode 2 – The Masque of the Red Death
And finally, we end with the very first death in The Fall of the House of Usher’s twisted killing spree, that of Prospero who attempts to impress his father by organizing the biggest and most exclusive party in history.
The night appears to be going well until a masked Verna appears. Perry had arranged for the warehouse’s sprinkler system to shower the attendees with water as the party reached its height, but what he was not aware of was that the water tanks he had connected to on the roof were not filled with water.
Instead, as Roderick reveals in episode 3, the tanks were actually filled with acidic waste produced by Fortuna Pharmaceuticals and so instead of a watery finale to the party, the guests are covered in acid, resulting in the nightmare-inducing death of every single person in attendance as their skin burns and melts, save for Frederick’s wife Morella who survives but is left horrifyingly scarred by the incident.
If Perry’s actual death in episode 2 wasn’t grim enough, the scene of Mark Hamill’s Arthur Pym examining the aftermath is definitely enough to make you feel queasy as he treads through a sea of disfigured corpses to identify Perry.
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The Fall of the House of Usher is available to stream on Netflix from Thursday, October 12, 2023.
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