All interviews included in this article were conducted in spring 2022.

Are you ready to attend a funeral? The first eight minutes of The Fall of the House of Usher are here, and you’ll want to dress for the somber occasion. 

Mike Flanagan’s upcoming horror drama opens with a funeral for not one, but three deceased characters. The family patriarch, Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), is a powerful pharmaceutical CEO who’s built a painkiller empire with his twin sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell) — and now all of his children are dead. Everyone’s under a microscope, as we see newspaper clippings announcing the brutal deaths of each Usher heir pinned up on a bulletin board. 

As we come to find out in the first scene, these clips belong to C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), an assistant US attorney who’s spent more than three decades trying to expose the Usher family for their nefarious crimes. With his bloodline gone and nothing left to lose, Roderick is ready to confess to Dupin — and he says he’ll reveal how his children died. But you’ll have to wait until Oct. 12 to find out how these freak accidents occurred.

Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s most haunting short stories and poems, The Fall of the House of Usher tells the story of one family’s rise to success, and the privilege and greed that eventually brings them down. “Roderick Usher is a guy who has never had to pay for any trespass. He's moved forward in his life without impediment at the expense of everybody and everything around him,” Greenwood told Netflix during production. McDonnell added, “Mike was really examining the greed that is at the core of really all of our problems on the planet, and the narcissism of greed, and the havoc that can wreak.”

Fans of Flanagan’s previous shows including The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass will see a mix of familiar and new faces. The Fall of the House of Usher also stars Willa Fitzgerald, Mark Hamill, Henry Thomas, Crystal Balint, Kyliegh Curran, Samantha Sloyan, Matt Biedel, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Daniel Jun, T’Nia Miller,  Paola Núñez, Sauriyan Sapkota, and Ruth Codd.

Prepare to enter this house full of skeletons when The Fall of the House of Usher premieres Oct. 12 on Netflix.