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

In most cases, we toast to new beginnings. Whether it’s to ring in another year or celebrate a major milestone, the sound of clinking glasses symbolizes a new era. For young siblings Roderick (Zach Gilford) and Madeline Usher (Willa Fitzgerald), what they thought was a toast to success was also a toast to their own demise.

Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher combines Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous poems and short stories into a haunting exploration of privilege and greed. After spending decades building a successful pharmaceutical company, Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) are now forced to confront the skeletons in their closet, as each of their heirs die in brutal and mysterious ways. As the series finale reveals, these aren’t random freak accidents — they were all part of a deadly deal that the siblings made many decades prior. Let’s dig into that bleak and bloody ending — but first, take a moment to catch your breath. You’ll need it.

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Why do all the Ushers die?

In Episode 1, a young Roderick and Madeline meet a bartender named Verna (Carla Gugino) on New Year’s Eve 1979. She’s warm and friendly, but there’s something mysterious about her. Verna reappears several decades later, as each of Roderick’s children die, and it’s revealed in the eighth and final episode that the brother and sister made a deadly deal with Verna on that fateful night. After murdering Fortunato executive Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco), the siblings head to a bar to create an alibi. “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.

Verna already knows everything and confronts Roderick and Madeline about the murder. She promises that they’ll never be convicted for their crime — as long as they accept a deal. The Ushers will achieve massive success, but their bloodline will die just before Madeline and Roderick’s own deaths. As each of the Usher children grow up enjoying their lavish lifestyles, they’re unaware their fates are already sealed.

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What’s the deal that Verna offers Pym?

As the Usher family’s fixer, Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill) has worked tirelessly to help cover up their crimes. “He’s the investigative thread providing a lot of exposition for the audience,” shared Hamill, adding that Pym’s been doing this dirty work for “quite a long time.” His character doesn’t witness any supernatural occurrences for most of the series, but that changes at the end when Pym attempts to kill Verna inside the Ushers’ childhood home. 

Little does he know that Verna can never die. She reveals that there’s an incriminating file on Pym that can get him locked up. “You can either ride the phoenix out of Fortunato’s ashes, or you can watch it fly away from a federal prison cell,” Verna tells him. The only way he can get away with his crimes is to sacrifice a valuable asset, similar to what Roderick and Madeline did. Pym replies that he has no collateral to be used as leverage and accepts whatever fate has in store for him.

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How does Lenore die?

Unlike everyone in her family, Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) has always led with good conscience. She’s witnessed the moral madness that money has inflicted on her family and asks Roderick to dissolve Fortunato. “It’s not too late to fix it,” she tells her grandfather, suggesting that they use their money to repair the damage they’ve caused. 

But she’s still an Usher, and a deal’s a deal — every member of the family has to die. When Lenore returns to the guest bedroom, she finds a teary-eyed Verna sitting on her bed. “There is a lot about my job that I love, but there are moments like these that bring me no joy,” Verna says. She tells Lenore that her mother, Morella (Crystal Balint), will fully recover from her burns and use Fortunato’s money after it collapses to start a nonprofit called the Lenore Foundation. Through that, Morella will save millions of lives — and it’s all thanks to Lenore. “When you got out of that house, when you defied your father, you did that,” she says. “That choice you made echoes through millions of lives.” Verna places her finger on Lenore’s forehead and she dies painlessly.

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What happens to Madeline and Roderick?

Knowing his time is short, Roderick pays one last visit to Fortunato, where he’s faced with a vision of his deceased dynasty seated around a conference room table. But the body count is actually much higher: Verna also shows him the many, many more who’ve died as a result of Fortunato’s drugs, raining down out the high-rise window. “Those are your bodies,” she tells him. “They’d each be alive today if it weren’t for you.”

Roderick then invites Madeline over to their childhood home. Sitting in the basement, he offers his sister a drink, and they reflect on the empire that they’ve built together. It’s clear that Madeline feels no remorse as she vents about who the real monsters are: the consumers. “They point at you and me like we’re the problem. They fucking invented us,” she spews. “Let’s not hide here in the basement like we’ve got something to be ashamed of.” As she gets up from the table, it’s clear something’s not right — Roderick’s poisoned her drink. He then mummifies her, in what he deems a fitting send-off.

After Roderick confesses to Dupin (Carl Lumbly) about murdering his sister earlier that night, they hear thuds coming from the other room. Just like their mother in Episode 1, Madeline isn’t fully dead. Her bloodied corpse enters the room and strangles Roderick to death. “The very last thing she sees her own beloved mother do is strangle a man and kill him out of pain,” McDonnell said of her character. “And these are children who experienced a mother who was capable of crawling her way out of a coffin.”

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What does nevermore mean?

Lenore is dead, but her phone has been texting Roderick the word nevermore all night. He tells Dupin that Madeline created an AI project that scans a person’s social media posts and creates a digital version of them. Although the project never fully came into fruition, she used Lenore as a beta test to create a bot, which explains the texts. Right before Madeline strangles Roderick to death, his very last word is also “nevermore.”

This reference comes directly from Poe’s poem “The Raven.” “I read [the poem] in English class and was always taken with the notion that the only word that the raven ever says is nevermore,” Gugino said. “That’s both poetic and ominous.” In the piece, the narrator is grieving his lost love Lenore, whom Roderick’s granddaughter is named after. The raven appears to him and says, “Nevermore,” reminding him that he’ll never see Lenore again and forever be stuck in a cycle of grief.

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What happens to Fortunato?

After the Usher home comes crumbling down, Roderick’s second wife, Juno (Ruth Codd), inherits everything from Fortunato. Now a widow, she repurposes the pharmaceutical company into the Phoenix Foundation to fund rehabilitation programs. Because Pym didn’t make a deal with Verna, he’s arrested a few weeks later after incriminating files are turned in to the police. He’s the only conviction from the Fortunato Pharmaceutical case, as everyone else is dead, and surrenders himself to a life sentence behind bars.

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What are the items that Verna places on the tombstones?

In Episode 8’s final moments, Verna — which, by the way, is an anagram for raven — pays the Ushers a visit at the cemetery. As she recites Poe’s poem “Spirits of the Dead,” she places an item on each of their tombstones. These possessions once belonged to them, but they’re also what eventually killed them. There’s a mask for Perry (Sauriyan Sapkota), a cat’s collar for Leo (Rahul Kohli), a plastic heart for Victorine (T’Nia Miller), a golden scarab for Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), a bag of cocaine for Frederick (Henry Thomas), a flower and raven’s feather for Lenore, sapphires for Madeline, and a glass tumbler for Roderick. This is the very same glass that he toasted with back in 1979 to seal the deal with Verna — only this time, it’s empty. “Early in his life, he had a conversation with somebody who promised him an effortless life in return for something that he didn’t quite believe could happen,” said Greenwood. “And now that’s coming home to roost.”

The Fall of the House of Usher is now streaming on Netflix.