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

One choice. One selfish choice seals the Usher family’s fates forever when twins Roderick (Zach Gilford) and Madeline Usher (Willa Fitzgerald) meet an omnipotent harbinger of fate, Verna (Carla Gugino), at a bar on New Year’s Eve 1979 in Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher.

They’ll get the whole world — running Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, making more money than they could ever imagine, literally getting away with murder — all sans consequences. But the next generation will have to foot the bill. “When you’re done, at the end of it all… just before you would have died anyway, your bloodline dies with you,” Verna offers them. The two scrappy Ushers, who came into the world together, would leave the world together, atop a hill of riches, excess… and bodies.

Would you accept such an offer? Well, Madeline and Roderick sure did. That choice comes home to roost when Verna comes to collect — and it isn’t pretty.

Here’s how every Usher meets their fate in The Fall of the House of Usher.

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Eliza Usher

Died in: Episode 1, “A Midnight Dreary”

Roderick and Madeline’s trauma begins when their devout mother, Eliza (Annabeth Gish), dies at home, and the twins bury her in a homemade coffin in the backyard. But! Turns out, she’s still alive. Eliza claws her way out and exacts vengeance on William Longfellow (Robert Longstreet) — her married boss, CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, and Madeline and Roderick’s neglectful father. After choking him to death, she collapses. 

Mary McDonnell (who plays present-day Madeline) sees her character’s drive and spirit stemming from this shocking experience. “The very last thing she sees her own beloved mother do is strangle a man and kill him out of pain. These are children who experienced a mother who was capable of crawling her way out of a coffin,” she said. “Eventually, you see that she never really did get past [it].”

Think that’s bad? It only gets worse from here…

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Prospero “Perry” Usher

Died in: Episode 2, “The Masque of the Red Death”

The youngest Usher bastard to join the clan, Perry (Sauriyan Sapkota), feels like he has something to prove to his father and decides to do so by throwing a rager to remember. And it sure is memorable, because it makes him the first Usher to die at the hands of Verna. As his party reaches the heights of decadence and debauchery, she makes it so the building’s sprinklers rain acid down on the revelers, including Perry. “It just turns into everyone’s living nightmare,” said Sapkota. “Everyone burns and it’s the cuddle puddle.”

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Camille L’Espanaye

Died in: Episode 3, “Murder in the Rue Morgue”

Camille (Kate Siegel) couldn’t let her animosity toward her half-sister, Victorine LaFourcade (T’Nia Miller), rest, so she goes to Vic’s research facility to dig up more dirt on her unethical experiments. Instead, she gets mauled by chimpanzees. “Truly her defining moment is her death, right?” said Siegel. 

“She’s just living this kind of numb existence where she was plucked out of obscurity and made into an Usher, and then has a desire to upend her sister’s life — not physically, like I don’t want to murder my sister — but I just want to ruin her completely until she’s very unhappy all the time. And then I get my face ripped off by a monkey. So I would say in the moment my face is removed, that would be the pinnacle of the character.”

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Napoleon “Leo” Usher 

Died in: Episode 4, “The Black Cat”

After Leo (Rahul Kohli) wakes up from a bender with bloodstained hands to find his boyfriend Julius’ (Daniel Jun) cat stabbed to death in their living room, he knows he’s in trouble. He adopts a new cat (from Verna!) to replace it. But then he starts experiencing disturbing and violent visions — attacks from the cat, dead animals — to the point where he uses Thor’s hammer (a gift from Chris Hemsworth, naturally) to tear his apartment apart looking for the cat. Thinking he sees the feline out on his balcony, he chases after it in a rage… and falls off the ledge to his death on the street below.

“Leo’s death scene was so exciting. I knew that to some degree I would be smashing the apartment to bits, looking for this cat that’s tormenting me,” said Kohli. “Mike had mentioned that we’d be using a prop hammer from a film paying homage, and I would be basically tearing it down. So I’d been looking forward to doing that for a long time. It sounded like what people pay for, for those de-stressing rooms — whatever they’re called — where you get to pay to break stuff. When it finally came, it was exhausting. It’s like, be careful what you wish for.”

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Victorine Lafourcade

Died in: Episode 5, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

After hearing endless ticking noises that drive Victorine (and us) into madness, we discover that it’s been the mechanical heartbeat of her heart mesh technology… that’s strapped onto the corpse of her doctor girlfriend Alessandra Ruiz (Paola Núñez) — who she murdered days before. Why, you ask? Because she was going to stop Victorine’s trials on human subjects and rat the Ushers out as corrupt. Once her dad sees how far she’s gone, Victorine then stabs herself (at the behest of Verna), right before Roderick’s (played by Bruce Greenwood in the present day) eyes, because the trial “needs a better heart.”

“She’s completely delusional. That [denial] sort of seeps in more and more and more,” Miller said. Throwing a bookend at Alessandra’s head “was not out of spite or cruelty,” said Miller. “She never had any bad intentions. Unlike other people in this episode, her death wasn’t about that. She truly wanted to save everyone.” Yeah, well, so much for that.

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Tamerlane Usher

Died in: Episode 6, “Goldbug”

After the disastrous launch of her Goldbug company, Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) returns home to see visions of Verna (dressed as her doppelgänger) reflected back at her in every mirror of her house. She chases after Verna with a fire poker and smashes nearly all of the mirrors, ultimately hitting the mirrored ceiling above her bed as she cries about messing everything up. And what happens next? Shards fall down and stab her to the eternal sleep that Verna knows she desperately needs.

For her death scene, Sloyan wore a harness and worked with a descender rig for the first time. “Trying not to look thrilled in my death scenes [was] difficult,” she said. “I get to smash everything, which is so exciting. And Verna gives her the option for just one second of peace. I do think there is this one moment where she admits to herself that she made all the wrong choices and that she did this to herself. So I’d like to think she dies with a little bit of redemption, but I could be wrong.”

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Frederick Usher

Died in: Episode 7, “The Pit and the Pendulum”

Frederick (Henry Thomas) has been resentful of his wife, Morella (Crystal Balint), ever since she survived Perry’s rager of death — she’d snuck out and took off her wedding ring to revel in the rave. As retribution, he takes over her burn care — by way of bloody punishment. (Think: drugging her and plucking out her teeth with pliers.) Returning to the scene of what he views as his wife’s infidelity, Frederick oversees the demolition of the warehouse where Perry threw his party. Verna sets him up to get trapped inside as the crew knocks down the building, and a piece of sheet metal swings back and forth till there’s nothing left of the eldest Usher child.

“Freddie dies in a very gruesome, horrible way, but by the end of the show, you’ll see that he most likely deserves that death,” said Thomas. “He’s helpless and prone as a giant, sharp object carves him up into small pieces.” 

Gugino recalled filming that crazy sequence fondly. “We shot on a freezing cold cement floor for many, many hours,” she said. “And I looked at [Thomas] and I was like, ‘Well, there’s nobody I’d rather be here with than you.’ He was like, ‘You, too.’ ”

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Annabel Lee

Died in: Episode 8, “The Raven”

Roderick’s first wife and only true love, Annabel Lee (Katie Parker), leaves him after he betrayed his sense of integrity and threw young investigator C. Auguste Dupin (Malcolm Goodwin) under the bus to get ahead at Fortunato. Auguste (portrayed in the present by Carl Lumbly) later tells Roderick that the only reason he trusted him back then was because he trusted the good-hearted Annabel Lee. 

As the doting mother of both Frederick and Tamerlane, Annabel Lee was devastated to lose custody of her children after Roderick gorged them with money they couldn’t refuse. We discover in the final episode, when she appears as a vision to Roderick, that she literally could not live without them. Annabel Lee reveals that she’d tell people “he’s rich” when they’d ask how he stole her kids away. But now she only sees poverty in Roderick, as he starved their children of love. After she turns her back on him, we learn that she died by suicide.

Rufus Griswold

Died in: Episode 8, “The Raven”

Roderick and Madeline sold their souls the night they killed Fortunato CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) — the same night they met Verna, on New Year’s Eve 1979. Using Griswold as a fall guy to begin Roderick’s takeover, the twins drugged him on the night of the company holiday party. When Griswold woke, he found that they’re sealing him behind a brick wall in the basement of the new Fortunato building he’s constructing. His cries for help were useless, because the holidays meant no one would be back in the building for days. But he wouldn’t last the night anyway — Madeline poisoned him with cyanide.

Lenore Usher

Died in: Episode 8, “The Raven”

Roderick adored Lenore, Frederick and Morella’s daughter. She possessed the warmth and moral compass of Annabel Lee, he thought, the “best of her without a broken heart.” She’s the one who called 911 and saved her mom from her father’s brutality. But she’s still an Usher, and exceptions can’t be made. Her death brings Verna no joy, but she does tell Lenore about all the good her mother does in the future thanks to Lenore’s heroic choice to save her — before allowing the youngest and kindest Usher to die peacefully. She’s only 16.

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Madeline Usher 

Died in: Episode 8, “The Raven”

When the final death knells ring in The Fall of the House of Usher, Roderick and Madeline toast to the life they built in the basement of their mother’s home, knowing their time to go is nigh. In a callback to how they killed Griswold, Roderick poisons Madeline’s drink with cyanide and mummifies her so she “lives forever.” He buries her in a send-off worthy of the “queen” she is, with all the treasures she’d need in the afterlife. But like their mother before her, the question remains: Is Roderick sure she’s dead?

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Roderick Usher

Died in: Episode 8, “The Raven”

Turns out, maybe not. After Roderick gives Auguste his final confession, Madeline bursts through the door of the basement and strangles her brother to death — the same way their mother killed their father. Their childhood home crumbles around them, finishing the job. Auguste stands outside in horror, as Verna stands atop the wreckage.

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So does anyone live? 

Yes!

After seeing the fall of the House of Usher firsthand, Auguste survives and is, as Annabel Lee would say, the richest man in the world. “He triumphs,” said Lumbly. “He returns to his family. He’s retired, he’s set down his burden, and he’s returned to the place where he’s loved, where he might have even lost sight of how loved he is. But when he returns to it, he feels that at such a level and with such joy, and he gets the opportunity to communicate that to Roderick’s spirit — even if not to Roderick’s face.”

Roderick’s widow, Juno (Ruth Codd), inherits everything and completely dissolves Fortunato. She repurposes it into the Phoenix Foundation, where every dollar goes to rehabilitation programs and addiction and recovery research. And the onetime addict completely weans herself off of Fortunato’s mainline drug, Ligodone. 

The Ushers’ lawyer Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill) is arrested a few weeks later, after Camille’s former assistants turn over a mountain of files to the police. He surrenders himself and doesn’t utter a word in his defense. He’ll die in prison, having declined his own offer from Verna to get off scot-free.

Lenore’s mother, Morella, recovers well after she’s moved to a proper clinic. It takes years of procedures and reconstructive surgery, but she endures it. She also inherits a fortune when Fortunato collapses, and she gives most of it away to domestic violence and abuse charities. But she keeps enough to start a nonprofit, setting up chapters all over the world. She calls it the Lenore Foundation after her daughter, and in a decade alone, she saves millions of lives. All because her daughter saved hers.

Some life comes from the fall of the House of Usher. But nevermore will they profit off the lives of others.

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