Rahul Kohli as Napoleon Usher and Kate Siegel as Camille L’Espanaye in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’
Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix
The Fall of the House of Usher showrunner Mike Flanagan has been largely retaining quiet amid the rollout of his latest Netflix horror collection, however he took to Twitter/X late final week to make clear a burning query from a fan. And when you’re going to take a single query from the web, it’d as nicely be a few cat.
The query: “What did cats ever do to you?” in reference to episode 4’s gory battle between the ill-fated Leo (Rahul Kohli) and a black cat named Pluto in a narrative that’s loosely based mostly on Edgar Allen Poe’s brief story “The Black Cat.”
Flanagan needed to make it clear that after the cat goes lacking, the menacing substitute cat he adopts is completely a hallucination attributable to the mysterious Verna (Carla Gugino) and that Pluto is alive and nicely.
“Okay. So… ‘The Black Cat’ was written by Edgar Allan Poe,” Flanagan wrote. “In HIS version, a cat is killed. In MY version, the cat is… (spoilers) … in MY version, the killing of the cat is revealed to be a hallucination. In MY version, the cat is alive and well. So who hates cats? :)”
Reacts a reader: “Wait. When does it get revealed it was a hallucination?!?! I know the evil cat was a hallucination but Pluto didn’t die?”
“That’s why we made such a big deal about the the fact that Pluto was wearing a Gucci collar, and the new cat was not,” he continued. “Look at the cat in the final shot of the episode, who is wearing the collar… and the empty bathtub, which means ALL of the animal violence was imagined.”
On Monday, PETA introduced Flanagan is receiving its “F—k Around (With Animals) and Find Out” award for “spotlighting the cruelty and pointlessness of experiments on nonhuman primates and other animals in episode three, ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue.’”
In Poe’s authentic story, a person awaiting execution describes how he’s an animal lover who grew to become an alcoholic and started to mistreat his pets, together with a cat named Pluto who dies. Feeling responsible, he adopts a seemingly equivalent cat, however more and more begins to detest the cat and finally tries to kill it, too. When his spouse stops him, he kills her and hides the physique — however the howls of the cat lead police to her corpse. So, the primary cat certainly dies, however the second (maybe actual) cat lives.
For extra connections between House of Usher and Poe’s work, listed below are all of the Poe references within the present.
