Fall of the House Usher: How each Usher child died

In Mike Flanagan’s Netflix mini-series The Fall of the House of Usher, the demise of Roderick Usher’s children is portrayed in a horrifying and macabre manner, with varying degrees of severity in their fates.

Based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story of the same name, The Fall of the House of Usher tells the dark story of Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and his sister’s rise to wealth and power thanks to the Fortunato pharmaceutical company. As CEOs, they have everything from vast fortune to inexplicable immunity from the law.

Hidden in their past is the truth behind why each of Roderick’s children suddenly faces a horrid demise, one after the other. Behind each death is an unknown and mysterious woman. By all accounts, the police believe the death of each Usher child was a fluke accident or easily explained.

Audiences will be left in utter shock and dismay at the gravity of how each one of them died. From acid rain to a monkey gone wild, here’s a breakdown of each how each Usher child died in The Fall of the House of Usher. Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Perry’s night-club festivities lead to death in The Fall of the House of Usher

Perry Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota) is the youngest child of Roderick who has yet to prove his worth to his father, but finds himself melted to death in Episode 2 during a “fluke” accident.

Of all of Roderick’s children, only two come from the same mother. Perry is the youngest and his oldest siblings consider him a b*stard child. While all of his siblings have made a name for themselves in their careers, Roderick and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) veto every one of Perry’s ideas, especially a high-end VIP nightclub.

By The Fall of the House of Usher Episode 2, Perry has a grand idea to prove his father wrong. Learning about one of Fortunato’s abandoned testing factories, he and his friends devise a plan to turn it into a nightclub. The club would have an exclusive guest list with everyone wearing masks and locking away their phones. Amid the drugs and sex, Perry plans to use the CCTV footage to gather dirt on the elite. Knowledge is power.

But Perry has a grand idea to make his nightclub opening a masterpiece. While the factory has been vacant, its water lines are dry. Perry thinks otherwise and believes Fortunato used their own source of water coming from the tanks on the roof. During the party, some of the staff miraculously leave without a word before Perry’s friend activates the sprinklers.

Hell ensues as the sprinklers are not dropping down water, but a highly corrosive acid. Everyone, including Perry, is being burned and eaten alive by the acid. In the sea of melted bodies and flesh, is Perry.

Roderick explains in his storyline that the tanks were never used for water. To avoid fines, they stored highly volatile material in the tanks until they could get rid of it, but never did.

Camille’s snooping leads to her gruesome death

Netflix

As a publicist for Fortunato, Camille’s (Kate Siegel) desire to uncover dirt on her sister leads her to be mauled and murdered by one of Victorine’s test chimpanzees.

In The Fall of the House of Usher, audiences become aware that Victorine (T’Nia Miller) is looking for any chance to take her medical heart apparatus into human trials. After years of using chimpanzees, the experiment still failed. Amid Perry’s death, Camille is hellbent on looking for dirt on Victorine and her experiments.

Which is when her assistant tells her the gossip that Victorine is lying about the livestock in her lab. A test subject dies on the table, she swaps it out with a live one and makes all the same incisions to claim it survived the trial.

Wanting proof, Camille goes to Victorine’s lab late at night and is given access thanks to the mysterious woman. She takes photos of all the test subjects with horrid stitched-up incisions on their chests. While her back is turned, one of the test subject’s doors is opened.

In an interesting twist, the woman appears and gives a ferocious speech about Victorine’s plight to save people. At the end, Camille takes a photo of her to reveal it’s really one of the test subjects. Which goes wild and beats Camille to death.

Napolean Usher goes mad before his death in The Fall of the House of Usher

Netflix

The second-oldest son, Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), dies after a twisting tale of lies and madness that made his death appear to the public as suicide.

Napoleon is also an illegitimate heir of Roderick and a supposedly famous game developer. By Episode 3, he’s in a pickle when he wakes up from a night of drinking and drugs and is covered in blood. He just so happened to have murdered his boyfriend’s cat. Instead of telling him, he goes to the pet store to find a replacement.

There, he meets the mysterious woman posing as a worker. Napoleon finds the same exact cat and takes it home. But that’s when things go wrong. His boyfriend never sees the cat, but Napolean does and it even scratches his eye. The problem is that none of it appears to be true.

Soon going mad, Napoleon calls the woman from the store to help find it. She claims the cat is in the walls and sooner rather than later, the cat appears to attack Napolean. Gouging its eyes, he flings the cat away and gets enraged. He becomes hellbent on killing the cat – with Thor’s hammer.

Enraged and going insane, Napoleon’s boyfriend arrives as he is hammering the wall apart. Seeing the cat sitting on the balcony’s railing, Napoleon lunges at it with the hammer. Seeing as the cat is his manifestation, Napoleon falls over the edge and is killed on impact with a shiny yellow Ferrari. The final scene shows all the supposed rats the cat killed and left in the apartment were all a figment of his hallucinations.

Victorine does the unthinkable in her medical trials

Netflix

The next death is Victorine who slowly goes insane. She uses her dead girlfriend’s body to test her medical heart equipment and later ends with her dying by suicide.

There are only three of the older Usher children left, and Victorine’s death story is a doozy. Having gone behind her girlfriend’s back, who is also the surgeon, she found a willing human test subject. At home, Victorine tells her girlfriend who soon realizes Victorine has been falsifying her signature on the legal documents. Angered, she leaves before the scene cuts to Victorine throwing something out of anger.

Victorine goes on as usual until she begins to hear odd sounds that never stop, similar to a beating heart. By all accounts, audiences believe Victorine is going insane. In her home at night, Roderick goes to visit her to apologize and see if she’s okay. But loud music is distracting him and Victorine is hesitant to turn it off.

She does so hoping her father would also hear the noise, and he says he does. Seeing her girlfriend walk in the background, Victorine follows and audiences are transported to a flashback. As her girlfriend was leaving, Victorine threw an object that hit her on the back of the head. Bleeding out on the floor, she tries to get help before the scene cuts. Roderick looks for the source of the noise and is shocked to find Victorine’s girlfriend with her chest pried open and her heart beating with the medical equipment around it.

Victorine has gone insane and believes they just need a better heart and test subject and holds a knife to her father’s neck. In a twist, Victorine plunges the knife into her own abdomen. The news calls it a murder-suicide.

Tamerlane Usher’s career shatters to bits

Netflix

Roderick’s oldest daughter, Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), dies in The Fall of the House of Usher from a large shard of glass piercing her neck.

Tamerlane’s career is best described as an imitation of Goop, while her husband is a fitness celebrity. But they have their issues as Tamerlane gets sexual gratification from having a sex worker pose as her with her husband while she watches. After a falling out with him, Tamerlane attends her brand launch on her own.

It’s a disaster as she hallucinates that someone is streaming a private video of their sexual escapades with the mysterious woman for everyone to see. In reality, it’s all fake, and the monitors she smashes only display images of her brand and products. Back at home frazzled, she believes the Usher stalker is in her home as she hears voices. Using a fireplace poker, she breaks all the mirrors.

In her bedroom, she’s had enough and looks at the mirror above her bed and sees the woman. Angered, she jumps toward the mirror with the poker to shatter it. In slow-mo, the mirror breaks as one giant shard pierces her throat and smaller pieces cover her.

Frederick Usher was the worst of the Usher bunch

Netflix

Having manipulated and abused his severely wounded wife, Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas) is the last heir of Fortunato who dies during the demolition of a factory when a blade slices him open.

Audiences may find Frederick’s death a deserving one. At Perry’s party, his wife was in attendance and had been severely burned by the acid, but survived. Ever since, Frederick was led to believe his wife was having an affair with Perry, making her life hell. He also goes mad with jealousy combined with cocaine use.

Over time, he begins to abuse his bedridden wife and drugs her into complicity. In Episode 7, Frederick plans to demolish the factory that was used as Perry’s nightclub. It’s in an effort to make sure his new role as successor is smooth and to get rid of the chemical evidence. But he went too far when he decided to use pliers to rip out some of his wife’s teeth.

At the demolition site, he’s paralyzed and the woman appears. She had directly intervened when angered by what Frederick did to his wife. She mind-controlled him to scoop vast amounts of deadly medication into his drugs. Lying on the floor of the factory unmoving, the woman impersonates his voice to give the all-clear to demolish the factory.

As the wrecking ball destroys everything, a metal support beam goes loose with its sharp edge swinging back and forth. It soon gets closer and slices Frederick wide open.

Roderick Usher’s granddaughter also meets her death in The Fall of the House of Usher

Due to Roderick and Madeline’s (Kyleigh Curran) deal, all of Roderick’s kin must die, including his granddaughter Lenore.

Lenore is the daughter of Frederick and his wife and is considered the best Usher of all of them. She was unaware of what her father was truly doing to her mother. Amid the arrival of police after his death, audiences see her sitting with her mother and realizing the abuse she was subjected to.

Audiences are led to believe that she will get to live her life as the last heir of Fortunato and help her mother heal, but it’s far from the truth. Due to Roderick and Madeline’s deal with the mysterious woman, all of their bloodlines must die as penance. In her bedroom, she’s visited by the woman who smiles fondly at her. She almost feels bad that Lenore is one of the ill fates of the Usher’s dark demise.

She tells Lenore that her mother recovers in the clinic, gets skin grafts, and receives a vast fortune from Fortunato. Lenore’s mother gives most of it away to domestic abuse charities and sets up a foundation after Lenore. With tears in her eyes, the woman wants Lenore to know its because of what she did for her mother that it was all possible.

With a simple touch on her forehead, Lenore closes her eyes and never wakes up again. Roderick finds her dead, in front of the fireplace.

You can read more Netflix content in our hub here, Dexerto’s review here, its connection to Haunting of Hills House here, and more.