“The Fall of the House of Usher” – How Color Informed the Characters and Production Design of Mike Flanagan Series

Mike Flanagan’s final series for Netflix is “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and it’s available to stream now. The limited eight-episode series is based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and that is reflected in every facet of the series, right down to its production design.

In the series, “Ruthless siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built Fortunato Pharmaceuticals into an empire of wealth, privilege, and power. But past secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman from their youth.”

The Usher family is played by Bruce Greenwood (Roderick Usher), Mary McDonnell (Madeline Usher), Henry Thomas (Frederick Usher), T’Nia Miller (Victorine Lafourcade), Samantha Sloyan (Tamerlane Usher), Rahul Kohli (Napoleon “Leo” Usher), Kate Siegel (Camille L’Espanaye), Sauriyan Sapkota (Prospero “Perry” Usher), Kyliegh Curran (Lenore Usher), and Zach Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald as young Roderick and Madeline respectively.

Mike Flanagan and Michael Fimognari each directed four episodes of “Usher” and enlisted “The Midnight Club” production designer Laurin Kelsey to bring their expansive vision to life on screen. Straightaway, it’s not just the scale of the Ushers’ dynasty that sets this series apart, but its use of color. Each family member has a personal space to design for, with Roderick’s childhood home serving as the centerpiece connecting the various tales. In other words, it might be Flanagan’s most ambitious series to date regarding production design scale.

Bloody Disgusting spoke with Kelsey about the series’ production design and how each character’s assigned color informed her work.

The Fall of the House of Usher. (L to R) Sauriyan Sapkota as Prospero Usher, Kate Siegel as Camille L’Espanaye, Rahul Kohli as Napoleon Usher, Matt Biedel as Bill-T Wilson, Samantha Sloyan as Tamerlane Usher, Mark Hamill as Arthur Pym in episode 101 of The Fall of the House of Usher. Cr. Eike Schroter/Netflix © 2023

“Mike had the idea of the colors for each of the Ushers,” Kelsey tells Bloody Disgusting. “So, Roderick’s is gold, Madeline’s is purple or lilac, but those are a little less obvious because we don’t see their living spaces in the same way. He actually came with the colors; I didn’t assign them. Really, it was a process of figuring out what their spaces looked like and then how the colors played in a way that wasn’t too overpowering. Together with Michael Fimognari, who co-directed and was the director of photography, he wanted to do a lot of saturation with light in key moments of the show. It didn’t give us anywhere to go if I went too saturated in the colors.

“So, focusing on figuring out the subdued palette of each character, how that worked with the style of space that they had, and then how to not overpower or overdo it or make it a little bit too kitschy by having every single item yellow or orange or whatever the respective color was. It was a fun challenge. Also, in terms of palette, being assigned a color and then figuring out what tone to use. Michael and I talked a lot about using jewel tones because it would play well with some of the past time periods as well and feel a little more elevated than some of the primary colors. The colors in the sets and in the production designs start in a more jewel tone and then a muted jewel tone kind of world, and then they get more vivid and more saturated and more bright with lighting.”

Learning about which character was most fun for Kelsey to design space for reveals more insight behind the color assignments of each character and how that extends to their personalities, specifically for Rahul Kohli’s Leo Usher and Kate Siegel’s ruthless publicist Camille.

“I think Leo,” Kelsey tells us. “I think his space was always going to be the Playboy bachelor pad feel. It was scripted as a loft, so I loved that it was a different set of materials to use; I used more wood, more metal, and more brick. We did a lot of feature lighting in his closet; there’s a lot of undermount lighting in the kitchen and things like that that give some of the yellow glow, which was a lot of fun to play with. Camille was really fun. Being the ice queen and her color silver, hers was a little more obvious, I think, to go into glass and sharp edges and nothing soft and nothing feminine. But it was fun because it was just so specific.”

Kelsey didn’t have to do much digging into Poe’s works for this series, at least not at first, because the series creator came with such a strong vision already. But one key set piece in episode two had the production designer connecting with one of Poe’s most famous short stories.

She explains, “Mike was really good at weaving the Poe details into the script. There was a lot of thought and care that he gave to each character, and then each episode being a specific Poe reference, like The Tell-Tale Heart or The Pit and the Pendulum. My focus was not on trying to layer in more Poe because he already had so much; it was to take what he had and make it as eloquent as possible visually. But of course, I did go back and reread a lot of the stories just so I knew the backstory. The one that was probably the most drawn upon from our side, from a production design side and art direction side, was for The Masque of the Red Death, which was Perry’s party in the big warehouse. We built most of the sets from scratch to do all the stunt work and all of the intricate details that we needed to do. But that warehouse, because in the Masque of the Red Death, there’s all the windows and the doors and things like that. We tried to replicate that in the design there. For that one, I really did do a lot more research to dig into the story more.

“In the original Poe story, there are different colors for the different rooms, and there’s the stained glass. When we laid out the building, Mike and I talked about having a long space, so it felt like the hallway, which is one of the images that’s pretty popular for The Masque of the Red Death. Then, at the end of the building, we made sure that we had some big arched windows that were reminiscent of that feeling of stained glass. Down the side hallways, even though we don’t see very much of the bedrooms and everything, that’s all drawn upon the original story as well. Everything’s balanced, and all the intricate details of how many doors and where they’re placed is all kind of based on my interpretation of the original story.”

The Fall of the House of Usher Review

While Perry’s party and its Poe origins provide one showstopper sequence in episode two, involving multiple departments united to bring this ghastly sequence to life, it turns out that it wasn’t the most challenging for Kelsey.

“Tamerlane’s was the most challenging set,” she states. “They all had their own unique challenges. Each one had to do something. I think the warehouse for Perry was obviously number two. But with Tamerlane’s, because of the mirrors and using the breakaway glass, then having the mirrored glass look perfect for the reflections and not be warped. Especially at that size, when you get mirrors that large, it doesn’t really matter how great the material is; it has imperfections, it’s so massive.

“Because they were something like seven feet tall, they were huge, and there were twelve of them. Also, in her bedroom, the mirrored ceiling piece, which was its own entity so that it could be flown in and out to adjust the heights for the stunt work, and then she also had to be attached. Stunts had to go through the mirror with rigging and things, so creating a set piece that looked like a perfect mirrored ceiling that didn’t look like it moved, but actually it moved. It had holes in it, which meant we had to have two mirrors to address the different challenges and then change them out quickly even though they’re massive and heavy.”

Speaking of mirrors, Flanagan frequently hides the Lasser Glass, the evil mirror from Oculus, in his works. Could Tamerlane’s mirrored set be the obvious spot to find it?

Kelsey teases, “No, not in Tamerlane’s, but it is in the show.”

See if you can find it now that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is available to stream on Netflix.