On High Body Counts, Horror Tropes, and the Fall of the House of Usher
I recently finished watching the Netflix miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher and thoroughly enjoyed it. It had everything I like in my horror: a dollop of creepiness, a dash of humor, and a high body count and gore quotient (also Mark Hamill as an evil lawyer).
While there’s a lot to discuss about Fall of the House of Usher—I may do a future blog post on the panoply of Poe references if the spirit so moves me—the thing that most impressed me was how well it pulled off two simultaneous and complementary tropes, what I’ll call “inevitable demise” and “cruel and unusual death.”
These are often found side-by-side in horror movies. Most frequently, at least in my experience, they show up in slasher films, usually ones that are either intentionally campy or are just plain not that good. This isn’t coincidence. These tropes are difficult to pull off with any kind of storytelling grace. When paired, they tend to end up in narratives where subtlety and depth weren’t ever on the menu.
In the “inevitable demise” trope, the audience knows full well that a character, or several characters, are doomed. This could be because a frame device tells you they’re already dead, or because other tropes are used that signal this likely outcome: a family moves into a haunted house; a group of teenagers arrives at a creepy summer camp; a collection of survivors flees a zombie apocalypse. The audience expects from the start that most of these people aren’t gonna make it.
What’s tricky about this is that it shifts the source of tension. The audience has no expectation the person will survive, so you lose the hope that adds stakes to life-threatening situations. The question becomes not if they die but when and how, and what that means for the other characters.
One thing to note is that the inevitable death trope isn’t unique to horror. It’s also common in historical fiction, military fiction, and disaster thrillers. In Titanic, for example, there’s a sense of impending doom hanging over the ship because the audience knows its journey doesn’t end well. This works for the film because it adds another layer to Jack and Rose’s relationship. Even as they’re falling in love, the viewer understands it’s going to end in tragedy, adding emotional weight to their romance.
The ”cruel and unusual death” trope is more firmly in the horror domain. This is when characters are picked off one-by-one in unique ways, often increasingly creative and gruesome as the story goes on. This can quickly veer into ridiculous territory that pushes the story toward camp, whether or not that was the intent.
I’ll cite my favorite example of this done poorly to illustrate, which is M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. The premise of the film is basically that the trees are making people kill themselves—a concept bordering on ridiculous already, that doubles-down on the absurdity by having people choose absolutely bizarre methods to off themselves, including my personal favorite of “suicide by riding lawnmower.”
To keep cruel and unusual deaths compelling, rather than laughable, the story needs to give the strangeness some kind of in-world logic. This is usually done in one of two ways:
- Death finds a way – The character is doomed, and death overcomes their efforts to avoid their fate by making everything around them fatal. The Final Destination series is a prime example. The Rube Goldberg fatalities are intentionally over-the-top, demonstrating death’s power as it catches people who sidestepped their pre-determined demise.
- Psycho killer with a mission – The unusual deaths are chosen intentionally by a killer to send a moral message. Examples would include Jigsaw’s “games” in the Saw series or the murders in Seven. In both cases, the killer intentionally sets up bizarre deaths that mirror the victim’s sins or bad behavior.
Even when you give this kind of in-world logic, though, it doesn’t always hit. I’m thinking of the movie Smile, which combines these two strategies. In that film, an evil parasitic force passes from one victim to the next by forcing an observer to watch its current host kill themselves. That justifies the unusual deaths somewhat—making the deaths unusual amps up the new victim’s terror, making them more susceptible to the parasitic takeover. Even so, there are instances where the death method strains the viewer’s suspension of disbelief.
The Fall of the House of Usher avoids this trap and successfully wields both of these tropes in tandem. All of the deaths are inevitable and heavily foreshadowed within each episode. Every death is also extremely cruel, very unusual, or both, and no two victims in the series die the same way.
I think there are 3 main reasons this works:
The mystery comes from the why, not the who or how. The question that keeps the viewer hooked on the series isn’t who will die next, or whether certain characters will survive—it’s why Roderick Usher is convinced he’s the cause. The slow reveal of this underlying logic restores the energy and momentum that are otherwise lost by knowing who dies next.
The deaths aren’t random. The show employs both the “death finds a way” and “psycho killer with a mission” methods. A supernatural force steers the individuals to their respective demises, which are tailored to match their lives—not always a direct comeuppance for past sins like in Seven, but adjacent to that strategy.
Death has agency. The murderous force in Usher isn’t quite death personified a la Supernatural or similar shows, but we do see the bringer of death making conscious decisions about who will die and how. This adds another level of intrigue for the audience. Death isn’t indiscriminate—it targets the people who either must die or deserve to die, and punishes them accordingly. That makes the individual deaths more satisfying, along with reinforcing the in-story logic.
As someone who loves a good bloodbath, I was tickled by Fall of the House of Usher and will likely give it a re-watch in the near future, not just out of enjoyment but to study how it tells its tale. I’d definitely give it a strong recommend for horror writers who play in slasher, splatterpunk, or similarly high-body-count sandboxes. It effortlessly balances gore, mystery, and emotional weight, with winks of humor and camp. The concept is one that could easily have gone very wrong but didn’t, and that alone makes it worth the watch for horror writers, in my book.
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