Yahoo News ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: Mike Flanagan Points Out a Detail Some Viewers Missed
The Fall of the House of Usher showrunner Mike Flanagan has been largely keeping quiet amid the rollout of his latest Netflix horror series, but he took to Twitter/X late last week to clarify a burning question from a fan. And if you’re going to take a single question from the internet, it might as well be about a cat.
The question: “What did cats ever do to you?” in reference to episode four’s gory battle between the ill-fated Leo (Rahul Kohli) and a black cat named Pluto in a story that’s loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Black Cat.”
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Flanagan wanted to make it clear that after the cat goes missing, the menacing replacement cat he adopts is entirely a hallucination caused by the mysterious Verna (Carla Gugino) and that Pluto is alive and well.
“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 announced 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 original story, a man awaiting execution describes how he’s an animal lover who became an alcoholic and began to mistreat his pets, including a cat named Pluto who dies. Feeling guilty, he adopts a seemingly identical cat, but increasingly begins to loathe the cat and eventually tries to kill it, too. When his wife stops him, he kills her and hides the body — but the howls of the cat lead police to her corpse. So, the first cat indeed dies, but the second (perhaps real) cat lives.
For more connections between House of Usher and Poe’s work, here are all the Poe references in the show.
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