Visualizing Poe’s Ecogothic in 21st-century Pop Culture: Ecocriticism and Corporate Horror in Mike Flannagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

Abstract

While Edgar Allan Poe is nowadays counted among the key figures of American and world literature, his work used to be diminished as tasteless and catering to the masses. Presently, similar prejudice is often held not against Poe’s texts, but their pop cultural adaptations. This paper aims to analyze Mike Flannagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, a 2023 Netflix series drawing from Poe’s milieu and biography alike, as a pop cultural text building on the academic notions of ecogothic and corporate horror. Poe’s literary works have long been read as a 19th-century take on modern ecological principles: viewed from such a contemporary perspective, the texts become actualized. I argue that The Fall of the House of Usher attains a similar goal, proving that texts of pop culture may both develop academic notions and bring literary heritage closer to 21st-century audiences.