Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: Film and TV, Netflix
Callum Jones
Netflix viewers are being urged to avoid one extremely brutal scene in The Fall of the House of Usher.
Heading up to Halloween season, you are probably looking for something to watch to get into the spooky mood.
While you could watch some of the endless Halloween classics that are on offer, many will want to be trying something new in the coming weeks.
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One series you may want to try out on Netflix is The Fall of the House of Usher, an eight-episode drama created by Mike Flanagan.
Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story of the same name, the short series follows Roderick Usher, the CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company, who goes through a terrible ordeal as his children begin to die in a mysterious and brutal fashion.
The Fall of the House of Usher has been praised for the most part by industry critics, sitting at a rather impressive 91 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
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"There are numerous scenes that elicit instant goosebumps..." the Chicago Sun-Times' review reads.
While the Financial Times' review said: "Poe’s narratives and Gothic conventions provide the skeleton of the show, but Flanagan also pulls out the urgent themes of those works: conscience and the unconscious, greed and paranoia, sex and death."
But while The Fall of the House of Usher may have been praised massively by critics and audiences alike, it is certainly not for the faint hearted.
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In fact, some viewers are urging those who haven't watched it to avoid one particular scene.
There will be spoilers ahead, so be warned.
The scene in question features in the fourth instalment of the series, 'The Black Cat', which focuses on the death of Leo Usher (Rahul Kohli), Roderick's third child to die.
After adopting a new cat, things begin to turn for Leo as the animal begins hunting rats and pigeons, subsequently leaving them for Leo to find.
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Without going too far into spoilers, the presence of a previous cat and a certain mutilation scene has led to some viewers warning others about watching.
"This is the only thing I’ll say about The Fall of the House of Usher so far, but what does Mike Flanagan have against cats, my guy, stop it," one person penned on X, formerly known as Twitter.
A second added: "If u have a severe reaction to cat abvse/cat d3ath/lots of g0ry imagery of cats dont watch House of Usher btw."
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While a third remarked: "The Fall of the House of Usher was so freaking good. (minus the cat mutilation)."
Flanagan has actually spoken out to deny he has some form of vendetta against cats.
He claims that no cats died in the plot of the episode, with it all ultimately being a hallucination.
He wrote on X: "Okay. So… ‘The Black Cat’ was written by Edgar Allan Poe.
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“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?"
Flanagan went on to reveal the shot of a black cat at the end of the episode is Leo's original cat, and not its extremely violent replacement.