The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan’s latest horror miniseries that’s destined to doom us to sleepless nights spent in fright this spooky season, is perhaps the creator’s most ambitious Netflix offering to date. The Haunting showrunner pressed through serious behind-the-scenes upheaval to get this series made, which is nominally an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name but is really creating something of a Poe Cinematic Universe, by intertwining many of the Gothic author’s stories into one.
With any luck, Fall will be another win for the outgoing Flanagan when it hits streaming this October. Its success may come as a sad reminder of the project that got away for one of his fellow Netflix creators, however. While it’s Flanagan who’s shepherding this take on the classic tale to the small screen, Wednesday director Tim Burton once tried to get his own twist on the source material to the big screen, back when he was at the height of his powers, but it failed to escape its coffin.
Tim Burton’s Fall of the House of Usher movie was doomed to an early death
While his unmade movie graveyard is not quite as heavily populated as, say, Guillermo del Toro’s, Tim Burton nonetheless has a variety of films that never made it to production in his past. Most famously, there’s Superman Lives, which finally became immortalized in cinema in some fashion thanks to Nicolas Cage’s cameo as Kal-El in The Flash. In contrast, Flanagan’s Fall series is reminding us that one of Burton’s biggest passion projects unfortunately failed to materialize.
Burton is perhaps the biggest Poe fanboy alive today, wearing the writer’s influence on his own work on his sleeve — for proof, check out Vincent, the stop-motion film he made as a young animator at Disney in the 1980s, a semi-autobiographical tale about a boy who makes-believe that he’s Edgar Allan Poe. So naturally, post the immense success of Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and his other early-90s hits, Burton turned his hand to making a full-on Poe adaptation.
In 1994, Burton’s Fall of the House of Usher movie was being developed at Warner Bros., as based on a screenplay by Jonathan Gems. Interestingly, much like Flanagan, Burton intended to reinvent the story by removing its period setting and relocating it to the present, as he recently confirmed to The Independent. Burton’s film was to be set in modern-day California, likely as a further nod to the director’s childhood spent obsessing over Poe while growing up in sunny Burbank.
Unfortunately for Burton, the project stalled in pre-production and he instead jumped ship to Mars Attacks!. Since then, there’s been no other attempt to make a major new adaptation of the story, until Flanagan has finally stepped in to pick up where Burton left off. The Fall of the House of Usher debuts on Netflix this Oct. 12.