--- description: 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' premiering Oct. 12, is likely the horror master's last show for the platform. How does it stack up? title: Mike Flanagan's 5 Netflix Horror Series, Ranked image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt082ee5770cebfa38/698a412609208fbc4a41acdd/TFHU_101_Unit_04174RC.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) ## Entertainment Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Television](/tag/television/) ## Television Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # From _Hill House_ to _House of Usher_: Mike Flanagan's 5 Netflix Horror Series, Ranked  by [Judy Berman](/author/judy-berman/)  ## Judy Berman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close TV Critic Oct 12, 2023 2:27 PM CUT  From left: Sauriyan Sapkota, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Matt Biedel, Samantha Sloyan, and Mark Hamill in The Fall of the House of Usher From left: Sauriyan Sapkota, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Matt Biedel, Samantha Sloyan, and Mark Hamill in The Fall of the House of UsherEike Schroter—Netflix  by [Judy Berman](/author/judy-berman/)  ## Judy Berman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close TV Critic Oct 12, 2023 2:27 PM CUT For fans of Netflix horror master Mike Flanagan, the Oct. 12 premiere of his latest show, _The Fall of the House of Usher_, is bound to be bittersweet. The good news is that _House of Usher_, an adaptation of not just the eponymous story, but of [Edgar Allan Poe](https://time.com/3676510/edgar-allan-poe-raven/ "undefined")’s bibliography at large, is up there with his best efforts—a return to form for a creator who went a bit astray with last year’s _The Midnight Club_. The bad news is that it will likely be his last series for Netflix, after Flanagan and his Intrepid Pictures partner Trevor Macy [signed an overall deal with Amazon](https://deadline.com/2022/12/mike-flanagan-amp-trevor-macy-overall-deal-with-amazon-studios-1235186302/ "undefined") in late 2022\. To mark the occasion, and celebrate a remarkable run, I’ve ranked the five single-season shows Flanagan has made for Netflix from worst (which isn’t really so awful) to best, with a bit of extra ink on the sublimely vindictive new _House of Usher_. ## 5\. _The Midnight Club_  From left: Adia as Cheri Ian, Igby Rigney as Kevin, Annarah Cymone as Sandra, Iman Benson as Ilonka, Aya Furukawa as Natsuki, Ruth Codd as Anya, Sauriyan Sapkota as Amesh, Chris Sumpter as Spencer in The Midnight Club Eike Schroter—Netflix In my estimation, Flanagan has only made one disappointing season of TV, and this is it. Drawing on unexpected source material for a creator who likes to remix literary classics—the YA horror novels of Christopher Pike—[_The Midnight Club_](https://time.com/6220107/midnight-club-review/ "undefined")is set at a hospice for teens. It’s 1994, a year when Pike’s books were flying off middle-school library shelves. Positive-thinking heroine Ilonka (Iman Benson) arrives convinced that the place can cure her terminal cancer. She soon stumbles upon the Midnight Club, a secret nightly gathering where the residents laugh in the face of death by telling each other scary stories that come straight out of Pike’s other work. There are some wonderful performances here, namely from Ruth Codd (who returns in _House of Usher_) as Ilonka’s bitter, angry roommate. But the teen-hospice setting limits Flanagan and co-creator Leah Fong’s ability to capitalize on some of his previous shows’ greatest strengths, from rampant psychosexual intrigue to an excellent troupe of adult actors that included Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, and Victoria Pedretti. Instead of subjecting sick kids to gruesome horrors, _The Midnight Club_ reserves its most grotesque moments for the stories they tell. But the decision to devote so much runtime to these tangentially related tales detracts from the characters, robbing their poignant predicament of specificity and emotional weight. ## 4\. _The Haunting of Hill House_  The Haunting of Hill House Steve Dietl—Netflix Flanagan’s first Netflix series became a huge surprise hit—and for many of his fans, this extremely loose adaptation of [Shirley Jackson](https://time.com/4595609/shirley-jackson-100-reviews/ "undefined")’s National Book Award finalist remains the impossibly high standard against which everything he’s done since must be judged. That’s understandable. Like I said, once you get past _Midnight Club_, there’s not a failure on this list. How you rank the three middle-of-the-pack entries, in particular, is a matter of taste more than quality. [_Hill House_](https://time.com/5419832/haunting-of-hill-house-red-room-explained/ "undefined")pulled in viewers with something that can be hard to find in the horror genre: emotional realism. Straddling the early 1990s and the present, it follows the Crains, a big family that lost its matriarch (Gugino) in the eerie mansion she was helping her husband fix up to flip when the five children were still kids. Each has since been wrestling with grief over her death—and confusion about what really happened in the house the night their father (Timothy Hutton) hustled them into the car while their mom remained inside. Episodes devoted to each child explore their respective damaged psychological landscapes in turn. This is all elegantly done. But, at 10 episodes, the show drags in the second half of the season. Its trauma plot doesn’t have the originality of a _Bly Manor_ or a _Midnight Mass_. Most of all, I questioned why so many female characters had to die in the service of repairing a father-son relationship. ## 3\. _The Haunting of Bly Manor_  Victoria Pedretti in 'The Haunting of Bly Manor' Eike Schroter—Netflix [_Bly Manor_](https://time.com/5898216/haunting-bly-manor-review-netflix/ "undefined")over _Hill House_? It’s not a popular opinion, I know. And I’ll admit that Flanagan’s second series gets off to a pretty slow start. But, for me, the profound places it ends up going more than justify a sluggish first few episodes. In 1987, a young woman named Dani (Pedretti) is hired to teach and care for two orphaned children at their wealthy uncle’s country estate in the English countryside, following their previous caregiver’s suicide. You guessed it: we’re in an [updated take](https://time.com/5898095/haunting-of-bly-manor-turn-of-the-screw/ "undefined") on Henry James’ Gothic novella [_The Turn of the Screw_](https://time.com/collection/best-mystery-thriller-books/6309156/the-turn-of-the-screw/ "undefined"). As Dani gets to know her new co-workers on Bly Manor’s household staff, the question arises of why so many talented, once-ambitious people have remained in the “gravity well” of the estate for so many years. Standout performances by T’Nia Miller as the housekeeper and Rahul Kohli as the chef (both return in _House of Usher_) paint observant portraits of characters trapped in the domestic sphere by various forms of inequality, most prominently the caste divisions that support their existences as 24/7 servants to an absent owner. What makes this symbolism work so well is that it isn’t a thematic stretch on Flanagan’s part; class anxiety is written into the very fabric of James’ work, and never more hauntingly than in _The Turn of the Screw_. Also: _Bly Manor_ ends with one hell of a final twist—my favorite Flanagan kicker to date. ## 2\. _The Fall of the House of Usher_  Carl Lumbly, left, and Bruce Greenwood in The Fall of the House of Usher Eike Schroter—Netflix Flanagan’s _The Fall of the House of Usher_ opens in much the same way as the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name: A man arrives at a decrepit home, summoned by an old acquaintance who is deathly ill. But from there, the series expands in directions both typical and wildly unexpected. Like Flanagan’s other adaptations, it riffs on plots and motifs from the author’s most famous works—“The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Yet _House of Usher_ also dares to bring Poe into the most contemporary of contexts, reimagining the unfortunate Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) as the patriarch of an opioid empire in the mold of the [Sacklers’ Purdue Pharma](https://time.com/6104495/purdue-pharma-bankruptcy-victims/ "undefined"). A series of what appear to be tragic coincidences has just befallen the family: Roderick’s six adult children (by five different mothers) have all died, gorily, one after the other. Now afflicted with nightmarish delusions, he has promised a confession to the attorney, Carl Lumbly’s C. Auguste Dupin, who has spent decades laboring to catch the Ushers, whose drugs have killed hundreds of thousands, engaged in illegal activities. It’s quite a long story. Weaving together the past—Roderick and his beloved twin sister Madeline’s (Mary McDonnell) unhappy 1950s childhood, then his rise to power as a young father (Zach Gilford) on the cusp of the ’80s—and the present, it recounts each heir’s untimely demise. A spectral, shapeshifting character played by Gugino appears to each of the Ushers in turn. While the setting is ultra-modern, the atmosphere is archetypally Gothic. Shadows loom. Ravens hover. Psyches suffer. Generous excerpts of Poe’s most morbid texts are recited. _House of Usher_ is, however, anything but a bummer. More propulsive than any other series in Flanagan’s slow-burning canon, it can also be quite funny. Roderick’s magnificently named children, from aspiring nightlife impresario Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) to Kate Siegel’s dagger-tongued PR czar Camille, are hilariously, debaucherously awful. Often, the show feels like a broader, spookier riff on [_Succession_](https://time.com/tag/succession/ "undefined"). (In fact, Roderick’s two eldest offspring have more than a little in common with Kendall and Shiv Roy.) If the script gets a bit preachy in the end, well, _House of Usher_ still brings more insight into the evils of supply and demand to its depiction of pharmaceutical profiteers than the many [straightforward](https://time.com/6302678/painkiller-review-netflix/ "undefined") [docudramas](https://time.com/6105941/succession-wealth-gap-tv/ "undefined") that preceded it. ## 1\. _Midnight Mass_  Samantha Sloyan and Hamish Linklater in 'Midnight Mass' Netflix It’s a testament to Flanagan’s abilities as a storyteller that the very best of the five Netflix series he’s created is also the only one that came straight out of his imagination. Gilford stars as Riley Flynn, a prodigal son who returns from Chicago to the tiny island community where he grew up, now a recovering alcoholic haunted by the teen girl he killed in a drunk-driving accident. Crockett Island is a religious place, but Riley—once an altar boy—has lost his faith. Thankfully, or not, there’s also an enthusiastic new priest in town: Father Paul Hill, portrayed in a gloriously unhinged performance by Hamish Linklater. Miracles start to happen. But religious fervor of the kind Father Paul awakens rarely leads to happy outcomes; Crockett descends into chaos. [_Midnight Mass_](https://time.com/6098478/midnight-mass-review-netflix "undefined")delivers some of the biggest, craziest, most delightfully bizarre set pieces in the Flanagan oeuvre. Two years after it debuted, there are bonkers plot twists that I’m still avoiding here because I don’t want to spoil anyone’s surprise. But these moments are only a small part of what makes the series his masterpiece. Religious anxiety—as it afflicts true believers, non-believers, and hypocrites—is a common theme but one that’s hard to execute without defaulting to cliché. Flanagan uses the outsize imagery of horror to explore different flavors of faith and doubt with nuance. Neither vindicating nor condemning the devout, he suggests that unquestioned fealty to whichever god one worships might be the most dangerous thing of all. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6322568/fall-of-the-house-of-usher-mike-flanagan-netflix-series-ranked/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6322568/fall-of-the-house-of-usher-mike-flanagan-netflix-series-ranked/"},"headline":"From Hill House to House of Usher: Mike Flanagan's 5 Netflix Horror Series, Ranked","datePublished":"2023-10-12T14:27:04.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:52:57.616Z","description":"'The Fall of the House of Usher,' premiering Oct. 12, is likely the horror master's last show for the platform.","url":"https://time.com/6322568/fall-of-the-house-of-usher-mike-flanagan-netflix-series-ranked/","keywords":["Television","review","list","culturepod"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt082ee5770cebfa38/698a412609208fbc4a41acdd/TFHU_101_Unit_04174RC.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Judy Berman","jobTitle":"TV Critic","url":"https://time.com/author/judy-berman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt082ee5770cebfa38/698a412609208fbc4a41acdd/TFHU_101_Unit_04174RC.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"TFHU_101_Unit_04174RC","caption":"The Fall of the House of Usher. (L to R) Sauriyan Sapkota as Prospero Usher, Kate Siegel as Camille L'Espanaye, Rahul Kohli as Napoleon Usher, Matt Biedel as Bill-T Wilson, Samantha Sloyan as Tamerlane Usher, Mark Hamill as Arthur Pym in episode 101 of T","creditText":"Eike Schroter—Netflix","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/television/","name":"Television"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6322568/fall-of-the-house-of-usher-mike-flanagan-netflix-series-ranked/","name":"From Hill House to House of Usher: Mike Flanagan's 5 Netflix Horror Series, Ranked"}}]}] ```