Hornified by Trippy, Hot Bitches
Masque of the Red Death in Netflix's Fall of the House of Usher (2023)
This week, for your viewing pleasure, I have decided to revisit my favourite episode of Fall of the House of Usher: The Masque of the Red Death. It contains SO MANY of my interests: inter-textual references, incredible outfits, and characters who are completely hornified by the circumstances in which they find themselves.
It begins with the sound of an instant camera, that slithery zip of a Polaroid or Fuji Instax, and a discussion of necrophilia. There is a chemical aroma to these pleasingly tactile photographs that I enjoy, along with their discomposed quality that sets them apart from the ubiquitously recomposed phone camera image. This kind of tactility is something that is present throughout the episode, as we are invited to enter a world driven by sensations grounded in the real and in the supernatural.
In this series, the fall of this complicated family of rich but entertaining assholes is spearheaded by Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly and Malcolm Goodwin) and his investigations into the highly addictive pharmaceuticals that have built the Usher fortune. This kind of blood money exposé is clearly modelled on the revelations attached to the Sackler fortune, setting up an unexpected intertext between the queer gothic fun ride that is Netflix’s Fall of the House of Usher and the magnificent documentary, All the Beauty and The Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022), which follows the photographer Nan Goldin and her activism in forcing art museums to divest from Sackler family donations.
Prospero Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota), otherwise known as “Gucci Caligula”, is introduced surrounded by a nest of slumbering lovers, some of whom are actually still awake and crushing white pills with a steel butt plug on his kitchen counter. This establishes Prospero as a hedonist who remains unconcerned about the origins of his family’s money. For someone who is clearly so willing to experiment with desire and drugs, he remains utterly naïve about the ways in which his family’s dubiously acquired wealth will come back to haunt him. Visiting one of his siblings in a quest to supply Viagra to his pop-up sex rave, he’s told “You’re in your twenties! You’re basically 80% cum, I can fucking smell it” And while this is an evocative description of his sex drive, it also suggests that he’s….well...a very dirty boy. Which I imagine is part of his appeal.
A fortune built upon painkillers, ambition, and a lust for money. A sex party at an abandoned factory that’s been condemned by the EPA. What could possibly go wrong?
But Prospero isn’t just any hedonist: he’s willing to spy on and blackmail his fellow party-goers by secretly recording them. It is here that he reveals his mercenary nature as an Usher, in his willingness to monetise his own love of physical pleasure. It is therefore no surprise when Verna (the glorious Carla Gugino) makes her appearance, luring him into a red room with the promise of seduction.
She rhapsodises about the party’s atmosphere: “the beautiful flesh…so pretty and soft. But the smells of it! All that sweat, the perfumes, the lotions, the musk. Sex…yes, but with a dash of Rome. Tell me, and don’t lie. Is it everything you wanted it to be?” Answering her, we see Prospero become soft because truly he is no sorcerer, and he is ready to become whatever this being wants him to be. I imagine these two smelling of jasmine and latex, trails of scent lingering in the folds of Prospero’s crushed velvet kimono. Here, Verna wears something like Jasmin Gyokourou, its freshness of petals and pear undercut by a sinking into the kind of musk she so clearly relishes. Prospero’s skin would smell of bodies, but his velvet jacket would have that dash of Rome, with aromas of aniseed, blood orange, and spilled wine clinging to the fabric.
Anyone who has ever danced to Nine Inch Nail’s ‘Closer’ will know that no good can come from the dropping of this particular musical cue. The melting flesh of a chemical burn is nevertheless quite the gross-out finish to this particular episode. That said, I rather like the juxtaposition at work here, the suggestion that Death has a fondness for beautiful, bad boys and that she will wade into this ‘vortex of pleasure’ (a phrase I have shamelessly stolen from the English translation of Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera) for one last embrace with Prospero’s shattered remains.
Haha. Your work is always best read whilst still in bed 🔥
Nice!!! Well that’s certainly woke me up this morning!