The Fall Of The House Of Usher Brought A Character From The Incredibles Into Live Action
This post contains spoilers for "The Fall of the House of Usher."
Mike Flanagan's partnership with Netflix has resulted in some of the finest works of horror of the past few decades. Between "The Haunting of Hill House" and "Midnight Mass," we have two masterpieces of horror. Plus, there's "Gerald's Game," one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever. Before that partnership ended, however, Flanagan gave us arguably his angriest and gnarliest work yet in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
The limited series, which is a loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's literary work, follows the titular Usher family, whose patriarch Roderick made a fortune in the pharma industry. Their nightmare begins when Roderick's children start dying. One of those children is Camille L'Espanaye. She is the head of PR at Roderick's pharma empire and a ruthless, sharp-tongued woman with dirt on every member of the family. Of the Usher kids, she is the smartest one, the one with a plan, the one that holds the family's public image together.
In an interview before the release of the show (conducted prior to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike), actor Kate Siegel revealed that she based the character of Camille on a character from the popular Pixar film "The Incredibles."
An animated character brought to life, kind of
According to Siegel (via X, formerly known as Twitter), she based Camille on Mirage, who she described as her version of Jessica Rabbit. "I thought [Mirage] was the most beautiful woman I could imagine," she said.
The connection makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Not only does Camille look a lot like the character design for Mirage, but Siegel's performance conveys her as someone with a smart and tough exterior that hides a vulnerable and volatile interior, just like Mirage. Both characters are also manipulative, with Camille using her job to handle most of the family like puppets, while Mirage manipulates Mr. Incredible into inadvertently working for Syndrome.
"Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it," Siegel added. "So sorry to spoil all of your childhood dreams, but Camille is just Mirage."
While Mirage's fate is unknown at the end of "The Incredibles," Camille's fate is a violent, messy one.
While investigating her half-sister's medical experiments on chimps, Camille ends up getting mauled by a chimp (who is actually an immortal angel of death in disguise). It is a gnarly scene, but one that won Mike Flanagan the "F*** Around (With Animals) and Find Out" award from PETA. This is part of the show's much darker tone, particularly compared to Flanagan's other work for Netflix.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is not really an emotional show, at least in that it doesn't aim to make you cry at the end with a huge emotional gut punch. Of course, that stems from the characters. There's no sympathy towards the Ushers. Even the ones you initially think are not that bad are soon shown to be horrible monsters — except for Lenore, but by then it's too late.