Fall Of The House Of Usher Star Reveals Camille’s Backstory & How It Ties Into Her Death

The Fall of the House of Usher star Kate Siegel shares Camille’s entire backstory and how it connects to her grisly fate. Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix horror show serves as an adaptation of the combined works of Edgar Allan Poe, chronicling the demise of family members of a pharmaceutical empire’s patriarch. Each member of the Usher family experiences a gruesome death, with Camille meeting her end at the hands of an angry chimpanzee that had been used for medical experimentation.

In a recent interview with Collider, Siegel reveals that there’s much more about Camille than was shown on screen. The actor had devised an elaborate backstory for the character, and it ultimately plays into Camille’s The Fall of the House of Usher death. Check out Siegel’s full comment below:

“So, I believe that Camille and her family were Roma, and Roderick Usher came across them one time near Spain and slept with my mom. I grew up in that way. I was a little bit of a con artist kid and doing all of that, and then I found out when I was 18 that my dad was Roderick Usher, and he asked me to come be with him.

“I went to my mother and my mother said, ‘18 years ago, I slept with the devil. If you are going to this man… you are making the choice to go be with the devil and I wash my hands of you,’ and, ‘What will happen to you?’ I was enticed by the money. I was just this wild kid, so I left. And that’s sort of why when the monkey is about to rip my face off, I get it, because I was like, ‘This was inevitable.’

“I knew it from the second I got the script how it went. There’s this thing that happens, there’s this beautiful structure to that scene, which is like you get this slow, slow, slow, slow, creeping up, slow creeping up, slow creeping up, slow creeping up, and a dénouement that bottoms out at, ‘Fuck it, I got mine,’ and then she gets her face ripped off by the monkey!

“And it’s such a weird structure, so that ‘fuck it, I got mine,’ has to be absolutely angelic almost, like true acceptance and a true understanding that she got the information she needed about her sister and that her sister was messing with those chimps, and she was right, and that was it, but this has to happen and there’s no other way. So it’s acceptance, which is the plié, which lets you, the audience, envision how horrific that death must have been.”

How Camille’s Backstory Speaks To Mike Flanagan’s Biggest Strength

The Fall Of The House Of Usher Continues A Crucial Trend

Flanagan is now one of the biggest names in horror, with Hush and then The Haunting of Hill House really announcing him as one of the foremost creators in the genre. The filmmaker has continued to impress both audiences and critics, with The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher affirming his talent for mixing the horrifying and the dramatic.

One of the biggest things that separates Flanagan’s work from so many others in the horror space is his focus on character. The scares in Flanagan’s works are effective because he devotes so much runtime to fleshing out his characters as real, complex, and flawed people, which is something that sometimes gets lost in other horror ventures. That being said, however, the horror aspect of these shows and movies isn’t just an add-on to this character-focused drama, but inextricably woven into the fabric of the story.

The Fall of the House of Usher very much continues this trend. Although most members of the Usher family are quite despicable people, there’s a depth to each one of them, and their respective demises are tied to aspects of their character. Camille’s backstory in The Fall of the House of Usher isn’t shown on screen, but it does enrich her as a character and inform Siegel’s performance, ultimately making her death all the more powerful and disturbing.