Mike Flanagan has delivered his biggest and bloodiest project to date with The Fall of the House of Usher. Based both on Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous short story and a variety of his other works, the Netflix show finds the descendants of a corrupt pharmaceutical CEO coming under attack from a mysterious woman with ominous ties to the family patriarch’s past, resulting in a series of increasingly horrific deaths.
The Fall of the House of Usher ensemble cast features a number of Flanagan vets and newcomers, including Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Rahul Kohli, Henry Thomas, Zach Gilford, Kate Siegel, Mary McDonnell, Samantha Sloyan, T’Nia Miller, Sauriyan Sapkota, Ruth Codd, Carl Lumbly, Kyliegh Curran and Mark Hamill. In addition to the haunting atmosphere of Poe’s stories, the show displays some of Flanagan’s most grandiose production to date, namely with the gruesome deaths of various Usher family members.
Following the show’s acclaimed premiere, Screen Rant exclusively interviewed FuseFX VFX Supervisor Marshall Krasser to discuss The Fall of the House of Usher, his team’s work in creating some of the show’s most memorable set pieces and how some artists requested to opt out of some of the more disturbing sequences.
Warning: Major SPOILERS lie ahead for The Fall of the House of Usher!
Marshall Krasser on The Fall of the House of Usher
Screen Rant: I’m a big fan of The Fall of the House of Usher, as well as Mike Flanagan in general, so I’m really excited to get to talk about this show. When were you and your team were first approached by him and Netflix to be a part of the process?
Marshall Krasser: Yeah, I’m trying to backtrack and see, I know there was some early preliminary stuff prior to April 2022, so somewhere around that range is when the first discussion started, probably a little prior to that. But I know in April 2022, we got the scripts, and so we started diving into them, and reading them, and kind of breaking them down in our minds, what we’re going to have to do and what was going to be involved. We were very aware that it was a very ambitious project, so I think, from what I’ve been able to determine, kind of from start to finish, as far as calendar’s concerned, it was somewhere around 15 months that we put in basically from script to final delivery. That’s calendar years, we’re not counting the actual hours. [Laughs]
Oh, I’m sure with the hours it probably feels like 36 months!
Marshall Krasser: Yeah, it’s way up there somewhere.
Well, I know, with shows like this, different production houses unite, in a sense, to help put it together. When Mike and Netflix first approached FuseFX to do the visual effects for the show, was it always the plan that you were going to do the Prospero party sequence, or were there other ideas that he had in mind for you guys?
Marshall Krasser: Yeah, I think some of those discussions might have been done prior to me joining the show. So, when I came on primarily it was going to be we call it the “Perry Party,” which would be the shower sequence there, and then, of course, the building destruction and pendulum as well. And then the falling bodies were the main kind of three things that we were focused on. We did have some stuff with the cat, so there was some cat augmentation, and some cat animation, that we added into the mix.
Those are four of my favorite sequences in the show! Now, in designing the factory, how much of that was practical versus how much of that was your team?
Marshall Krasser: Yes, so the exterior of the factory — essentially, all that they had on set was the doorway, the steps leading up the doorway, and just a little bit of a facade around the door. So, everything else other than that was pretty much up for us to design and come up with. We got these iterations, it was an earlier iteration where the building was actually a little bigger. On the left-hand side, it was more of a four or five-story stack, you know, and a building there. It was just a matter of them deciding where they wanted to ultimately land with the exterior being something that would be big enough, and feel like it would tie into the interior, when it came to that point to deal with.
Now, how involved then were you in the interior, was that a different team, or you just didn’t have involvement in that?
Marshall Krasser: Yeah, so the interior, the production side art department had designed it. So, there was a set piece. I was not on set, so I don’t know the specifics, but there was at least, I believe, two walls to it. There might have been a third partial wall that was involved with it, as well, so we had to do a lot of extensions. It went up maybe, two-and-a-half stories, some of the times the camera would go up, and it would get up into the rafters and the lights and stuff up there. So, we had to remove those, and extend the building up. With that, we at least had kind of a guide to match, as far as the plates were concerned. I think there was possibly some other kind of cat data that was given to us with a lot of notes, as far as what was going on, or what was going to be needed with that aspect. But, as far as the stuff in the ceiling, that was kind of all upon us. The pendulum had been designed, they had a partial pendulum swinging on set that was done that was mechanical, the one thing that we had to figure out was how it was actually going to break loose, and fall, and get caught and start swinging. That was one of the trickier things, there had not really been any post-vis work done for the sequence, so for us, we kind of talked to them about that, they kind of had their beats all worked out, but there was nothing that really would give us much more direction than what we were seeing on the screen. Sometimes, they’re offline, so it’d be a black screen with text, “The pendulum drops,” you know, “The pendulum drops more inches and starts swinging.” So with that, we did have to work with Mike and his team, the creative team, and then we were working with Brett Cole, who is the studio side visual effects supervisor, on that to kind of figure out what we needed to do in order to be able to tell the story that they were trying to tell in that sequence. So, like I said, that got us into the situation where we have to do a post-vis of mocking it up roughly, impact here, impact here and impact here. It all had to work together, so that’s where things got very complicated in that sequence. Because as the wrecking ball hits, boom, you see it hit in the very next shot as a CG shot. You need to see the continuation of that debris falling, so it was like one of those things, if you change something upstream, it rippled down to other shots, in order to keep the continuity going through. Because if you’re able to film that for real, heaven forbid, they would have had cameras set up, so their reaction would have been caught, and they would have had a continuity that would kind of move through the whole thing. So that, to me, was one of the more challenging things that I’ve actually had to deal with in my career was just trying to keep that continuity of debris and dust and falling, elements like, “That rock is here when you cut away, and then that rock is there continuing to fall as you get in to the next shot.” So, again, that’s where things get really complicated.
Well, as miniscule as it may seem to some, that attention to detail is very well executed in that scene. I especially loved the pendulum, I know you just said that they had already kind of designed it themselves, but because you were also just talking about how there was some post-vis work that needed to be done on it, what was it like retaining the sort of Gothic feel of a Poe story while still essentially being a part of this building?
Marshall Krasser: Like I said, it was a challenge for us just to kind of mentally keep track of it, I mean, Rav Brar was our DFX Supervisor, I kind of tasked him with that. I said, “Well, Rob, you’re gonna have to keep this in your head, and make sure you don’t get hit by a bus as you go out during the day, because you’re the keeper of that information for the most part.” It was the planning and the animatic that took a lot of time. Normally, with stuff like that, you would be working with the director day-to-day to do it, but I know he was very busy with other work that he was involved with, so it was difficult at times to get a line to him to get the feedback, so we would do our best guess, and send it off, and then wait back for the next round of notes. That added a little bit more time to the schedule for us to get actual, hands-on creating. With anything like that, it requires a lot of feedback, because there is a story that the pendulum is telling, and there’s a story that the building is telling, and there’s a story that has to be told, and just to get all of those things pulled in together, yet stay true to the set and the look, it was a challenge, but it was a fun challenge.
Well, again, you pulled it off very well. I also really love Perry’s Party, as you call it, that shower sequence is just burned in my brain. It amazes me how brutal it gets, not just this show, but that sequence in particular, and Mike has not generally gone that far when it comes to gore in a lot of his projects. So I’m curious what that discussion was like with him and his team about how far to take these melting people with the VFX versus how far to pull back?
Marshall Krasser: You know, for the most part, they were trying to hold true to the realism of what would happen. I don’t recall there being any shots — I think we pushed some right to the edge, and they had us back down. That was maybe more specifically on some of the aftermath stuff that we had gone maybe a little too far with it. But yeah, it’s meant to make people feel a little uncomfortable. I think, whether that’s exactly what he was going for, we had some artists that actually kind of requested to not work on that sequence. [Laughs] It was just a little too visceral for them, I guess, would be the right word, so we did have to change some casting on our end. But, it was a trick getting the looks of that. Essentially, what we did was go through and set level of burns, so level 1, 2, 3, 4, and would pick at what point in time that it kind of was at that level. We worked on that shot to get those four key shots kind of working, and then we had to fill in the blanks and the shots in between it to keep the flow moving through it. But as I said, Brett had given us some references that they had found of acid being dropped on a chicken leg, I think it was. The stuff would hit, and it would bubble — we didn’t get too much in the bubbling, I think that’s where I think they felt it was going to go a little too far. So, it was mainly dealing with the smoke that came off of it, and we had a couple of different smoke approaches, we had kind of the lacey smoke, and the wispy smoke, there were different approaches to that. In order to get that, we had to run multiple effects simulations to deal with that. Also, we had to take into account the movement of the body, so we had to do actual body tracks on everybody, so as they moved, that movement would then add air disturbance to the smoke. When you look at it, you think, “Oh, yeah, it’s all there.” But, the point is, if we didn’t have all of those little details, that it would have looked fake. So, for the most part, we were not able to use any 2D practical elements to get the characteristics. Even when we had shots in the aftermath, there was more broad wide ones, we actually simulated that stuff and put it in just so that it would have the same characteristics throughout, because otherwise that’s what you’d see, you would see, “Okay, that smoke is acting different, that seems actually different than this one, shot to shot.” So there, again, it was continuity of that that was tricky and difficult, and also just nailing down the look that they wanted. It took some time and I can say at the end of the day, I think it worked out really good. Disturbing. [Laughs]
I agree it works out very well. Now, obviously, before that all happens, the party sequence does have a lot of extras in there, but they of course don’t likely couldn’t spend the money to make up every extra possible with the burns. How much of the aftermath would you say were practical people versus 3D doubles?
Marshall Krasser: As far as the actual aftermath, when it’s just kind of smoldering, they did have makeup on a lot of them. But there was still select ones we would have to go in and augment. The main heroes we had to do some changing, Perry him, just the build of his body is very slight, so when you start adding makeup applique and stuff on it, that starts changing the feel and the characteristics of the actor. So, there were cases where we actually had to take what was there and compress it down and, in essence, thin it down, so that it looked like it still had the same body shape that they would have when they were alive. As far as adding additional stuff to the background, we did add additional makeup effects randomly around where it was needed. Well, I said makeup effects, but it was like the DMP artists, digital matte painter artists, would kind of match what we had. There were certain things they wanted, they wanted to see a little bit more of the ribcages on stuff, so we created artwork that would show more of the ribcages. On some of the shots where Perry kind of comes up into the camera, we did do some augmentations of the cheek to go deeper in there, because you couldn’t do that with the actor, but to basically get some depth going on, and allow some smoke to escape from that. Even in the preliminary of the Perry’s Party stuff, in the background, people didn’t all have a lot of makeup on it, so we had to add the red neg, and some of the makeup to some of the distant ones too. So, like I said, most of the heavy lifting was done by the practical group on set, and our job was just to kind of come in and assist whenever the director felt that it wasn’t quite telling the story enough for him.
Well, it’s an incredible balance, I didn’t realize they went as practical as they did. Now, that’s not the only time we see Perry burnt out, either, there’s obviously the sequence between Roderick and Juno later on. That might be mostly practical, but did you or your team have any involvement with that sequence as well?
Marshall Krasser: On some of it, there were some specifically that we would definitely add some steam to it. Sometimes with Perry’s cheek, whenever you saw the cheek, I think it was basically just his left side, that would have the indention in there. We did do some, again, thinning, I think when you pan up on the two of them, we thinned out the arms a little bit, and did some additional adjustments there, again, to compensate for that extra stuff that was added on to the actor.
For my final couple of questions before I let you go, I wanted to look towards the body shower sequence, because I think I read that that was part of your team’s as well, when Roderick’s looking out the office window and the bodies are raining.
Marshall Krasser: Yeah, the falling bodies is kind of we call it. That was another tricky one, because we started out with — it was a pretty massive simulation that you had to deal with. So, we had to build the preliminary testing that we did, we built a part of the city, and so we had the bodies falling and hitting and bouncing and dropping and piling up and accumulating. Again, that’s a progression that had to happen throughout the course of the sequence, so a lot of stuff went into that to kind of get all of the bases covered for that. That type of stuff, Michael Capton was in our LA offices and was working with the team down there trying to get everything worked out in the pipeline setup for that. So, as the preliminary testing went through, we were able to get what he wanted. But then the trick is let’s get it into the shots, and there again, on a lot of the shots, it’s a digital environment out there. So, the far background is usually a DMP painting with 3D buildings, so it’s a combination of a two-and-a-half and 3D building that we could start dropping things through. As far as the overall look of that, a lot of the feeling of wetness and everything kind of fell to Derek Bird, who is our overall compositing supervisor for the show. Derek worked with the team in trying to get that sense of rain, because they want it to be like a rainstorm, but you still had to read that they were bodies, and they needed to fall at a realistic speed. When we first did the terminal velocity, they just ended up being blurs, so that was not working quite right. Then, we played into adjusting the speed of the fall, adjusting the motion blur, we did two different versions, one with reduced motion blur that we would mix in back with the normal motion blur to give a little bit more depth in there. Then what we ultimately came down with was we were still having difficulties kind of reading it overall. Mike and his team were talking through it, and it was kind of determined during the lightning flashes, it kind of acts like a strobe, which you kind of saw happening in the Perry shower sequence, you have a strobe effect, where they would become sharp, you would actually see them without motion blur. You can’t really probably viewing it and step through it frame-by-frame, but on the lightning frames, we reduced or almost eliminated all of the motion blur on the falling bodies, so that allows you to pop and read them. Otherwise, they just would have been blurred, so that was a very unique approach that Mike was on board with, and it made things feel realistic and yet creepy, too, something a little beyond the ordinary.
It definitely walks that supernatural line very well. One detail I actually really appreciated about the sequence, which is one that’s obviously hard to do, is that it feels like Bruce is really against a window there. His reflection is seen, and yet we’re getting this haunting visual effect outside. Was that a comp reflection of him in there, or was there real glass, and you had to find a balance?
Marshall Krasser: For the most part, there was definitely glass there. As you can see on my glasses, there’s reflections. [Chuckles] Most of those were retained, the only place where we had a little bit of trickiness was in order to read it is kind of the shot where we tilt up and look down as they fall, because technically to do that, you’re outside the window, because he wouldn’t be able to see straight down. So, there was some cheating that we did there to try to figure out where things were. I think that was one of the more difficult [aspects], but what we ended up doing at the end of the day was playing with the idea that there was water running down the window. So, there’s a little bit of something between us and what’s out there that we kind of tilt down and gives that sense. It’s subtle, but that seemed to kind of help pull everything back in together, just adding a little bit of the water on the windows.
Well, again, it works really well, as does everything else in this show, I loved every second of it. And I’m not the only one, critics are loving it, too, have you seen the reviews that have come out for the show, and if so, how are you feeling about them?
Marshall Krasser: I’ve seen a few reviews, I have not dived heavily into it. I have just been spending a lot of time off grid, and I’m just back in, so I’ve just started actually seeing the episodes, in their final state with all of the music and soundtrack and stuff. So, I’m still working through the sequence right now as we talk, my wife doesn’t want me to view it without her, so we have to get our schedules together, otherwise, you know, I’d sneak through and look at it. [Laughs] But there is some stuff I did pop ahead and look at, so yeah, I will have to dive into reviews. Sometimes reviews are a mixed blessing. To be honest, has there been any reviews on what the visuals were like? I’ve not read any of those, maybe you can enlighten me if there’s that. But, I mean, hopefully the point is that no one is really pointing out the visual effects, it’s just part of the storytelling process is what’s important.
About The Fall of the House of Usher
From Mike Flanagan, the creator of The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, a wicked horror series based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ruthless siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built Fortunato Pharmaceuticals into an empire of wealth, privilege and power. But past secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman from their youth.
Check out our previous The Fall of the House of Usher interview with Production Designer Laurin Kelsey!
The Fall of the House of Usher is now streaming on Netflix!
