Who is Verna in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher?’

Warning: The article contains spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher.

Depends on what you mean. If you mean “Who plays Verna in Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher?” the answer is Carla Gugino, returning to work with showrunner Mike Flanagan after previously collaborating on Gerald’s Game, The Haunting of Hill House, and Midnight Mass. Depending on your personal preference, she’s the mom from Spy Kids, the parole officer from Sin City, or one of half a dozen characters from Zack Snyder’s decades-long demo reel of how nifty stuff looks in slow motion.

If, on the other hand, you’re wondering who the character Verna is supposed to be in the larger universe of The Fall of the House of Usher, the answer is a little more vague. The most simplistic answer: She’s comeuppance. She’s the classic gonna-getcha, Faustian, genie-that-won’t-stop-grinning-while-you-make-your-wish source of narrative-inducing devilry.

In the final episode of the miniseries, we learn that the seemingly ageless, occasionally chimpanzee-ish Verna struck a deal with Usher family progenitors Roderick and Madeline back in 1980, just after they’d murdered their boss: They’d live cozy, unjailed lives of luxury, as long as they were cool with the fact that they’d die together and that all of their heirs would die at the same time. “Cool,” the Ushers said paraphrasingly, and they went off into the world to enjoy years of opulence, comfort, and not getting too attached to their kids.

Verna – whose name is an anagram of “Raven,” indicating either a reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s iconic harbinger of death, or to the gothic 19th-century author’s love of Teen Titans Go!, we’ll let you decide  – becomes the force behind the generally yucky deaths of the Usher family. She sticks acid in sprinkler systems, regifts cats with behavioral issues, and, in a less than subtle turn of the knife, goes full improv class, does an ape impression, and mauls a lady. It’s a wild subversion of the events of the Poe story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” from which the episode takes its name. That’s what my friends who know how to read tell me, anyway. 

It’s important to note that Verna doesn’t seem to do this for personal reasons. She gets a jolt out of punishing bad guys, but she’ll still snuff out someone nice, as we see when she sends good old Lenore to her eternal naptime. Swatting folks out of existence is her job, not her hobby, and while she might enjoy parts of it, she mostly goes where the work takes her. In contemporary terms, she’s Uber for death by poetic irony.

Also, did it bother anyone else that they didn’t even ask Usher to be in this? Eight episodes of this show, and nobody sings “My Boo” once. That doesn’t seem like it’s what Poe would have wanted.