‘Fall of the House of Usher’ FuseFX VFX Supervisor On Creating Realistic Horror For Mike Flanagan’s Poe-Inspired Series

One might encounter some unusual research when you’re a visual effects supervisor tasked with working on a Mike Flanagan project.

Case in point, Marshall Krasser, the FuseFX VFX supervisor working on Flanagan’s fall Netflix project The Fall of the House of Usher, and team needed to perform all kinds of gruesome research for the limited series. One such sequence was the buzz-about death of Prospero “Perry” Usher, the youngest son of the doomed Usher family. In this show-stopping moment, Perry plans a no-inhibition rave in an abandoned Usher warehouse. Believing tanks on top of the building contained water, he plans for a late-night rain shower over his invited guests.

Instead, the water tanks contained chemical waste which does indeed rains down on the assembly, burning them alive.

Krasser’s team at FuseFX accentuated the prosthetics used for the sequence.

Well, most of his team…

“We actually had one artist in particular who requested to not work on it. It just creeped him out a little too much,” Krasser revealed. “We did have some reference footage of acid dropping on a dead chicken leg which would bubble up as it hit. That was a really good guide of how acid would react when it came in contact with flesh.”

The goal was to provide realism without going overly grotesque in this Edgar Allen Poe-influenced project. The audience needed to feel uncomfortable, not nauseous. To reflect the progression of the acid rain, Krasser and his FuseFX VFX team developed effects to reflect four progressions of the skin and affected body. The first progression involved a reading of the skin to follow the characters’ movement during the dance. That would allow the VFX team to then project an eerie red and illustrate early bubbling on the skin. That progressed all the way to level four with actual skin and clothing melting, including a shot of a mask deteriorating to highlight the severity of the damage without necessarily focusing on human bodies. The team also developed different levels of steam and smoke — what they called “the whispies.”

Krasser and the FuseFX VFX team received assignments from Bret Culp, the studio-based VFX supervisor who handled outsourcing various projects. Krasser didn’t work on the entire series. Rather, they were assigned specific areas on which to focus. In addition to the “Perry party,” they needed to create the building in which it took place. The actors performed on a partial set with VFX completing the look. Krasser wasn’t able to visit the set, so they worked to extend the building set from provided photos. They fully created the exterior for day and nighttime shots and created the interior upper walls and ceiling.

That would prove exceptionally critical for later in the series.

In episode seven, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Henry Thomas’s Frederick Usher is drugged and paralyzed by Carla Gugino’s Verna (an anagram for Raven) during the building’s demolition. As he lays fully conscious yet unable to move, the building tumbles down around him. Pieces of the infrastructure form a pendulum / scythe which continuously swings and inches closer and closer until it bisects him. Alive.

The sequence would prove some of the most complex on the series.

“Everything we worked on was challenging, but with the building collapse, we needed to figure out all the timing and sequencing of pieces of the building falling and that fluid continuity of motion,” Krasser explained. “My hope is, when people sit there and watch it, they’re not really thinking about it as being effects there. They’re more reacting to what’s happening to him than how it was made. That was probably some of the most advanced effects works in my almost 30 years of visual effects.”

The Fall of the House of Usher streams exclusively on Netflix.