11 details you might have missed in Netflix's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

"The Fall of House Usher" is crammed with characters and storylines that are inspired and influenced by a lot of Edgar Allan Poe's writings. But some of the figures in the Ushers' story are named after real people in Poe's life.

Audiences are introduced to a young Roderick Usher (Lincoln Russo) and his sister, Madeline (Kate Whiddington), in the first episode.

They're raised by Eliza Usher (Annabeth Gish), a single parent who works at the Fortunato pharmaceutical company. Eliza is named after Poe's own mother, Eliza Poe, who died at the age of 24.

Early in episode one, it's established that the Usher siblings' biological father is actually their mother's boss at Fortunato, Mr. Longfellow (Robert Longstreet). He's named after the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who Poe famously accused of being a plagiarist in the 1840s.

As the series progresses, there are numerous flashbacks to when an adult Roderick (Zach Gilford) is working for Rufus Griswold at Fortunato in the 1970s. Griswold is also the name of the poet and critic who published some of Poe's work in 1842.

Every single one of the Usher children have names taken from Poe's fiction or poetry.

Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) is named for Prince Prospero, a wealthy nobleman who throws a masquerade ball for the rich amid a gruesome plague in "The Masque of the Red Death."

Napoleon (Rahul Kohli) gets his name from "The Spectacles," a story about a man who ends up marrying his own great-grandmother.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" features a character called Camille L'Espanye, which is also the name of Kate Siegel's character.

T'Nia Miller plays Victorine LaFourcade, whose namesake is in "The Premature Burial."

"Midnight Mass" alum Samantha Sloyan stars as Tamerlane, which comes from Poe's poem about the 14th-century conqueror of the same name.

Roderick's eldest child, Frederick (Henry Thomas), is named for the main character of "Metzengerstein" who clashes with a rival family.

"The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" star Carl Lumbly plays C. Auguste Dupin, the assistant US attorney who has been investigating the Usher family and the Fortunato company since the 1970s for corruption, murder, and a litany of other crimes.

Dupin is inspired by a detective of the same name who is a recurring character who appears in three stories written by Poe. The character made his debut in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which sees Dupin figure out who killed Camille L'Espanye and her mother.

The detective shows up again in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," when he tries to solve the mystery behind a body that's discovered in the river Seine. Poe's third Dupin story, "The Purloined Letter," sees the detective tackle a criminal who is blackmailing the French queen.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" creator Mike Flanagan reunited with frequent collaborator Carla Gugino for the new series, after working with her on "Gerald's Game," "The Haunting of Hill House," and "The Haunting of Bly Manor."

In the new series, Gugino plays Verna, a mysterious entity who forces the Ushers to face their sins and pay for their crimes by killing them in a variety of gory ways.

The name "Verna" is an anagram of raven, which is fitting considering how the character taunts the whole family in a similar way to how the bird tormented the student in Poe's original poem.

Most of the episodes in the series are named for Poe's short stories, and each one relates to what happens to the Usher child it focuses on. For example in episode two, "Masque of the Red Death," Prospero Usher throws a depraved masked party/orgy in an old Fortunato warehouse.

But when the sprinklers are turned on to douse the partygoers on the dancefloor, the left-over chemicals in the building severely burn the attendees in a grisly scene.

This idea is (loosely) taken from Poe's short story of the same name, where Prince Prospero holds a "safe" masquerade ball for the wealthy in the middle of a plague, called the Red Death. The story ends with Prospero and his guests all contracting the disease and abruptly dying.

The other episodes that match Poe's short stories are "Murder in the Rue Morgue," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Gold-Bug," and "The Pit and the Pendulum."

While six of the episodes get their titles from Poe's short stories, the premiere and the finale are each taken from Poe's most famous poem. Episode one is called "A Midnight Dreary," which is part of the first line of "The Raven."

The poem from 1845 revolves around an unnamed student who is taunted by a raven while grieving for his late lover, Lenore.

The final episode of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is simply called "The Raven," to honor Poe's famed work.

Not all of the Usher siblings' deaths correspond to what happens to the Poe characters they're named for, but Camille's does.

In the show, Camille L'Espanye runs Fortunato's PR department and manages the family's public image during numerous crises. But she's not immune from the tragedies that plague the family, and she ultimately meets a brutal end herself.

When she sneaks into Victorine's lab (conveniently also named RUE Morgue) to dig up dirt on her half-sibling, she encounters Verna disguised as a security guard at the facility. After Verna releases one of the caged chimpanzees that Victorine had been experimenting on, the creature flies into a rage and savagely mauls Camille to death.

In Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Detective C. Auguste Dupin (the namesake of Lumbly's character) investigates the deaths of Camille L'Espanye and her mother on a street in Paris called Rue Morgue. He eventually discovers that they were both brutally killed by an orangutan that had escaped after being brought to the city by a sailor.

Former "Bachelor" producer Elan Gale has a cameo in episode two as the bartender speaking to Prospero about setting up the sprinklers in the abandoned warehouse, before the ill-fated party. Gale isn't an actor, so this appearance may seem random. But he and series creator Mike Flanagan have actually been friends for years after tweeting about their admiration for one another's projects and later meeting in person.

The two have worked together several times before on other Flanagan projects. Gale was a producer and writer on two of Flanagan's previous Netflix shows, "Midnight Mass" and "The Midnight Club." Although he didn't produce "The Fall of the House of Usher," it's cool to see that Flanagan gave him a cameo — he did the same with "The Haunting of Hill House," where Gale briefly appeared as a mold remediator working on Hill House.

Interestingly, one of Prospero's partners, Jenny, is played by "Castle" alumni Molly Quinn who is engaged to Gale. The pair started dating in 2015 and were together for four years before Gale proposed to the actor in 2019.

Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan) and her husband William (Matt Biedel) run a fitness company called Billt. William is the face of the company as a fitness influencer, and he leads the virtual gym classes that subscribers get access to.

Throughout the series, Tamerlane is developing a new app called Goldbug, a Goop-like company that blends the fitness side of Billt with health and beauty products. The Goldbug name is also pulled from (yet another) short story by Poe.

"The Gold-Bug" follows two friends who discover a bizarre insect seemingly made out of gold, which sends them on a quest to discover buried treasure.

In episode six, Roderick opens up to Dupin about the mysterious family lawyer Arthur Gordon Pym (Mark Hamill). He explains that Pym set out on an expedition around the world when he was younger, and he used to tell the Usher children stories about his adventures.

According to Roderick, the Usher children used to make up their own ideas about Pym's travels because he never told them all the details. He also recalls that when Tamerlane was young, Pym told her he found a mythical island in the North Pole called Ultima Thule. Pym claimed that it was home to a race of creatures who lived "beneath us out of time, out of space."

While there isn't really an island called Ultima Thule, the name actually was a Latin term used to refer to a place that was so far away it was considered unreachable. The Nazis also believed that Ultima Thule was "a prehistoric Aryan utopia that collapsed because of racial miscegenation," according to history professor Eric Kurlander.

NASA had named an object in space after Ultima Thule, but decided to rename it to Arrokoth after backlash over the title's Nazi history.

Also in episode six, Lenore (Kyleigh Curran) is watching an old black-and-white movie with her bedbound mother, Morella (Crystal Ballint), while Morella recovers from the horrific chemical burn injuries she got at Prospero's party.

The quick clip of the movie seems to be a version of Poe's story "The Pit and the Pendulum," where a swinging blade threatens to cut a man in half.

This blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment foreshadows how Lenore's father, Frederick (Henry Thomas) is killed in episode seven.

Frederick's the eldest of the Usher children, and he personally takes it upon himself to be there when Fortunato demolishes the doomed old warehouse that Prospero used for the masquerade party.

But Verna punishes Frederick for torturing his helpless wife by ensuring that he gets trapped in the building when it starts to come down, and he gets bisected by a swinging piece of debris.