Watch: Queer Characters, Family Dysfunction, Opioids... Netflix's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' a Trick-Filled Halloween Treat

The following contains spoilers for "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Horrormeister Mike Flanagan is back again with a scary, smart Netflix miniseries for the Halloween season. This time, the "Haunting of Hill House" auteur stitches "Succession," "Dopesick," sharp satire, and plenty of queer characters together into a monstrously fun show.

The eight-episode series doesn't just take its title from an Edgar Allen Poe story; it's essentially a one-stop Poe Cinematic universe. Esquire said that the series "sees inventive adaptations of Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' 'The Cask of Amontillado,' 'The Masque of the Red Death,' 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' 'The Pit and the Pendulum,' and many more scary stories.'"

But the real horror may derive from the way Flanagan has ripped the beating heart of one of today's most shocking stories right out of the headlines and implanted it at the center of his new opus, with a none-too-thinly-veiled plot that references the Sackler family and the opioid crisis that has engulfed much of America.

Flanagan makes it work. "By the end, viewers are left with a complete narrative – and a mystery that's solved by supernatural events. While it may be a little too based in the real world, 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is is still a blast," Esquire said.

"When we meet them at the beginning of the story, the family is navigating a huge public trial over Ligodone having killed thousands of people and deepened the substance crisis and epidemic in the United States," explained Teen Vogue, which noted that the show is reminiscent of series like "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina," only "a lot more queer and a touch more sinister."

Added Teen Vogue: "The show is set up immediately to be fundamentally about people's fears of disability and mortality, desires as downfall, addiction not only to substance but to power, and powerful people's chickens coming home to roost."

Flanagan turned to actors he's worked with before in creating his scarefest. The show centers around Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood, "Gerald's Game") the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company, and his brood of children – "six children by five mothers," as Roderick explains to the gay Assistant U.S. Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly, "Doctor Sleep") during the course of a long, dark night of confessions. This allows the cast to be ethnically diverse, even as the characters are ethically uniform in their callous amorality.

Decades ago, Roderick and his sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell, "Battlestar Galactica") made a pact with a mysterious bartender named Verna (Carlao Gugino, "Midnight Mass," "The Haunting of Bly Manor") and have come to enjoy enormous wealth, ignoring the law and never paying a price for it.

Only, now, the bill has come due... and the house of Usher crumbles quickly, with all six of Roderick's children meeting untimely ends. Those children include the clueless Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas, "The Midnight Club"), who's rather reminiscent of Connor Roy from "Succession," as well as the bisexual Leo (Rahul Kohli, "Midnight Mass"), the smart and ruthless Camille (Kate Siegel, "The Haunting of Hill House"), lesbian scientist Victorine (T'nia Miller, "The Haunting of Bly Manor"), Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan, "Midnight Mass"), and Perry (Sauriyan Sapkota, "The Midnight Club"). The ends they meet are as varied and inventive as the string of deaths in any slasher, but the series' atmospherics are downright Gothic. In short, the series is "batshit crazy," as Netflix's Tudum site puts it.

We hope you're ready for some big scares and plenty of laughs – some of them rueful, some pure schadenfreude. Tune in and binge – if you haven't already.

Check out the preview below.