Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher has so many references to the story’s author, Edgar Allan Poe, you’d be hard pressed to miss the more overt ones. Some are character names, others are narrative parallels, some are embedded in prop design. But there are some references so tiny, so hidden, we can’t help but raise a glass of Amontillado to how well they’re buried.
There’s one reference you’ll find hidden within the dialogue, and it’s all to do with Toby (Igby Rigney), the long-suffering assistant of morally nihilistic PR mogul Camille L’Espanaye (Kate Siegel).
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“Damn it, Toby! Toby, dammit!” Camille scorns her assistant in episode 2. The line is repeated several times during the series by the Usher family’s monarch of spin, perpetually and vocally unimpressed with the precocious Toby, who is struggling to complete her impossible requests.
Camille’s not glitching or simply uninventive when it comes to lambasting her (very) personal staff member. Toby’s full name in the series is actually Toby Dammit, named for a character from Poe’s 1841 story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” A title with sage advice, we love it.
Toby Dammit is the narrator’s friend in the story, a perpetually ambitious man, full of false bravado and a love for dares, who likes to make hypothetical bets with the Devil — everyone knows one. As the story’s title suggests, Toby bets something pretty valuable, and things don’t end well. He bets the Devil he can leapfrog a bridge turnstile:
He insisted upon leaping the stile, and said he could cut a pigeon-wing over it in the air. Now this, conscientiously speaking, I did not think he could do. The best pigeon-winger over all kinds of style, was my friend Mr. Carlyle, and as I knew he could not do it, I would not believe that it could be done by Toby Dammit. I therefore told him, in so many words, that he was a braggadocio, and could not do what he said. For this, I had reason to be sorry afterwards; — for he straightway offered to bet the Devil his head that he could.
And reader, the whole thing leaves him without… Yeah, a head. You saw it coming.
The truth is, he had been deprived of his head, which after a close search I could not find anywhere…
But Dammit doesn’t die immediately in the story, and his mate sends for… the homœopathists. When Toby eventually does die (shocker), the narrator gets all shitty about having to pay for the funeral himself.
The scoundrels refused to pay it, so I had Mr. Dammit dug up at once, and sold him for dog’s meat.
Luckily, Toby’s character in The Fall of the House of Usher keeps his head. He isn’t sold for meat, either — perhaps he’s named for his naïveté?
This isn’t the first time that this particular short story has inspired a filmmaker. Fellini himself directed a segment called “Toby Dammit” for the old-school anthology Spirits of the Dead, with Terence Stamp as a debauched Shakespearean actor being chased around Rome by the Devil disguised as a creepy little girl. It’s currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
How to watch: The Fall of the House of Usher is now streaming on Netflix.