The Fall Of The House Of Usher's Gnarly Ape Episode Earned Mike Flanagan An Unlikely Award

Spoilers ahead for "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Mike Flanagan's last production for Netflix is finally here, and it is one hell of a goodbye. After two "The Haunting Of" shows, "Midnight Club" and "Midnight Mass," Flanagan's latest, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is by far his angriest, most cynical TV show yet. What it lacks in emotional catharsis, it more than makes up for in brutal killings. Lots of them.

The show loosely adapts several Edgar Allan Poe short stories, framed around the story of the Usher family's downfall. Having made their money in the pharma industry, Roderick Usher's (Bruce Greenwood) children all start dying off in tragic and gruesome accidents with just the right amount of supernatural undertones.

In a show full of gnarly deaths, one of the worst ones came early in episode 3. Titled "Murder in the Rue Morgue," the episode follows daughter Camille (Kate Siegel) trying to investigate her half-sister's medical lab where she is experimenting on chimpanzees. At the end of the episode, Camille is lured by Verna, an immortal and evil entity played by Carla Gugino, into the lab. There, she is attacked by one of the chimpanzees, who destroys her face and kills her.

The scene is not only gnarly, but it got Flanagan an award from PETA. Specifically, it won the "F**k Around (With Animals) and Find Out" award for "spotlighting the cruelty and pointlessness of experiments on nonhuman primates and other animals."

But the chimpanzee attack is not the only episode to feature animals committing violence on humans. There's also Flanagan's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat." In the episode, Napoleon Usher (Rahul Kohli) snaps and kills his boyfriend's cat, Pluto. Panicking, he replaces the cat with a lookalike, only to realize the new cat is quite violent and sneaky. That ushers a cat-and-mouse game (hah) between the two, with Napoleon tearing down his apartment looking for the cat behind the walls, trying to get revenge after losing an eye to it. In the end, he gets his face mauled, and ultimately (kind of accidentally) jumps off a balcony and to his death in a fit of rage.

In Poe's original story, the protagonist does kill his first cat, named Pluto, but the second one lives when he is caught by the police — after killing his wife. Except, that's not what happens in "The Fall of the House of Usher." Neither of the cats die, and fans may have missed that detail.

Mike Flanagan took to Twitter to reassure animal lovers. "In MY version, the killing of the cat is revealed to be a hallucination. In MY version, the cat is alive and well. So who hates cats?" Flanagan said. When a reader asked how to notice that Pluto is alive, he elaborated.

"That's why we made such a big deal about the fact that Pluto was wearing a Gucci collar, and the new cat was not," he continued. "Look at the cat in the final shot of the episode, who is wearing the collar ... and the empty bathtub, which means ALL of the animal violence was imagined."