Obsessed with death, filled with regret and tinged with madness, the works of Edgar Allan Poe were groundbreaking and timeless. So while Netflix’s eight-episode limited series “The Fall of the House of Usher” may take liberties with Poe’s tales, including the 1839 short story which gives the series its title, it faithfully interprets its moral dread.

Poe’s short story is about the final days of the Usher lineage, with the last surviving members, Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline, on death’s doorstep in a crumbling estate. In the screen adaptation, created by longform horror master Mike Flanagan (“The Haunting of Hill House,”“The Haunting of Bly Manor” and“Midnight Mass”) and starring many of his regular cast members, the Ushers are reimagined as big pharma kingpins whose family billions rest on an opioid painkiller linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

It opens with Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) at a funeral for three of Roderick’s six children, all of whom are dying under increasingly bizarre circumstances. Roderick and the company are on trial on a slew of charges, with the government’s lead prosecutor C. Auguste Dupin (Berkeley residentCarl Lumbly), a longtime Usher antagonist, bragging the government has an informant from within the family.

The Rodericks have long been able to escape justice through the cunning of their family lawyer Arthur Pym (Oakland nativeMark Hamill), but even he might not be able to defend the evidence provided by the informant.

Determined to ferret out the mole, Roderick calls a family dinner worthy of a “Knives Out” movie. As each episode progresses, we see the back stories of the children, including a Donald Trump Jr.-like twit (Henry Thomas of“Pet Sematary: Bloodlines”), a video-game magnate (Rahul Kohli), a fraudulent medical researcher (T’Nia Miller), a powerful PR agent (Kate Siegel), a Gen Z party animal (Sauriyan Sapkota) and a life and fitness coach (Samantha Sloyan).

Flanagan borrows characters and plots from other stories penned by the Gothic fiction writer as well. Episode titles include “The Masque of the Red Death,” “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” all Poe titles. Dupin, often called the first detective in American fiction, is the main character in three Poe stories but is not in “Usher”; in the series there are flashbacks to his detective days, when Dupin is played by Malcolm Goodwin (Prime Video’s action crime series “Reacher”).

In some ways, Flanagan accomplishes in his series what Roger Corman accomplished with his adaptations of Poe’s work in several movies in the 1960s, many starring Vincent Price, including “The House of Usher” (1960). There’s a clear love of Poe, and like Corman’s movies there are gleefully grim performances, especially from Hamill (who is the polar opposite of Luke Skywalker here) and Carla Gugino as Verna, a mysterious figure who seemingly haunts the Ushers.

The tonal difference between the books and the series? The makers of “The Fall of the House of Usher” are having way more fun.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com