Recent streaming and theatrical releases have offered tense and suspenseful tales to honor the spooky spirit of the month, between the eight-episode Edgar Allan Poe-inspired miniseries, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” that went live on Netflix Oct. 12, and the Australian psychological thriller, “The Royal Hotel,” whose broad release premiered on American theater screens Oct. 6.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

In his dozen years of directing feature films and streaming series, Mike Flanagan has demonstrated a crackerjack talent that’s rightly earned praise from proven auteur filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and William Friedkin (RIP).

And yet, to the extent that Flanagan himself might qualify as an auteur, I’d argue he’s achieved less pristine, more workmanlike versions of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptations of, and expansions upon, the works of artists such as Ridley Scott (with “Blade Runner 2049”) and Frank Herbert (with “Dune” Parts One and Two).

Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “Doctor Sleep” reminded me of Peter Hyams’ woefully underrated “2010: The Year We Make Contact,” in a good way, and not just because both screenwriter-directors faced the unenviable task of crafting coherent sequels to austere Stanley Kubrick classics whose interpretations continue to inspire heated debates.

Flanagan not only cracked the code of translating King’s interior prose in “Gerald’s Game” to the screen in a visually accessible fashion, but he’s also built a small kingdom on Netflix out of his inventive reinterpretations of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Christopher Pike’s “The Midnight Club.”

What Flanagan has done with “The Fall of the House of Usher” is arguably his most ambitious exercise yet, because he’s essentially consolidated all of Poe’s works into a single, shared Marvel Cinematic Universe of sorts, that plays fast and loose in recasting Poe’s characters in new roles and settings, while likewise recontextualizing Poe’s plots and verse to accommodate some very modern and novel conceits.

And yet, for all of Flanagan’s liberal revisions, “The Fall of the House of Usher” contains more quotes lifted directly from Poe’s writing than any number of straight-faced adaptations of Poe’s poems or stories, and it plumbs far more obscure depths in dredging up relatively overlooked Poe characters such as C. Auguste Dupin and Arthur Gordon Pym.

By shunting all of Poe’s tales under the narrative umbrella of one corrupt and powerful family’s extensive catalog of sins, Flanagan constructs an ideal anthology framing sequence for featuring not only obligatory, widely recognized Poe favorites such as “The Raven” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” but also too-often ignored gems such as “The Gold-Bug” and “Annabel Lee.”

Virtually all of Flanagan’s regular company of players receive substantive parts in his latest outing, thanks to his addition of several offshoots to the Usher bloodline beyond the canon of Poe’s text, but Flanagan’s loyalty to his stable of actors is rewarded through the quality of their performances, perhaps most notably with the equally entrancing and terrifying Carla Gugino.

From “Gerald’s Game” through “Doctor Sleep,” Flanagan has honed his knack for weaponizing former child actor Henry Thomas’ persistently soft facial features, into depicting a spectrum of

“bad dads,” ranging from merely unreliable and weak-willed, to parasitic and outright predatory.

And Bruce Greenwood, who leads the ensemble as the haunted, conflicted patriarch Roderick Usher, hasn’t had this much dramatic meat to tear his teeth into since he starred alongside Mia Kirshner in Atom Egoyan’s “Exotica” in 1994.

In detailing Usher’s final confession, Greenwood conveys a bone-tired weariness, leavened only by a ruefully wry wit, as he surrenders himself to Carl Lumbly, playing the aforementioned Dupin as the righteous man whom Usher leaned on for moral support, before betraying him for selfish advancement.

Like Greenwood, Lumbly has racked up decades as a solidly watchable supporting character actor, so it’s been a treat to see Lumbly receive a brighter spotlight through the 2017-2019 “Supergirl” series, as well as in the MCU’s “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” even before Flanagan capitalized upon Lumbly’s deft capacity to blend Dupin’s cynically savvy caution with a humane, hopeful empathy toward even his worst foe.

Bonus points for casting one of my longtime faves, Mary McDonnell, as a significantly more formidable Madeline Usher than appears in Poe’s text, allowing her to carry on her distinct niche, as previously seen in “Battlestar Galactica,” of playing steel-willed, self-possessed women who refuse to allow any lesser compunctions to get in the way of their larger goals.

Be warned, this is a horror show on Netflix, so its sex and violence take full advantage of the streaming service’s lack of broadcast network standards, and while “The Fall of the House of Usher” opens with a critique of how corporate capitalism has reduced many healthcare patients to (often exploited) consumers, its final episodes adopt horror novelist Garth Marenghi’s mantra of “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards” in their sociopolitical commentary.

THE ROYAL HOTEL

By comparison, Australian screenwriter-director Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” feels relatively subtle, and deceptively sedate, as she builds up a John Carpenter-style slow burn, with her quiet tale of two American (posing as Canadian) tourist girls, who resort to taking temporary jobs at a remote Outback pub, after the one gal’s credit card gets declined during their journey.

Anyone who’s accompanied young women on extended trips will recognize the relationship dynamic here; Liv (Jessica Henwick) is the “take a chance” friend, who’s always pushing her companions to try new experiences, while Hanna (Julia Garner) is the “responsible mom” friend, whose cautiousness and Spider-Sense for creepy dudes earns groans from other gals, and increasingly persistent demands that she “smile more” from men.

Hugo Weaving has aged suitably into playing weather-beaten men of questionable character, as he does here as Billy, the inheritor of the overly grandly named “Royal Hotel,” and his use of a particularly Australian epithet for Hanna (starting with “c”)  sets off her alarm bells as strongly as the bar’s dodgy plumbing and its almost total isolation from the rest of civilization.

Unlike American thrillers in similar countrified settings, there’s no inbred or cannibal killers among the miners, drunks and other working-class reprobates who frequent the Royal Hotel every night, and even the film’s moments of bloodshed are brief and restrained.

But it doesn’t take long to register that these two girls are being left alone with, and being forced to trust, a bunch of testosterone-overloaded strangers with poor impulse control, who grow progressively more impatient at receiving “no” for an answer to their aggressive advances.