It's probably safe to assume that Edgar Allan Poe does not rest quietly in the Baltimore grave that claimed him, at 40, in 1849. In the works that made him famous â€" poems like The Raven and Annabel Lee, stories like The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia â€" death is never quite the end: something lives on, not happily.
Poe died nearly half a century before the invention of cinema, but the movies knew a kindred spirit when they saw one, and began almost immediately to stir his ashes and rattle his crumbling bones. D.W. Griffith made a short called Edgar Allan Poe in 1909, in which the writer composes The Raven while his young wife lies on her deathbed, and five years later that great filmmaker directed a feature, The Avenging Conscience, that is largely based on The Tell-Tale Heart.
Poe's work â€" violent, frightening, romantic, and distinctly unwholesome â€" seemed made for the movies then, and now it still does. Times have changed, but filmmakers' fascination with his wild, sensation-based art seems destined to linger into eternity.
James McTeigue's Raven, which opens Friday, is, according the Internet Movie Database, the 241st film or television show adapted, however loosely, from Poe's writings. This latest production finds the writer himself (John Cusack), in the days before his death, chasing a serial killer whose methods are inspired by his stories. Poe devotees will recognize motifs from The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Premature Burial and many others.
Because the precise manner of Poe's demise has always been somewhat mysterious, the makers of The Raven are free to speculate. The Raven imagines an action-packed end to a life that had, in reality, been rather sad and sedentary: a writer's existence lived more vividly in the mind than in the actual world, where there's never enough money, never enough time and scant opportunities for heroism.
Making up stories about people who make up stories is always a dicey enterprise, but fantasizing about the lives of favorite writers is nothing new. And although the movie's narrative bears no relation whatsoever to the moody, annoyingly memorable poem whose name it shares, that's nothing new, either, in the long history of Poe cinema: a hefty majority of the films putatively based on his works have mighty tenuous connections to their sources. The stories are recognizable, but only just. They hover and flicker like wraiths, unsure of where they are and how they got there.
Probably the best known Poe pictures are the eight low-budget adaptations directed by Roger Corman between 1960 and 1964. All but one of which starred the fearsome hambone Vincent Price, sometimes accompanied by other aging character actors like Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff. The casting can lend the films a nice ruined-castle air of decrepitude, but even when Corman is being reasonably faithful to the stories, the rhythms seem all wrong, too stately and deliberate for the hurtling, breathless narrative style that makes Poe's tales such intense, even deranging, reading experiences.
This fault isn't unique to Corman. Poe's work, full of murder, madness, ghosts and febrile passion, is irresistible to filmmakers because of its bold imagery and powerful emotional impact. But despite these sensational qualities Poe is not nearly as movie ready as his writing seems. The big problem is that he wrote almost exclusively in short forms, and his stories' effects are highly concentrated, like shots of neat whiskey. (In his life as in his art, he was by all accounts not a man to water down his libations.)
Diluted, a nightmarish tale like The Masque of the Red Death can begin to feel more than a little silly, and that feeling is the plague of fantastic fiction. When the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief is allowed to weaken, the game is up. And for that reason virtually every feature-length Poe movie, no matter how cleverly it tries to expand, attenuate or embellish its original, is, if not doomed to disaster, at least courting it pretty aggressively.
The Avenging Conscience is surprisingly effective, despite the yawning pit that separates Poe's morbid, decadent sensibility from Griffith's earnest humanism, because Griffith doesn't even try to re-create the Gothic atmosphere of The Tell-Tale Heart. He merely takes the story's central conceit â€" a dead man, his heart apparently still beating, is stashed under the floorboards of his killer's room â€" and uses it as a symbol of the murderer's sense of guilt.
Poe's imagination was always more at home in the Old World than the New. He was stirred profoundly by people and things that were in decline, dying, ebbing slowly out of history â€" as he, at the moment of his death in a Baltimore hospital, might have felt that his own work was fading out of memory. And he may have died more comfortably in the ruins of a musty manor like Roderick Usher's, which the French director Jean Epstein evokes lyrically in the 1928 silent The Fall of the House of Usher. The rooms are vast, and the characters drift languorously though them, knowing that they are the end of the family line, that everything will disappear for good from their tenuous, unreal-seeming world.
Poe seems almost present in Epstein's film.
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