The best and worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptations
The Fall Of The House Of Usher, Mike Flanagan's new Netflix series, follows a rich history of Poe tales translated to both big and small screens
Film Features Edgar Allan Poe
For almost as long as the medium has existed, filmmakers have been turning to the works of Edgar Allan Poe for inspiration. The earliest adaptations of his stories date back to the silent era. Just as the author’s writing has stood the test of time, many of these films still linger in our consciousness, from Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi facing off in 1934’s The Black Cat to Roger Corman and Vincent Price’s prolific Poe partnership in the 1960s. Since Poe wrote primarily in short form, it’s rare to come across a feature film that’s truly faithful to the source material, but some have come close, and it’s always fascinating to see how different filmmakers put their own spin on the Master of the Macabre.
The latest of these is Mike Flanagan, the filmmaker behind the successful Netflix horror series The Haunting Of Hill House, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. Flanagan once again turns to literary inspiration for his new series The Fall Of The House Of Usher (premiering on October 12). This version of Poe’s classic tale reimagines the Usher family as a wealthy pharmaceutical dynasty whose past sins come back to haunt them, literally. In anticipation of the new series, we decided to look back on past Poe adaptations that got it right, and a handful that woefully missed the mark.
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The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror with James Earl Jones doing The Raven is the best Poe adaptation of all time.
Yea where is that? Even Lisa’s Rival and the Tell-Tale Heart reference deserves a mention.
Too many people take The Simpsons for granted. It is the greatest American television show, if not the world’s greatest. We will miss it when it’s gone.
Well, we’ll miss the first ten seasons anyway. Hell, we miss them now even as Zombie Simpsons keeps airing and airing, watched by somebody, I guess.
Kinda can’t believe they didn’t acknowledge this in passing at the very least.
It may be the best Poe adaptation, but it’s only the Simpsons’ second-best Poe reference:
I’ve seen most of these movies and read all of the stories they were based on. The Corman movies are a hoot, mostly because of Vincent Price and the casts around him. The wizard duel in The Raven is particularly entertaining. It’s very Dungeons & Dragons.My favorite is The Black Cat, with Lugosi and Karloff. It is the one I find myself re-watching. The thing I find most terrifying is the specter of the relatively recent, at the time of filming, Great War, now unfortunately for humanity known as World War I. The terrors inflicted in the supposed “war to end all wars” now just seem a prelude to the horrors the modern viewer knows will come in World War II. I know the filmmakers couldn’t read the future but it and the misery of fascism looms in this film.I don’t think The Raven with John Cusack was that bad. Anything with Brendan Gleeson is worth a watch.Happy Halloween!
I loved that the Criterion Channel managed to get the rights to all eight Corman-Poe movies for the months of August and September.
Criterion is awesome.
I loved The Black Cat. Not only because Karloff and Lugosi work so well together but because…There’s a damn digital clock in the movie. In 1934. And it’s futuristic and cool and that fits in with the script. It’s got physical numbers (not lights) and they flip over as the minutes change. (I think – it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie.) The cool thing about it is that digital clocks weren’t patented till 1956. That was probably the light-up kind, but still…
The “modernity” of the house is terrifying.
My parents had an old clock radio that kind of had three Rolodexes of numbers that dropped down according to the time. I think you could even see the little holes on top of the flaps. Must’ve been from the 70s. Thinking back, it seems pretty complicated for a cheapass clock radio back then.
Kinda like this, but all you could see was the bottom card, and they were black with white numbers.
I always liked the old pre-digital split-flap arrival and departure signs you used to see in airports and train stations that even did letters. I loved the clacking noise they made when updating. They were pretty much all gone in the US by the late 1980s, but apparently some places in Europe still use them to this day.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display
The Black Cat also has one of the greatest lines of dialog in the history of cinema.‘The phone is dead. Do you hear that, Vitus? Even the phone is dead.’
Oh wait, I thought American culture was vapid, shallow and all about action movies. You can take yer Baudelaires and foutez-moi le camp.
Before you start puttin’ on airs, don’t forget, Poe was found dead on a Baltimore street. Probably beaten to death. ‘Murica!
The man single handedly created not one, but two, genres–detective stories and horror. Well, maybe not single handedly on horror but he did set the template for detective stories.
…and look how America treated him.
and yet his innovation of having the murderers be escaped orangutans just never caught on for some reason.
And the dude was from Boston of all places, originally!
While “The Haunted Palace” deserves it’s criticism for sacrificing Lovecraft’s authorship of the story for the more popularly known at the time Poe, the film itself is a well done adaptation with some excellent visuals and color photography and an excellent performance by Price.It’s an outlier in the Poe cycle and it’s been known for years that the Poe references were added later over Corman’s objections by the producers at AIP.
I mean Lovecraft is credited in the film, they just gave it a title from Poe.
Came to say exactly this.
They slapped the Poe name on it as a cheap marketing ploy, but once you get past the opening credits, The Haunted Castle is quite clearly a straight-up adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward – done in the signature Corman style. (With some random rubber snakes thrown in, just because.)
It’s the first cinematic adaptation of a Lovecraft story, the first appearance of the Necronomicon, and makes a halfway decent pass at trying to convey an unspeakable nameless god, which is shot through a vaseline lens so there are only a handful of frames where you can even tell what the hell you’re looking at.
All in all, it’s one of the best Lovecraft adaptations around… aside from the name.
I recently bought and read a collection of his works, and boy, I know these were considered terrifying back in the day. but man, were they boring by today’s standards. For an interesting collection of modern weird short stories, check out this underrated collection by Laren Coe.
This is a pretty bold move to slam one of the most important and influential American writers of all time just to try and promote your own shit. (Yes bro, it is bliiiiiindingly obvious that that is your own book. You’ve posted it elsewhere on Kinja before. Can’t you even, like, get a family member or something to give it at least one review on Amazon before attempting to pass it off as on the level? Bruh.)
The Julie Taymor adaptation of Hop Frog was quite good. It’s called Fool’s Fire.
Your ‘worst’ list is wrong. You obviously haven’t seen ‘The Haunting of Morelle’. Peeyew.
I was thrilled that all eight Corman-Poe films could be seen on the Criterion Channel in August and September.
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Every so often I will feel inclined to watch The Raven (2012) because it *seems* like it is right up my alley. And each time, I remember that the reviews of it range from “laughably bad” to “kind of mediocre if you’re inebriated” and I just skip it for something else.
When I was a kid, we’d watch The Raven just for the parts where Peter Lorre says “We are doooooomed”, or just for Peter Lorre in general, I guess.I think that’s the movie where he says that.EDIT: Oops, missed the (2012) part. Nevermind.
Do you like Corman movies in general? You have to be in the right mindset to enjoy them. Another great Corman movie, sometimes attached to the “Poe cycle” due to its themes (and was partly filmed using leftover sets from The Raven), is 1963’s “The Terror”. Probably best known for featuring a young promising actor — Jack Nicholson.
The animated Extraordinary Tales is indeed a mixed bag, but as is mentioned in this list, well worth seeing.
However, my fave animated Poe is one that made a huge impression on me when I was about ten and just getting into the history of animated shorts. During a brief period (maybe 5 years really) of the early 50s, UPA studios with their strikingly designed animated shorts, that used limited animation in clever ways (before it would be co-opted for TV) were really giving Disney, who were seen as artistically stale, a run for their money especially with awards. Stuff like Unicorn in the Garden, Rooty Toot Too, Gerald McBoing Boing (an early Dr Seuss adaptation that would lead to one of the first animated tv shows) and even the early Mr Magoo were seen as bold and fresh. Of course really by the late 50s they were riddled with Mr Magoo, cheaper and cheaper looking animation, less concern for inventive one offs and the phenomenon died very quickly. But one of their shorts always made a huge impression on me (and as a kid genuinely scared me…) Narrated by James Mason.
Where is Spirits of the Dead?? Sure, as an anthology not all the sections are great – the first is just an excuse for Jane Fonda cosplay. But the William Wilson and Toby Dammit sections are pretty damn great.
Genuinely surprised to see “Masque Of Red Death” at number one. Fantastic movie. I also loved Neil Gaiman’s take on it during the first Sandman continuation series.
Làn da của bé sơ sinh rất tinh tế và nhạy cảm, nó chưa hoàn thiện như da của con người. Chính vì vậy, việc chăm sóc da cho em bé trở nên cực kỳ quan trọng. Kem da giúp bảo vệ da khỏi những tác động có thể gây tổn thương như gió, nắng, hay thậm chí là tác động từ keo lót. https://evolovebeauty.com/kem-duong-da-cho-be-so-sinh/
The two books, What Moves the Dead and Mexican Gothic are both excellent takes on Fall of the House of Usher. Highly recommend reading them, especially in that order as the first is a simplified version of the second by a different author who gives full credit for her just trying to imitate it.
Severly lacking Stuart Gordon’s The Pit And The Pendulum.