Macabre movies miss the mark

Baltimore's an Edgar Allan Poe kind of town, never more so than in 2009 with the Poe House, a football team named for his most famous poem, and a year-long celebration honoring the macabre author's death. Naturally, Baltimore's repertory movie house would want to feature a Poe movie at some point, if only to bask in the reflected glow of this long-term love affair.

Problem is, when it comes to movies based on Poe's stories, there's a curious dearth of material. There's certainly a dearth of good material.

"I can't think of any that stand out as great," says John Standiford, a former co-owner of the Charles Theatre who has spent eight years programming the theater's Saturday revival series of older films. "I was encouraged to play Poe movies, but I immediately thought that would make for showing some not-very-good movies."

It would be hard to name a prominent literary figure worse served than the estimable Mr. Poe, from whose pen sprouted two of the dominant literary - and cinematic - genres of the 20th century. Through stories like "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat" and "The Pit and the Pendulum," Poe was scaring readers decades before Bram Stoker ever imagined "Dracula." And with "The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders In the Rue Morgue," he practically invented the detective genre. Without Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, it's quite possible Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would never have created Sherlock Holmes.

But when it comes to translating Poe to film, there's precious little to rave about. Actually, there's precious little to talk about, period. Search for "Edgar Allan Poe movies" on the Internet Movie Database, and only 20 results come up. Many of those are shorts or made-for-TV quickies. Of the theatrical films, the most prevalent are Roger Corman B-movies from the 1960s - fun, but not exactly classics. The major studios have largely avoided Poe's work.

It may be that a director like David Lynch in "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet," who creates creepy obsessional atmospheres akin to The Bard of Baltimore, cuts closer to Poe's work than anyone who tries to adapt it directly. Akira Kurosawa wanted to make his own version of "The Masque of the Red Death." He didn't, but that story's color-coding influenced his "Ran."

Hollywood has always showed its love for Sherlock Holmes, whether through the much-beloved 1940s series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, or the upcoming big-budget "Sherlock Holmes," starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law and set for a Christmas day release. And new horror movies seem to come out every week. Which makes it even harder to explain why Poe, an early master of the genre who may be even more celebrated today than he was in his own time, has been given short shrift when it comes to the movies.

Mark Redfield, a Baltimore-based actor and director who has his own version of "The Tell-Tale Heart" in production, thinks that lack of a track record may, in itself, be the problem. Famous or not, respected or not, Poe is far from an economic sure thing.

"Nobody is doing it because the other guy has not made a fortune doing it," he says. "That's the way Hollywood works....All filmmakers try to find their commercial niche, to make their money back and to reach an audience. But to do something that might be true to somebody like Poe...the risk-takers might be in TV, but it's not going to be in Hollywood."

Others suspect the length of Poe's works may be the problem. He wrote primarily short stories, and fleshing them out to fill 90 minutes of screen time has never proved easy.

"Maybe there's just not enough material to stretch it out to a feature," says Marc Sober, humanities librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. "'The Masque of the Red Death,' the first time I saw it, I thought, 'This looks as if Ingmar Bergman has directed a horror film.' But even in 'The Masque of the Red Death," [director Corman] had to use a second story to flesh it out some more. He had to put a story within the story to make it long enough."

(Sober will be showing "Masque" at his monthly Film Talk series Oct. 31, scheduled for 10:30 a.m. at the Pratt's central library, 400 Cathedral St.)

George Figgs, a film historian and exhibitor who ran the much-missed Orpheum theater in Fells Point, suspects Poe's best work has, until recently, been beyond the scope of what was possible.

"Before now, with the state that CGI has gotten to, it would have been impossible to really materialize Poe's visions on the screen without looking silly," says Figgs, who is shopping around a script he's written based on Poe's final days.

Plus, Figgs notes, few great filmmakers have ever tried to bring Poe to the screen. "Frankenstein" had James Whale, "Dracula" had Tod Browning, directors who understood the essence of the stories and translated that to the screen. Poe's creations have never been so lucky.

"Roger Corman tried it so many times, and he failed," Figgs says. "The closest that anybody's come to the right atmosphere is Murnau, with "Nosferatu" (released in 1922), and that was from Bram Stoker and Dracula. But that's the closest they've ever come to the atmosphere that's needed."

Figgs' thoughts are in line with those of actor John Astin, who teaches theater at Johns Hopkins University and served as master of ceremonies for Baltimore's recent Poe funeral re-enactment. He suspects the subtleties of Poe's language and imagery are beyond the capabilities of most modern directors and screenwriters.

"The problem is, Poe didn't write the screenplays," says Astin. "His stories were really complex, and what he does with his words and his style...There is something underneath, and I don't think people have been able to grasp that yet."

Then again, maybe the problem with adapting Poe is both deeper and easier to explain than all that. Director Barry Levinson, whose 1985 "Young Sherlock Holmes" chronicled the exploits of one of Poe's more famous literary progenies, wastes few words in getting to what he sees as the heart of the problem.

To adapt Poe, "that would mean they would have to read Poe," Levinson says. "Their only reference is to the few feeble movie attempts from the past. And his literate writing is way past the comic book taste of Hollywood execs."

Poe on film

• "The Raven" (Roger Corman, 1963): OK, it's got a talking Raven and a young Jack Nicholson. And it's fun, as Vincent Price and Boris Karloff do battle in a match straight out of Marvel Comics' "Doctor Strange." But it's sure as heck not Poe. "It's camp," says John Astin, not as a compliment.
  
• "The Masque of the Red Death" (Roger Corman, 1964): Give Corman credit -- he never stopped trying to do right by Poe. And here, he succeeds about halfway, mostly thanks to the moody camera work of Nicolas Roeg , who would go on to become quite the director in his own right. Still, that psychedelic dream sequence? Very 1960s, not very Poe.
  
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" ( Jules Dassin , 1941): Poor E.A. Poe can't win. Sure, Hollywood does pretty well by him here, with a cast that includes former Oscar-winner Joseph Schildkraut under the direction of a young Jules Dassin . Nice job, but it's only 20 minutes long and rarely seen these days, which doesn't do Poe's cinematic reputation much good.
  
• "Edgar Allan Poe's Castle of Blood" (Antonio Margheriti , 1964): Poe's a character in this film (also known by its Italian name, "Danza Macabra"), but otherwise has nothing to do with the story, which plays like something out of the H.P. Lovercraft canon. At any rate, the real Poe never wrote it.
  
• "The Conqueror Worm" (Michael Reeves, 1968): Again, Poe in name only. An interesting film, unusually graphic and daringly sadistic for its time. But the only Poe connection is its title, which comes from one of his poems. It's actually based on the historical novel "Witchfinder General," by British author Ronald Bassett .