Once Upon a Midnight Dreary

Edgar Allan Poe, The King of American Gothic

Set to release this week, ?The Raven? is the third major film of this title associated with Edgar Allen Poe's famous poem - by the thinnest of pretexts. The first was made in 1935, and is about a Poe-obsessed madman who has a torture chamber in his basement. The second, from 1963, features a trio of magicians, one of whom is turned into a raven. And now we have a third, starring John Cusack as Edgar Allen Poe, who in the last days of his life pursues a serial killer whose murders are inspired by Poe's own stories.

?The Raven? is a story of devotion and the loss of the narrator's beloved Lenore; in his sorrow and darkness, he is visited by a raven. While the poem did not make Poe wealthy - upon its publication in 1845 it earned him the princely sum of $9.00 - it did turn him into a national celebrity. The poem was widely imitated and parodied in its day, and Poe received numerous invitations to speak and perform. President Abraham Lincoln not only read the poem, he had it committed to memory.

Poe's final days are considerably stranger than fiction. Less than five years after the publication of ?The Raven,? Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore, delirious, incoherent and wearing clothes that were not his own. Within four days he was dead, at the age of 40. He never recovered coherence, and apart from his mysterious exclamations of ?Reynolds,? his last words were allegedly ?Lord help my poor soul.? To add to the obscurity, his medical records and death certificate were lost. Poe's obituary writer and literary executor, Rufus Griswold, hated Poe and sought to destroy his reputation in death, characterizing him as an evil, depraved, drug-addled monster through forged letters and deliberate mischaracterization. Ultimately, Griswold's distortions and fabrications were discovered, but his portrayal of Poe only added to the public's fascination with his work.

Aside from a somewhat colorful personal life, Poe was a giant of American literature, who in addition to great poetry wrote gothic short stories and narrative fiction. His only novel, ?The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,? influenced both Herman Melville and Jules Verne, the latter of whom wrote a sequel, "An Antarctic Mystery." In his short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe created in C. Auguste Dupin the first true detective in fiction and the template for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes - and the army of literary detectives that followed.

Poe's short stories are probably the most famous of his canon and have been collected, anthologized and adapted many times over the past century-and-a-half. ?The Pit and the Pendulum,? "The Fall of the House of Usher,? ?The Masque of the Red Death? and ?The Tell-Tale Heart? are some of his most famous tales, which maintain power and resonance to this day and are considered classics of American Gothic literature. Many of Poe's works were ?adapted' (in a very liberal sense) by Roger Corman throughout the 1960's. His adaptatations of ?Ligeia" and ?Masque of the Red Death" are particularly notable.

I would see anything with John Cusack, so I recommend that you go see "The Raven," and definitely check out the original poem and the rest of Poe's work. If you don't make it to the cinema, you might want to seek out the darkest of all movies ever credited as being an adaptation of a Poe story: ?The Black Cat,? which naturally has little if anything to do with Poe. Made in 1934, it is a truly strange movie, featuring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi squaring off in a genuinely nightmarish story that features sadism, torture, human sacrifice and...chess. "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'"

Read more by Paul Ryall