Edgar Allan Poe Movies

The US edit of the Argentinian omnibus film Obras maestras del terror featured just two of the three Edgar Allen Poe tales found in the original: The Facts in M. Valdemar's Case and The Cask of Amontillado. The Telltale Heart was cut, trimming the runtime to just over an hour. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

The Living Coffin is a Mexican filmization of that old Edgar Allan Poe standby The Premature Burial. A seriously ill woman is terrified that she'll be buried while in a comatose state. To avoid this contingency, she has an alarm installed inside her coffin (indicating that someone involved with this film had seen the 1931 Paramount chiller Murder by the Clock). It comes to pass that the woman is indeed declared dead, planted six feet under, and.....hoo hoo hah hah HAAAAH! The legendary B-flick showman/huckster K. Gordon Murray filmed The Living Coffin in 1958 under the title El Grito de la Muerte; it didn't make the American rounds until 1965 (talk about rising from the dead!) ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug and The Tell-Tale Heart were updated and woven together into a single narrative in the ultra-cheap adventure yarn Manfish. John Bromfield, Lon Chaney Jr. and Victor Jory head the cast as three fortune hunters, combing the West Indies in search of buried treasure. The heavy of the piece is Jory, who murders Bromfield, weighs down the body and throws it overboard, with consequences not unlike those suffered by Poe's Tell-Tale Heart protagonist. Poor, simple-minded Chaney ends up coming out the winner, if only by default. The feminine angle is handled by Barbara Nichols (bad, brassy blonde) and Tessa Pendergast (good, dark-skinned native lass). Because of a handful of West Indian song interludes, Manfish was rerealeased as Calypso, in hopes of cashing in on the then-popular musical craze. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Filmed in 1950, this British adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher made the U.S. art-house rounds in 1952. Essentially an amateur production (though its non-union participants received minimal salaries), Usher is nowhere near as stylish as Jean Epstein's 1929 version or Roger Corman's 1960 remake, though it does have its own austere charm. At 70 minutes, the film is able to tell the familiar story of the accursed Usher family with a minimum of waste footage. Director Ivan Barnett also produced and handled the camera, making up in enthusiasm what he lacks in technique. Gwendoline Watford, the film's ill-fated Lady Usher, later appeared on Broadway in Women of Twilight. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The Mystery of Marie Roget is more faithful to its Edgar Allan Poe original than most Universal films of its ilk, even though the Poe story and the film aren't exactly twins. Based on the factual unsolved 1842 murder of one Mary Rogers, the film stars Maria Montez as the unfortunate heroine, a popular Parisian entertainer. No innocent young damsel, Marie Roget spends a great deal of her time plotting the demise of her younger sister Camille (Nell O'Day). Shortly afterward, Marie herself disappears, and before long the mutilated, unidentifiable corpse of a young woman turns up. It is up to master detecive Dupin (Patric Knowles) and his Dr. Watson-ish assistant Gobelin (Lloyd Corrigan) to piece all the clues together. The film's best moments belong to Maria Ouspenskaya as Maria's sardonic grandmother. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

1941's The Black Cat is neither a remake of the 1934 Karloff-Lugosi film of the same name, nor does it bear the slightest relation to the same-named Edgar Allan Poe story (as if the 1934 picture did!) The fact that the heroes are played by Hugh Herbert and Broderick Crawford is indication enough that the 1941 film wasn't meant to be taken entirely seriously. It all begins when elderly cat fancier Henrietta Winslow (played by legendary vaudeville impressionist Cecilia Loftus) is murdered by a scheming relative. At the reading of the will, Henrietta's heirs discover that the old dear has left her entire fortune to her pet felines. No one will get a penny until all the cats join their ancestors in Tabby Heaven. Several more murders occur, as suspicion is cast on such shady types as Mr. Hartley (Basil Rathbone), Abigail Doone (Gale Sondergaard) and family butler Eduardo (Bela Lugosi in yet another red-herring role). By the time that bumbling Mr. Penny (Herbert) and Hubert Smith (Crawford) figure out who the real killer is, heroine Elaine Winslow (Anne Gwynne) is on the verge of meeting her doom as well. Billed last, Alan Ladd has practically nothing to do as one of the heirs. Hardly one of the classic Universal horror efforts, The Black Cat at least has the advantage of some spook camerawork, courtesy of Stanley Cortez (Magnificent Ambersons). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff team up in this excellent 1935 chiller. Lugosi is crazed brain-surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin who is infatuated with the characters and devices found in the Edgar Allan Poe stories. When a local judge brings his beautiful daughter for brain surgery, the doctor falls in love with her and is spurned by the judge when he asks for her hand in marriage. To extract revenge, Vollin invites the judge, his daughter, and her new fiance over for dinner. He intends to try out some of his gruesome Poe gadgets on them. Before he can, enter Boris Karloff, a prison escapee who wants Vollin to do some much-needed plastic surgery on his face. Vollin obliges, but instead of making him handsome, he deforms Karloff and subjects him to his will. Now the evil Vollin can get down to business... ~ Rovi

Produced and directed by exploitation specialist Dwain Esper and written by Mrs. Esper, Hildegarde Stade, this ultra low-budget "educational" melodrama not only defied logic but broke virtually every rule of narrative film-making. That would not necessarily be a detriment to a film ostensibly warning about the dangers of untreated insanity, but Maniac is so badly handled in an obvious attempt to both horrify and titillate that it defies description. Vaguely based on Poe's The Black Cat and referring in several scenes to the same author's Murders in the Rue Morgue, Maniac told a rambling, sometimes incoherent story of a vaudeville impersonator turned lab assistant to an insane scientist. Like most Mad Medicos, Dr. Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter) is attempting to bring dead tissue to life but this particular scientist is accidentally killed in the process. His assistant (Bill Woods) takes over his persona, walling up the dead doc in the process. The protagonist's increasing dementia -- which threatens to engulf the viewing audience as well -- is depicted via inserts from silent films such as Benjamin Christensen's classic Witchcraft Through the Ages and Fritz Lang's Siegfried. There is plenty of gratuitous feline footage and at one point the fake Dr. Meirschultz actually devours a cat's eye! ("Why," he exclaims, "It's not unlike a grape or an oyster!") For unexplained reasons, the faux doctor examines a couple of women in various stages of undress. The presence of these women remains vague and they never appear again. There is also a deranged person (Ted Edwards) who believes he is the re-incarnation of the orangutan killer in "Rue Morgue"; a couple of women fighting with syringes; and various shots of girls lounging about in their underwear for no apparent reason other than audience titillation. Like most exploitation melodramas, Maniac is cast with a mix of has-beens and unknown beginners who remained unknown. Poor Horace B. Carpenter, a silent era producer/director/actor who played whitehaired Western characters in sound films, was made a complete fool in a role perhaps written for the too-expensive Bela Lugosi. Bill Woods and Ted Edwards, as the vaudeville performer and the orangutan wannabe respectively, saw their careers go nowhere but down after Maniac.The Latter's wife, incidentally, was played by one Phyllis Diller, a starlet who had absolutely no connection to the later comedienne of the same name; and Marian Blackton, the sister of the film's assistant director and daughter of screen pioneer J. Stuart Blackton, appears in male drag as a cat-catching neighbor. Despite all that, Maniac actually delivered a lot less than it's lurid art-work promised, a fate it shared with the vast majority of exploitation melodramas. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

This 51-minute adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's Tell Tale Heart was a labor of love for co-producer-director Brian Desmond Hurst, who funded the production (his first) from his own far-from-bottomless cash reserves. Norman Dryden stars as the tortured young hero whose hatred for his elderly employer (John Kelt) leads to murder. Hoping to escape detection, Dryden dissects the victim's body and hides it in various parts of Kelt's house. Alas, he is given away by the persistent sound of a heartbeat -- which may be his own conscience, but very well may not. Utilizing barely a dozen lines of dialog, director Hurst tells his story in purely cinematic terms, to excellent effect. Tell Tale Heart was released in the U.S. as Bucket of Blood. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Having missed the opportunity to direct Frankenstein for Universal, Robert Florey was offered Murders in the Rue Morgue as a consolation, whereupon he transformed a pedestrian property into a minor classic. Owing more to Cabinet of Dr. Caligari than to Edgar Allen Poe, the film stars Bela Lugosi as Doctor Mirakle (accent on the second syllable), a carnival sideshow entertainer who doubles as a mad scientist. Kidnapping prostitutes off the Paris streets, Mirakle endeavors to mix their blood with that of his pet gorilla. His experiments will forever be doomed to failure, however, until he is able to obtain the blood of a virgin -- and that's where Camille L'Espanye (Sidney Fox) comes into the picture. When Mirakle's monkey kidnaps Camille and murders her mother, suspicion immediately falls upon the girl's sweetheart, starving artist Pierre Dupin (Leon Waycoff, later known as Leon Ames). But by using the deductive skills displayed in the original story by Poe's master detective C. Auguste Dupin, our hero not only proves his innocence, but rescues the helpless heroine from Mirakle's clutches. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The French silent film La Chute de la Maison Usher is adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher. Director Jean Epstein studiously avoids cheap shocks in this tale of hereditary madness, choosing instead a tightly controlled, spookily subtle technique. The hero, having indirectly caused the death of his beloved, stubbornly tries to resurrect her spirit by devoting himself to painting and sculpture. Epstein conveys the twilight zone between life and death with lingering dissolves and brilliant utilization of slow motion. The production design of La Chute de la Maison Usher, together with the earlier Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, obviously inspired the "look" of Robert Florey's 1932 Poe derivation Murders in the Rue Morgue. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Although Henry B. Walthall (the "Little Colonel" in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation) made a strong showing as Edgar Allen Poe in this picture, he was hampered by its archaic special effects and approach. Based on the novel and play by George C. Hazelton, this is not a biopic of Poe in a strict sense, but it does show various events in the poet's life -- his adoption as a boy, his marriage to Virginia Clemm (Warda Howard, who played several other roles in the film, including the lost Lenore), and Virginia's premature death. But the narrative blends all this with lines from Poe's most famous poem and has him dying after his encounter with the bird. Even in 1915 -- when fakery was given a bit of leeway -- the paper mache sets and cheap camera tricks were unforgivable. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi