Edgar Allan Poe is no stranger to the movies. His literature has been adapted to film as early as 1908 and he was first portrayed onscreen in a D.W. Griffith short a year later. So it’s not always that exciting to hear about another Poe project in the works. However, I am very intrigued by this new movie coming from “V for Vendetta” director James McTeigue, which will fictionalize the writer’s mysterious final days.
/Film got the scoop on this project while interviewing McTeigue at San Diego Comic-Con. His latest, the upcoming “Ninja Assassin,” was screened at SDCC and it opens this November. The Poe project is titled “The Raven,” though it’s not exactly based on the writer’s avian-centric poem. McTeigue claims it’s like a cross between Poe’s “The Raven” and the David Fincher film “Se7en.” Scripted by Hannah Shakespeare (Kevin Bacon’s “Loverboy”) and Ben Livingston, “The Raven” follows Poe as he hunts for a serial killer inspired by his stories.
If you’re a fan of the Starz series “Party Down,” you may wish that a young Abraham Lincoln were involved, and that Poe was actually chasing a vampire. But this less ridiculous premise sounds pretty cool, even if it doesn’t feature Hollywood’s favorite trope du jour (hint: it rhymes with fampires).
The mystery of Poe’s death -- he was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore with someone else’s clothes and repeating the name “Reynolds,” but died shortly after without explaining what had happened -- has always been ripe for speculative fictions. Multiple works have been written about the potential circumstances that led to his delirium and subsequent death. Only a few years back there was another film, titled “The Death of Poe,” which proposed that the writer was lethally beaten during a robbery.
McTeigue’s movie is hardly the sole Poe project currently in the works. Sylvester Stallone has been developing a biography of the writer which he plans to direct while Clive Barker has been working on a Poe film for a young adult audience. Then there’s the upcoming adaptations “Tell-Tale,” starring Josh Lucas, a modern re-imagining of "The Tell-Tale Heart," and “The Ushers,” which will be a 3-D version of “The Fall of the House of Usher."
Are you ready for yet another Edgar Allan Poe movie? Who should play the writer this time around? Do you have a favorite Poe adaptation?
Comments