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