With so many macabre stories and poems, Edgar Allan Poe inadvertently has supplied horror cinema with a wealth of source material for more than 100 years. The most well-known is Roger Corman’s series of colorful adaptations in the 1960s, but filmmakers even more independent than he have turned to Poe evermore. Some of these are collected on Lurker Films’ THE EDGAR ALLAN POE COLLECTION: VOLUME 1 – ANNABEL LEE & OTHER TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION.
The centerpiece of this DVD is an adaptation of the title poem, “Annabel Lee.” Rather than knock this one out quickly with actors, director George Higham takes the painstaking route of stop-motion animation. With a puppet protagonist modeled directly after Poe, rats running around with half a body and a love as doomed as any, the result is what TIM BURTON’S CORPSE BRIDE might have looked like with no budget but just as much imagination.
True to Poe’s work, Higham’s short is rife with horrific imagery, and seems to stick to the text, word for word. I’m not a huge fan of Poe’s verse (or anyone’s, for that matter), so even just watching the short without paying attention to the narration has its delirious rewards. Also adhering to the letter is Peter Bradley’s live-action “The Raven.” Shot in stark black and white, it’s a bleak and surreal take on perhaps the world’s most famous poem, and the animatronic raven is creepy as hell.
More cinematically conventional is Alfonso Suárez’s colorless “The Tell-Tale Heart,” perhaps most notable for starring Spanish horror fave Paul Naschy. Here a two-person tale of two estranged brothers, it plays loosey-goosey with Poe’s original concept, and is the less effective for it. On its own, it’s watchable, but more literal adaptations of the past – I recommend the old UPA cartoon included in the special features of the HELLBOY DVD – have been far more successful.
Given the richness and raw talent on display here – not to mention the breadth of special features, especially for short films – one hopes Lurker has more Poe volumes in store. –Rod Lott
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