Excerpt from piece on the disturbing 1966 film, The Black Cat, an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story

Tuesday 9/9/25

This is good. Written this morning.

Despite what’s tantamount to a subgenre of macabre offerings suggesting otherwise, Edgar Allan Poe isn’t an author whose work readily lends itself to the cinematic medium. He’s very much an “on the page” writer, leading with and reliant upon dense forests of text and a stylistic formality in his prose that was deliberately archaic during Poe’s own time, an approach that H.P. Lovecraft adopted in his.

The language of Poe’s fiction possesses an oratorical quality, as if it were written to be declaimed as an actor delivers a soliloquy from the stage (though by one’s self, late at night), with the brunt of the drama—for all of the Gothic trappings of plot—being psychological rather than external in foundational nature. Poe is progressive through atavism, which is why he reads as both forward-thinking and primal. Hardly anyone moves swiftly in a Poe story. They think. All is laggard and lugubrious. We observe characters thinking, and think along with them, or, very probably, against them and what they’re doing and/or becoming.

To get Poe to the screen, liberties are taken en masse. Ironically, the less literal Poe’s symbolism-laden tales are made to become—that is, the further filmmakers venture from the designed workings of his actual texts—the greater the success of the cinematic venture. Roger Corman was the master of adapting Poe, striking the ideal balance between the spirit animating Poe’s words and engrossing visual narrative. The internal and external worked in thrilling, chilling cahoots.

Then we have the likes of Harold Hoffman’s dread-stain of a movie The Black Cat from 1966, a Poe-related—one is tempted to say, “Poe-triggered”—reimaginging that makes for a singularly scuzzy must-watch. If someone told you prior to viewing that The Black Cat was a student film, you wouldn’t be surprised come the end. Watching it, you’re unsure what the hell its impetus could have been. Perhaps a feverish nightmare which transitioned into a fully-awake, daytime affair kicking off with a camera on the nightstand and a copy of Poe’s eponymous 1843 story. The latter had already inspired the 1934 Edgar G. Ulmer picture for Universal, co-starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, which remains a contender for the most fucked up horror movie ever released by a major studio, or at least as far as the black and white era goes.

With his film, it’s as though Hoffman decided to take that earlier Ulmer effort of stylized, virtuosic sleaze as a challenge of prospective shock one-upmanship. Set in mid-1960s Texas—Yee-haw, Edgar!—Hoffman's adaptation is about a schizophrenic writer, played by Robert Frost—seriously, that’s the guy’s name, but he did definitely opt for the road usually not taken—who likes cozying up with his animals more so than he does his wife (Sadie French). He talks to them, gets all cuddly-wuddly with them to an alarming “Oh my God, is he boffing these animals?” degree, and dumps booze into his birds’ cages (while chuckling, toasting, and philosophizing like a stoned high school sophomore who just heard the Doors’ “The End” for the first time) so that his avian pals (and possible conquests) can tie one on, too. Polly wants a cracker? Have a Heineken instead, girl.