From a piece on Edgar Allan Poe and Roger Corman

Wednesday 3/25/26

Also from today. I am writing well. And remember: These people who go first in the prose can only do their bad version of fiction. There's no, "Okay, time to write my brilliant film piece, then my brilliant music piece, then my brilliant sports piece, then my brilliant op-ed, then my brilliant art piece." It's just the one sliver of the one thing, done the same every time, and poorly at that. Always the same. But not this. And not this guy.

Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t exactly a lover of plausibility. He may not have been a lover of anything despite popular culture’s love of him, preferring to wander dark streets at ungodly hours and converse with ravens while dreaming up unique ways to die. Fanfare for the common dyspeptic man.

As a general, if not always reliable rule, his detective fiction leans hard on the interiority, his terror tales thunder with exteriority (which isn’t to suggest they lack for internal monologues). Old blood and guts Edgar is at it again, they said—well, they should have—when the Philadelphian’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” was published in a literary annual called The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1843, which is darkly funny in a “Hey, humans, fuck you” capacity. The story, concerning methods of torture utilized against a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, is all about the senses and overwhelming them. You hear, smell, feel this tale, and recoil therefrom. The first work of torture porn? One wonders what Poe would’ve gotten up to creatively if he’d been born in, say, 1970 rather than 1809.

There’s a lot of stretching in Poe’s fiction, because he’s a mood man rather than a plot guy. This made his material ideal fodder for a coming-into-his-prime filmmaker like Roger Corman who was looking to move into a tonier neighborhood regarding the perceived artistry of his work, but without leaving his old high school chums behind such that they couldn’t hang on the weekends, in a manner of speaking. Corman had been directing and producing movies for a while when he initiated his Poe cycle with an adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum in 1961, but he’d never attempted a fusion of populist fare and lite art film. Stephen Sondheim for the horror film crowd.

Poe’s fiction oeuvre (don’t sleep on his inimical criticism) makes for prime pickings for filmmakers because there’s a central thrust—which can take the form of an oppressive mood or an implement of the macabre or a pain-maxed death—but plenty of room to insert what you please. You must. His fictions were prose-based trips to sensory overload. The movie theater itself is a geographical manifestation of this conceit. We’re bombarded by sights and sounds, to varying degrees, which is a construct Poe sought to render—and inflict—maximally. He took us into the minds of his characters as they suffered. Corman thought he’d have something special in creating a reverse imaging of these intense—we’ll call them torturous, too—brain waves denoting pain; something we could witness together on the screen quasi-palliatively on account of the community.