Adapting Poe

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Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix

1 Introduction: Poe and the Twenty-First-Century

Adaptation Renaissance 1

Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm

2 Edgar Allan Poe and the Undeath of the Author 13

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

3 Lusty Ape-men and Imperiled White Womanhood:

Reading Race in a 1930s Poe Film Adaptation 31

Jessica Metzler

4 An “Ambrosial Breath of Faery”: Jean Epstein’s La Chute

de la Maison Usher and the Inverted Orphism of Poe’s

“Poetic Principle” 45

Saviour Catania

5 Rethinking Fellini’s Poe: Nonplaces, Media Industries,

and the Manic Celebrity 59

Kevin M. Flanagan

6 Evolutions in Torture: James Wan’s Saw as Poe for the

Twenty-First Century 71

Sandra Hughes

7 A Poe within a Poe: Inception ’s ArabesquePlay with “Ligeia” 81

Dennis R. Perry

8 Identity Crisis and Personality Disorders in Edgar

Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), David Fincher’s

Fight Club (1999), and James Mangold’s Identity (2003) 93

Alexandra Reuber

Copyrighted material – 9780230120860



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vi Contents

9 Horrific Obsessions: Poe’s Legacy of the Unreliable and

Self-Obsessed Narrator 105

Rachel McCoppin10 The Pleasure of Losing One’s Way: Adapting Poe’s

“The Man of the Crowd” 119

Rebecca Johinke

11 “The Telltale Head,” “The Raven,” and “Lisa’s Rival”:

Poe Meets The Simpsons 133

Peter Conolly-Smith

12 In the Best Possible Tastes: Rhetoric and Taste inAIP’s Promotion of Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle 145

Joan Ormrod

13 From the Earth to Poe to the Moon: The Science-Fiction

Narrative as Precursor to Technological Reality 165

Todd Robert Petersen and Kyle William Bishop

14 The Perfect Drug: Edgar Allan Poe as Rock Star 179

Tony Magistrale15 That Vexing Power of Perverseness: Approaching

Heavy Metal Adaptations of Poe 193

Carl H. Sederholm

16 Picturing Poe: Contemporary Cultural

Implications of Nevermore 207

Michelle Kay Hansen

17 What Can “The Tell-Tale Heart” Tell about Gender? 217Mary J. Couzelis

18 Comic Book and Graphic Novel Adaptations of the

Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Chronology 231

M. Thomas Inge

19 The Purloining Critic: Adaptation, Criticism, and

the Claim to Meaning 249

Jason Douglas

20 Quid Pro Quo, or Destination Unknown: Johnson,

Derrida, and Lacan Reading Poe 261

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá and Geraldo Magela Cáffaro

Notes on Contributors 275

Index 281




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ADAPTING POE Copyright © Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm, 2012.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2012 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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ISBN: 978–0–230–12086–0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adapting Poe : re-imaginings in popular culture / edited byDennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm.

p. cm.ISBN 978–0–230–12086–0 (hardback)

1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Criticism and interpretation.2. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Adaptations. 3. Poe, Edgar Allan,1809–1849—Influence. 4. Popular culture and literature.I. Perry, Dennis R. II. Sederholm, Carl Hinckley.

PS2638.A43 2012818.309—dc23 2012002446

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: August 2012

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1

Introduction: Poe and the Twenty-First-Century

Adaptation Renaissance

Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm

If Poe’s fame has endured into the twenty-f irst century, to a large extent it is due to

his prominent place in popular culture.

—Mark Neimeyer

Edgar Allan Poe’s connection to contemporary popular culture should no

longer raise questions of “where” or “why,” but of “what” and “how.”

For years, a number of scholars have adequately tracked Poe’s appear-

ances in American culture generally, usually finding traces of his image

and his work almost everywhere—from alarm clocks to coffee mugs tofootball team mascots (see Neimeyer; Reilly). Generally, these scholars

have established plausible theories for why Poe turns up so often, includ-

ing the obvious tragic/romantic appeal of his life, which is easily made

out to work in harmony with his frequently nervous or obsessive charac-

ters. The figure at the heart of the Poe myth makes a perfect fit for the

narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the melancholy speaker

of “The Raven.” The Poe legend gives the public a perfectly archetypal

horror writer, one complete with a dramatic life, outrageous fiction, anda mysterious death—in short, a ready-made literary legend. Like the use

of medieval black-letter script on a heavy metal album, Poe’s name, his

image, and his works consistently signify something dark, macabre, or

grotesque. In addition, as a certified member of the American literary

canon of great writers, Poe’s image alone may bring a certain highbrow




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2 Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm

prestige to one’s cap, bag, mug, song, or film adaptation—a perk one

does not necessarily get with fellow horror writers like Stephen King,

H. P. Lovecraft, or Robert Bloch. In this introduction we examine, inthe light of our current renaissance of adaptation theory, what some

scholars have observed about Poe adaptations, not only in the familiar

genres of film and comic art but in how adaptation can also be applied to

areas like film advertising campaigns, the history of racism in America,

heavy metal music, rock videos, and literary criticism itself. Beyond what

new approaches are being explored, the book also examines the ways in

which adaptation theory may be applied to Poe today, and what it tells us

about not only the pervasive use of Poe in our culture but also the ubiqui-tous deployment of his primary themes that make him such a prominent

intertextual or “matrix” figure, on a scale that few writers or filmmakers

have attained.

According to David S. Reynolds in Beneath the American Renaissance

(1988), writers like Irving, Hawthorne, and Melville drew from the liter-

ary popular culture of their times. Reynolds suggests that this immer-

sion in popular literature helped American writers escape the orbit of the

oppressive influence of British classics, freeing them to create their own

indigenous texts (5). In this vein, a strong case can be made that Poe,

though his works rarely suggest their American origins, wrote the most

indigenous literature of all his contemporaries since he most lavishly

drew from his contemporary popular culture as a primary inspiration for

many of his most famous tales.

He began by taking various popular-fiction styles as sources for par-

ody, like the sensation tale in “Loss of Breath” or the plague scenario

in “King Pest,” themes and topics typical of Blackwood ’s fare. Poe also

developed the psychological dimensions of popular gothic tales. These

genres became sources to be exploited and modified in his art. For exam-

ple, Poe would take a tale with classic gothic elements and trim its ram-

bling plot, hackneyed ghosts, and out-of-place humor, turning it into a

brooding, surreal, minimalist gothic nightmare that focuses with laser

sharpness on the inexplicabilities of psychological aberration. Poe per-

ceived in popular culture untapped literary resources, making him the

watershed figure of the gothic in our time.

Of course, Poe’s connection to popular culture included more than

popular literature; it also drew from the newspapers: balloon travel (“The

Balloon-Hoax”), unwrapping mummies (“Some Words with a Mummy”),

lionizing military heroes (“The Man Who Was Used Up”), end-of-the-

world prophecies (“The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), the fear

of being buried alive (“The Premature Burial”), dying scenes (“Ligeia”),

mesmerism (“Mesmeric Revelation”), and public fascination with




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Introduction 3

Antarctica (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ). But Poe did not stop

at adapting pop-culture genres and sensational current events; he also

created his own news sensations (his hoaxes), helped lay out the genericfeatures of new genres like detective fiction, and contributed to the devel-

opment of science fiction and horror fiction. In the process, Poe trans-

formed American popular culture. Given his own literary interests, it

seems fitting that popular culture since his time has devoted more energy

to adapting his work than that of his American contemporaries. Paul

Woolf, for example, notes that Poe “is the most filmed American author

of the nineteenth century” (43). This is surely true for some other genres

as well; comic adaptations of Poe’s work currently number at over threehundred. Interestingly, the great variety of popular-culture media into

which Poe has been adapted reflects the range of his own work—detec-

tive, gothic, satirical, science fiction, sensation and hoax tales, poetry,

theoretical criticism, reviews, a play, cosmological theory, fantasy, and

so forth. Underlying much of his continuing popularity in high or low art

circles, among young and old, is clearly the power of his own personal-

ity. His compelling and ambiguous persona, even his unusual looks that

are so in concert with his writing, surely inspire adaptors and audiences

to continue creating and buying Poe adaptations. A good number of film

adaptations, for example, have included Poe as a character, including the

recent James McTeigue film, The Raven (2012), in which Poe must play

detective to find a killer who wants to match wits with him by using the

tales as clues to his murders.

With all of these adaptations, the question for Poe scholars is what to

do with them. The traditional answer in adaptation circles has been the

case study approach of comparing a source text with its adaptation, usu-

ally leading to discussions concerning fidelity to the “original” source.

Such approaches, however, are usually simplistic and do not allow critics

the proper range of judgment they need to understand the adaptation.

Underlying this traditional approach is a complex cultural history that

valued canonized literary texts over commercial cinema, leading to a set

of assumptions that Thomas Leitch identifies as critical fallacies, includ-

ing those which suggest that novels are better than films, that novels deal

in concepts whereas films deal in percepts, or that source texts are more

original than adaptations (“Twelve Fallacies”). Citing Brian McFarlane,Leitch also underscores the sometimes sorry state of adaptation studies

generally: “In view of the nearly sixty years of writing about the adapta-

tion of novels into film … it is depressing to find at what a limited, tenta-

tive stage the discourse has remained” (149).

The title of this book, Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular

Culture, sums up concisely the general theory of adaptation represented




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here. To suggest that adaptation is a re-imagining of a text implies a

number of things, including that the adaptation is a new text that is

both related to and independent from the source text. “The Fall of theHouse of Usher,” for example, re-imagines elements from specific texts

such as Hoffmann’s “Das Majorat,” Warren’s “Thunder-Struck,” and

Clauren’s The Robber’s Castle, as well as a broader array of gothic

tropes. When Epstein filmed La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928), he

likewise re-imagined, reinvented, and re-visioned Poe’s own imagina-

tive adaptation of sources. Such a perspective on adaptation is certainly

not about how accurately Epstein reproduced Poe’s vision but whether

it is a good film or not. Since film is a different and more public-facingmedium than prose fiction, creating a singular kind of effect, the possi-

bility of accurately reproducing a reader’s unique experience—rereading

passages, imagining scenes and characters from the reader’s own experi-

ences, responding to particular words and descriptions in the reader’s

own eccentric way, figuring out what is happening—is clearly out of

the question. This book reflects what might appropriately be called a

renaissance in adaptation studies that opens up new intertextual inqui-

ries and employs scores of new terms for examining the relationship

between sources and adaptations. Theorists such as Linda Hutcheon,

Julie Sanders, and Thomas Leitch are asking new questions about the

nature of texts themselves: what is an adaptation; what is the relation-

ship between a text and its adaptation; and the who, what, where, why,

and how of adapted texts.

Both sources and adaptations are part of a unique intertextual net-

work that raises complex questions about their overall relationship.

How do these texts relate to each other in the context of the other works

in their intertextual neighborhood (Sanders)? What kind of adaptation

is this? Revision? Allusion? Colonization? Expansion? Update (Leitch,

Film Adaptation )? What path does this adaptation take through the

text? Why? Why now? Are there other paths that could have been taken

(Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins 18)? Such questions open limitless possi-

bilities for shedding light on both the source(s) and the adaptation(s). For

example, Roger Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) adapts

Poe’s original through the lens of the Hammer Studio’s Technicolor

gothic horror films that had been doing well in the market since the mid-

1950s. Hence, Corman turns Poe’s tale into a horror film by using color

and gothic settings to construct his narrative around a series of ominous

shocks. Corman (following Richard Matheson’s script) also changes the

story so that Philip, the narrator figure, is not friends with Roderick

but rather the lover of Madeline—changes that were required to create

a cinematic story with clearer motivations and relationships among the




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Introduction 5

characters. In addition, casting Vincent Price as Roderick, with his siz-

able horror credentials, recalls the dimension of more familiar gothic

villains having a helpless young woman in thrall. These preliminaryobservations only begin to uncover the intertextual network of literary

and film influences that problematize the one-text-one-film case study

assumptions. By taking-in this more inclusive textual vista, we can ask

such questions as why these particular elements were combined, what

their cumulative effect was, and how these choices were inevitable or

eccentric in the context of when the film was made. Further, we can ask

what making these adaptation choices says about the original tale and

contemporary cultural perspectives on Poe in general. Also, what lightdo the changes made to the tale shed on the choices Poe originally made

for his characters and situation? Such questions can also lead to very

specific and narrow analyses of a character, the setting, the language

used in each version, social mores, or specific thematic interests of Poe’s,

such as the imp of the perverse, the death of a beautiful woman, live

burial, and so on.

For decades scholars have traced the sources of Poe’s oeuvre. We

should recognize, however, that, beyond that worthy endeavor, much

more needs to be said about why these findings are significant. This

is particularly true in our intertextual age that distrusts scholarship

that seeks only to establish direct sources of inspiration or influence.

Scholars in our generation want things that endlessly proliferate and

complicate texts, things that demonstrate the infinite relationships

between things. Ours is an age of adaptation, one in which scholars

have begun to employ more sophisticated theoretical perspectives that

allow for new possibilities in understanding Poe-inspired texts, and then

reexamining Poe’s work from new intertextual-theoretical prisms. From

this perspective we anticipate a flowering of adaptation studies within

Poe scholarship.

For this collection, we draw on a metaphor applied to Alfred Hitchcock

by John Orr—that of the “matrix-figure” (53). Such a figure, as the name

implies, suggests an individual whose ideas, works, and influence inter-

sect other areas of life at so many points that it becomes impossible to

imagine the world without him or her. That is, everything finally “goes

back to him” or, perhaps even “goes through him” (Orr 53). As Orr

writes of Hitchcock:

The image is enduring: Hitchcock at the center not only of his own cin-

ema but of cinema as such. Through his work so much of the entire life of

Western cinema has been nurtured and dispersed. So much shock, so much

suspense, so much montage, so much mystery, so much watching, so much




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doubling, so much disaster, so much redemption: it all goes back to him.

Or rather, because it also precedes him, it all goes through him. (53)

With the necessary apologies to Orr, we claim that Poe, too, figures as

a key intertextual figure somewhere near the heart of American popu-

lar culture. Through his own work, so much of contemporary Western

engagement with the depths of the human heart has been nurtured and

dispersed. So much terror, so much madness, so much perverseness, so

much fear, so much phobia, so much detection, so much destruction, so

much fear of the feminine: it all goes back to him. Or rather, because it

precedes him, it all goes through him.Our claim may seem grandiose, but our point is that Poe’s very

intertextuality needs to be understood as something that feeds into a

constantly changing network of relations. While Poe’s life and work reso-

nates throughout much of Western culture and, increasingly, beyond, the

purpose of this collection is not to revel in Poe’s vast influence; rather,

it is to reexamine his work in terms of the strength of the matrix-figure

metaphor. As Graham Allen writes, “the act of reading … plunges us into

a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its mean-ing, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a pro-

cess of moving between texts. Meaning becomes something which exists

between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, mov-

ing out from the independent text into a network of textual relations” (1).

For our purposes, the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe has come to be

such a dominant part of this larger network of meanings and ideas that

he even factors into larger discussions of literary meaning, theory, and

criticism (e.g., the work of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Barbara

Johnson on “The Purloined Letter”). The essays in this collection take up

the kinds of conventions that Poe worked with to determine how they are

being transformed into modern popular art.

Our collection draws on the premise that adaptation studies is itself

a subspecies of postmodern intertextuality. As Julie Sanders writes,

adapted “texts rework texts that often themselves reworked texts. The

process of adaptation is constant and ongoing” (24). Sanders further

notes that adaptation also contributes to

[o]ngoing experiences of pleasure for the reader or spectator in tracing

the intertextual relationships. It is this inherent sense of play, produced in

part by the activation of our informed sense of similarity and difference

between the text being invoked, and the connected interplay of expecta-

tion and surprise, that for me lies at the heart of the experience of adapta-

tion and appropriation. (25)




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Introduction 7

Adapting Poe speaks to the need to see Edgar Allan Poe in intertextual

terms.

As indicated above, legitimate adaptations of Poe do not necessarilyneed to be conscious, as Poe’s themes, character types, plots, and theories

are all but universal among texts, media, and films that explore genres

related to gothicism, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and so forth. Some

of the essays on film adaptations in this volume seem on the surface to

have little to do with Poe’s source texts but ultimately reprocess Poe’s

major concerns in contemporary terms. For example, Kevin Flanagan’s

essay on Fellini’s short film Never Bet the Devil Your Head, aka Toby

Dammit from the omnibus Spirits of the Dead (1969) engages with celeb-rity culture in the emerging global media-sphere, making it seem more

of an adaptation of “Lionizing.” However, the lionized Toby Dammit’s

experience touches on several Poe themes, including isolation, drug use,

insanity, and the imp perverse. Jeffrey Weinstock’s essay on Robert

Bloch’s “The Man Who Collected Poe” is similarly about the penalty of

isolated celebrityhood as Poe is brought back to life and forced to con-

tinue writing. This ultimately becomes a metaphor for how Poe himself is

adapted in many films, and is thus brought back from the dead through

his various textualizations.

With a related focus on audience perceptions, Joan Ormrod examines

how even promotional campaigns can serve as adaptations, specifically

American International Picture’s (AIP’s) promotion of Roger Corman’s

The Masque of the Red Death (1964), advertised with equal emphasis on

both Vincent Price and Poe. Both figures ensured cultural capital for gen-

eral as well as more sophisticated audiences in an era of gothic revival.

Like Poe’s own stories, these campaigns invoke hunger and obsession. The

Simpsons, according to Peter Conolly-Smith, despite their parodic form,

reflect the guilt, macabre, and grotesque from “The Tell-Tale Heart” in

both Lisa’s and Bart’s separate adaptations. Saviour Catania’s reading of

Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la Maison (1928) similarly demonstrates how

the film actually preserves the spirit of Poe by taking liberties. Epstein

inverts the Orpheus-Eurydice myth by having Madeline return from the

dead to liberate Roderick from the Usher underworld. This adaptation

becomes a dialogic variation on Poe’s theory about beauty, reasserted

here as the resurrection, not the death, of a beautiful woman as “unques-

tionably the most poetical topic in the world.”

Three of the essays look at the doppelganger in Poe as a means for

finding the self in several film adaptations. Alexandra Reuber analyzes

Fight Club (1999) and Identity (2003) as unacknowledged adaptations

of “William Wilson.” Both films are forced by their double to ask them-

selves, “Does a real ‘me’ exist?” The relation of the three texts creates an




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adaptation phenomenon, referred to by Hutcheon as a “dialogical pro-

cess,” that forces viewers to look back at the source text to reconstruct

its hidden subtext, which in this case is the interrelatedness of personalitydisorders in the three texts (21). Rachel McCoppin also examines the

search for self through the obsessions of the Poe-like “unreliable narra-

tors” in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth

Sense (1999). Examining Poe’s rarely adapted “A Man of the Crowd,”

Rebecca Johinke analyzes two short television adaptations of the tale,

several student adaptations posted online, a couple of museum installa-

tions, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1994), a novel with deliberate allu-

sions to “William Wilson” and “A Man of the Crowd,” which has itselfbeen adapted in both graphic novel and video game formats.

In looking at Universal’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (Florey 1932), a

film traditionally dismissed as being so far removed from Poe’s story as to

be irrelevant as an adaptation, Jessica Metzler interprets racism as a sig-

nificant point of connection back to Poe. She demonstrates how the film

revives nineteenth-century constructions of scientific racism, speciation,

and miscegenation as a means of entering into prevalent 1930s discourses

of primitivism, hinged upon a persistent fear of foreign Others. Such a

twenty-first-century update of how adaptation between seemingly dis-

similar stories can function is further explored in Dennis Perry’s analy-

sis of Inception (Nolan 2010) against the backdrop of Poe’s “Ligeia.”

In this reading, the film becomes a “playful allusion” that transforms

Poe’s arabesque dream text into the high-tech business of entering and

manipulating people’s dreams for profit. Sandra Hughes’ study of Saw

(Wan 2004) as an adaptation of “The Pit and the Pendulum” reveals how

Wan re-visions it in terms of the twenty-first century’s paranoid culture

of surveillance. In the process, Hughes posits Poe as a pioneer in the fic-

tion of torture and in the psychology of both tortured and torturer. Wan

expands the tale’s untapped potential for graphic horror, a dimension

unthinkable in Poe’s day.

Poe’s stories have regularly been adapted into graphic narratives.

These adaptations not only introduce Poe to new readers but also poten-

tially expand more seasoned readers’ understanding of each story’s larger

significance within popular culture. To help readers appreciate the sheer

range of these graphic adaptations, we also include M. Thomas Inge’s

revised and updated bibliographic chronology of these adaptations

through mid-2011. One of the more striking of these recent adaptations

is the 2008 collection titled Nevermore, which adapts nine works by Poe

within a single volume. In her essay on Nevermore, Michelle Hansen

examines the sophisticated ways in which it updates not only the Poe




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Introduction 9

legend but also how it uses Poe’s work to comment on contemporary

social problems. In another essay on Nevermore, Mary J. Couzelis turns

our attention to the graphic adaptation of “The Tell-Tale Heart” to helpreaders challenge the assumption that the narrator of Poe’s famous tale

is a man, helping us understand new ways of thinking of the narrator’s

supposed madness as a larger response to a patriarchal culture overly

committed to dominating and exploiting women.

When most people think of Poe’s presence in popular music, they usu-

ally point to the Alan Parsons Project’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination

as the best example. Carl Sederholm’s essay addresses the increasingly

growing body of heavy metal adaptations of Poe’s work and analyzesways in which compositions by bands like Iron Maiden and Metal Church

draw on his work to help them explore the darker themes of madness,

murder, and perverseness. Also working in the field of popular music,

Tony Magistrale ties the imagery and themes of Trent Reznor’s musical

project Nine Inch Nails to the gothic-inflected aesthetic perfected by Poe.

In his analysis of the music videos for “Burn” and “Hurt” by Nine Inch

Nails, Magistrale connects Poe’s own exploration of the outcast and the

insane to the creative turmoil of modern rock stars as they seek to tame

their own demons of addiction.

Like Ormrod’s analysis of AIP’s ad campaign as adaptation, a cou-

ple of other essays probe unexpected applications of adaptation the-

ory. In separate essays, Jason Douglas and Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá

and Geraldo Magela Cáffaro think about how adaptation studies may

apply to larger ways of thinking and producing creative works as they

examine the ways in which literary theorists like Lacan, Derrida, and

Johnson become adaptors of texts in the way they schematize them for

the purposes of defining literary theory. Moreover, Todd Petersen and

Kyle Bishop draw on Linda Hutcheon’s discussion of some adaptations

as forms of “transposition” that in this case shifts reader attention from

artistic adaptations of Poe’s ideas to technological adaptations, including

concepts that shaped our understanding of space exploration.

Finally, not only did Poe pioneer popular culture in terms of mining

its latent artistic potential and contributing to the development of sev-

eral popular-culture genres, but he also established the trend of, in vari-

ous ways, adapting Poe texts himself. Artists and critics who re-imagine

Poe and his writings only follow in the footsteps of a man who continu-

ally re-imagined and adapted his own work. He explained to Philip

P. Cooke, for example, that he made connections between “Morella”

and “Ligeia” by modifying the end of the latter, because in “Morella”

he had already explored the very slow realization “of the parent that




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the spirit of the first Morella tenants the person of the second” (Poe,

Collected Letters 193). Other examples include “Hop Frog,” which

is a study in revenge that re-imagines “The Cask of Amontillado” asa dark fairy tale; “The Pit and the Pendulum’s” new setting for “A

Descent into the Maelstrom”; and “The Masque of the Red Death,”

which re-imagines Poe’s comic-grotesque plague tale, “King Pest,” as

a more serious arabesque. As with many of the subsequent adaptations

of Poe in our time, Poe most often, perhaps, adapted concepts from his

tales, varying them from one story to another. For example, the mad,

self-destructive narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” gets rebooted as the

narrator of “The Black Cat.” In short, with his own subsequent re-imaginings and reworkings, Poe recognized that, despite his personal

obsession with plagiarism, all texts are ultimately re-imaginings of pre-

vious texts. We think, too, that he would agree that judgment should

not depend on how faithful an adaptation is to its sources but on how

creatively a work engages with its predecessors within the larger inter-

textual grid.

Works CitedAlbrecht-Crane, Christa, and Dennis R. Cutchins, eds. Adaptation Studies: New

Approaches . Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010.Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Print.Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.”

Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149–71.

———. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUP, 2007. Print.

Neimeyer, Mark. “Poe and Popular Culture.” The Cambridge Companion toEdgar Allan Poe. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 205–24. Print.

Orr, John. “Hitch as Matrix-Figure: Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema.”

A Hitchcock Reader. Ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague. 2nd ed.Danvers, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 47–67. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 1: 1824–1846.

Ed. Burton Pollin, Jeffrey A. Savoye, and John Ostrom. 3rd ed. New York:Gordian Press, 2008. Print.Pollin, Burton R. “Poe in Art, Music, Opera, and Dance.” A Companion to

Poe Studies. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.494–517. Print.

Reilly, John E. “Poe in Literature and Popular Culture.” A Companion to PoeStudies. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. 471–93.Print.




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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 166

Adaptationas allusion, 81as analogue, 81, 87, 139as appropriating and salvaging, 109as criticism and theory, 249–50, 262as dialogical process, 94as ever expanding network of

textual relations, 94, 194as fidelity fetish, 135as film promotion, 146as palimpsest, 17, 20, 45as play, 6, 8, 12, 81–82as process and product, 119, 209as reception continuum, 208as repetition without replication, 217as shifting from representational to

the real, 165as translation, 249as transposition (non-narrative

material), 165The Alan Parsons Project, Tales of

Mystery and Imagination , 182Albrect-Crane, Christa, 165Allen, Graham, 6American International Pictures

(AIP), 145–61The Asphalt Jungle (1950), 83Augé, Marc, 62 , 66

Bakhtin, M. M., 81Balázs, Béla, 48Bardine, Bryan, 197Barthes, Roland, 15, 16, 262, 265

Batman Begins (2005), 83Baudelaire, Charles, 155, 181Baudrillard, Jean, 211Beardsley, Aubrey, 186Benjamin, Walter, 62Berner, David, 210Bierce, Ambrose, “Occurrence at Owl

Creek Bridge,” 88Bloch, Robert, Psycho, 82

Bourdieu, Pierre, 160Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), 48The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), 120Burdick, Michael, 227Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 33

Carr, Daphne, 188Cell (2000), 83Christie, Agatha, 272Christie, Ian, 197Clarke, Arthur C., 166Clockstoppers (2002), 83Cooper, Martin, 165–66Cope, Andrew, 203Corman, Roger, 4–5, 53Csicsery-Ronan, Jr., Istvan, 166Cutchins, Dennis, 165

Davis, Robert Con, 108

Dayan, Joan, 180, 218–19, 224, 227De Bergerac, Cyrano, A Voyage to the

Moon , 169, 170, 172Debussy, Claude, 182, 195Delano, Jamie, 212, 213De Lillo, Don, 128Demory, Pamela, 168

Index




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282 Index

De Palma, Brian, 82Derrida, Jacques, 9, 15, 155, 250–53,

258, 261, 266–69, 270, 271Doctorow, E. L., 128Donan, Stanley, 82Doré, Gustav, 186Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), 38, 123Dracula (1931), 34 , 38, 120Dreamscape (1984), 83Duke, Alice, 217Du Vernay, Denise, 134, 136, 142

Edmundson, Mark, 181Eisner, Will, 212, 226, 231Eliot, T. S., 53, 155Epstein, Jean, 4, 7Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

(2004), 83

Fellini, Frederico, 7Fight Club (1999), 7, 94–101

Fletcher, James, 213Foucault, Michel, 14, 15, 16, 28n, 76 ,185, 194

Fox, Sydney, 36Frank, Frederick S., 253Frankenstein (1931), 34, 38, 120Freddy Kreuger, 225Freud, Sigmund, 96

Gargano, James, 105, 106Gemora, Charlie, 35Gibson, William, 128Gillat, John, 160Glass, Philip, 195

“A Descent into the Maelstrom,” 195“Fall of the House of Usher,” 195

Godwin, Francis, The Man in theMoone, 168–69

Gremillon, Jean, Gardens de Phare, 55Griswold, Rufus W., 119, 120

Halberstam, Judith, 222–23Halliburton, David, 197Harris, Steve, 198H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), “Eurydice,”

46, 53Heat (1995), 83

Hitchcock, Alfred, 82, 196The Birds , 82Vertigo, 8, 82, 257

Howe, Mike, 202Howell, Laura, 208Hutcheon, Linda, 4, 8, 9, 13, 17, 41,

45, 78, 119, 121 , 122, 123,162, 165, 168, 194, 196, 202,208–9, 217, 219, 220, 249,262, 263

Identity (2003), 7, 94–101

Inception (2010), 8, 81–90Ingagi (1930), 31, 34–36Inge, M. Thomas, 207, 208, 217Iron Maiden, 194, 197, 198–200

Eddie, 198“Invaders,” 197Killers, 197, 198“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 194,

197, 199–200

Intertextuality, 3–5, 7, 17, 20, 45,81, 194The Invisible Man (1933), 120Irwin, William, 139

James, Henry, 82, 155 Johnson, Barbara, 9, 261, 268 Joyce, James, 270

Finnigan’s Wake , 270

Jung, Carl, 105, 106, 111, 114–15, 116

Kallis, Al, 158, 159Karloff, Boris, 119, 120Kennedy, J. Gerald, 201King Kong (1933), 36, 37Klimt, Gustav, 186Kline, Karen, 218–19Kristeva, Julia, 93

Lacan, Jacques, 9, 98, 155, 250, 251,253, 261, 264–66, 268

Lavic, Eric, 110Leitch, Thomas, 3–4, 135Loche, Richard, “Moon Story,” 169Lombardo, J. R., 139Lost Memories (2002), 83Lovecraft, H. P., 19, 28




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Index 283

Lowell, James Russell, 261Lucian, True History, 168–69Lugosi, Bela, 36, 119

Magistrale, Anthony, 253Marshall, Wolf, 198Matheson, Carl, 138–39The Matrix (1999), 83Matthiessen, F. O., 155Mattotti, Lorenzo, 196McCloud, Scott, 210, 212, 215–16McCurdy, Howard, 174

McFarlane, Brian, 3Meyers, Helene, 222–23Moore, Leah, 213–14Mor Vran (1931), 50Mulvey, Laura, 222The Mummy (1932), 120The Mysteries of Paris (Eugène Sue), 32

Neimeyer, Mark, 1, 194

Nevermore : A Graphic Adaptationof Edgar Allan Poe’s ShortStories , 8, 207, 208, 217

“The Black Cat,” 210, 213–15“The Oval Portrait,” 210–12“The Pit and the Pendulum,”

210, 212“The Tell-Tale Heart,” 210, 217

Nine Inch Nails, 183–89

“Burn” (1994), 184“Closer” (1994), 185“Happiness in Slavery” (1992 ),

184–85“Hurt” (2003), 184“The Perfect Drug” (1997), 185, 187Pretty Hate Machine (1989), 185

Nolan, Christopher, 81–90Nosferatu (1922), 48

Ocean’s Eleven (1960; 2001), 83“Of Unsound Mind” (Metal Church,

Blessings in Disguise 1989),194, 201–4

The One (2001), 83Orr, John, 5–6, 196Overstreet, Robert M., Comic Book

Price Guide , 231

Perry, Dennis R., 122, 257Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of

Delight and Terror, 257Playtime (1967), 63 , 67Poe, Edgar Allan

apolalyptic endings in, 82and the arabesque, 83–89authorship, 15–28doppelgangers in, 7, 82and film, 3, 120–21, 126and gender, 181, 217–22and genre development, 2–3

as matrix figure, 5–6, 196and music, 195–96mythologizes his life, 119, 207–8myths and legends of, 1–3, 7, 25narrators, 109, 209, 218, 257and popular culture, 1, 2, 9and psychological Gothic, 2and race issues, 8, 31–41and science fiction, 3, 7,

165–75and The Simpsons , 133–43as textualized character, 13, 14,

16–17as torture fiction pioneer, 71Film Adaptations

The Assignation (Snow 1988), 123The Avenging Conscience

(Griffith 1914), 45–46

The Black Cat (Ulmer 1934),120, 125La Chute de la Maison Usher

(Epstein 1928), 4–7, 45–56Danza Macabra, aka Castle

of Blood (Margheriti 1965),13–19, 23, 27

Edgar Allen (sic) Poe (Griffith1909), 120, 126

The Fall of the House of Usher

(Corman 1960), 4–5, 121,147, 249–51

The Fall of the House of Usher (Watson/Webber 1928), 50

The House of Usher (Cloake2006), 252, 255–57

“Lisa’s Rival” (The Simpsons 1994), 133, 134, 138




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284 Index

Poe, Edgar Allan—Continued Man About Crowd (Makkas

2009) 127The Man of the Crowd (Aiken

2008), 123, 125–26The Man of the Crowd (Crouse

2008), 127The Man of the Crowd (Morales

1988), 127The Man of the Crowd (Ngyen

2011), 127–28The Man of the Crowd ( Snow

1987), 123–25The Masque of the Red Death

(Corman 1964), 7, 10, 17, 121,146–61

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Florey 1932), 8, 36–41, 120

The Pit and the Pendulum (Corman 1961), 121, 147

The Premature Burial (Corman

1962), 121 , 125The Raven (Corman 1963), 121The Raven (Éclair/American

Standard 1912), 120The Raven (Essanay Company of

Chicago 1915), 120The Raven (Landers 1935), 120The Simpsons Halloween

Special: “The Raven” (The

Simpsons 1990), 131, 133–38, 207Spirits of the Dead (Vadim,

Malle, Fellini 1967), 60“The Telltale Head” (The

Simpsons 1990), 134, 139–41William Wilson, 7, 8

Graphic Adaptations, 231–47Works

“The Assignation,” 82“The Balloon Hoax,” 167“The Bells,” 182“The Black Cat,” 10, 89, 105–8,

181, 183, 194, 201“The Cask of Amontillado,”

10, 134“City in the Sea,” 183“The Conqueror Worm,” 85

“The Conversation of Eiros andCharmion,” 167

“A Descent into theMaelström,” 10

“Dream-Land,” 183“A Dream within a Dream,” 82“Eleanora,” 46, 180Eureka , 83–84, 87“The Fall of the House of Usher,”

19–20, 82, 134, 145, 147, 256“Hop Frog,” 10, 121“The Imp of the Perverse,” 82,

194, 201“King Pest,” 10, 183“Lander’s Cottage, 55“Ligeia,” 8, 9, 81–90, 179, 257“Lionizing,” 7“Loss of Breath,” 47“The Man of the Crowd,” 119,

121, 127, 128–29“The Man Who Collected

Poe” (Robert Bloch), 14–15,19–25“The Man Who Collected Poe”

(in Torture Garden [Francis1967]), 15, 25–28

“Marginalia,” 52“The Masque of the Red Death,”

31–32, 33, 37, 82“Mellonta Tauta,” 166

“Morella,” 9“The Murders in the RueMorgue,” 31–32, 33, 37, 198

“Never Bet the Devil YourHead,” 59

“The Oval Portrait,” 46“The Philosophy of

Composition,” 14, 46, 181“The Philosophy of Furniture,” 56“The Pit and the Pendulum,” 8,

10, 46, 72–79, 185“The Poetic Principle,” 46, 47,

48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 181“The Power of Words,” 52“The Purloined Letter,” 82, 90,

250, 253, 261, 263“The Rationale of Verse,” 181“The Raven,” 182, 183




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Index 285

Tales of Mystery andImagination , 96

Tales of the Grotesque and

Arabesque , 96, 197“The Tell-Tale Heart,” 105, 108,

122, 227“The Unparalleled Adventures of

One Hans Pfaall,” 166, 167–75“William Wilson,” 94–101, 125 ,

128, 129The Poe Encyclopedia (Frank and

Magistrale), 253, 254

Pollin, Burton, 195Praz, Mario, 181Price, Vincent, 121, 146, 153, 154,

157–60Pugh, Steve, 212, 213The Purloined Poe , 250

Rajan, Gita, 218, 219, 221, 222Ravel, Maurice, 195

Reed, Lou, 182, 195–96Reppion, John, 213–14Reynolds, David, J., 141Reznor, Trent, 183–89Richards, Eliza, 218, 219, 221, 222Riggs, Derek, 198Romanek, Mark, 185–86Rush, Benjamin, Medical Inquiries

and Observations Upon

Diseases of the Mind , 95

Sandells, Natalie, 210Sanders, Julie, 4, 6, 28n, 46, 94,

194, 262Saw (2004), 8, 71–79The Seventh Seal (1857), 152Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 157

The Simpsons, 133–43, 207The Sixth Sense (1999), 8, 108,

114–16Slater, Jeremy, 217Smith, Andrew, 226Smith, Ronald L., 120, 123 , 126Solaris (1972), 90Solomon, Robert, 189Star Wars (1977), 166Sullivan, Jack, 195Swinburne, Algernon, 181Swirski, Peter, 252, 253

Tartuffe (1925), 55Thompson, Kirsten, 189Thoms, Peter, 200Timequest (2002), 83Tresch, John, 167Truffaut, Francois, 82

Vampyr (1932), 50

Verne, Jules, 167From the Earth to the Moon , 167,172 , 175

Round the Moon, 172, 173, 175Le voyage dans la lune , 172, 175

Vertov, Dziga, 48

Wallace, Diana, 226Walse, Robert, 193

Waltonen, Karma, 134, 136, 142“Warrior” (Saxon), 197Weinstein, Deena, 193Wells, H. G., 166, 174

The World Set Free , 166Wertham, Fredric, 215

Žižek, Slavoj, 262, 270, 271




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Documents

Adapting Poe