[New-Poetry] Another Poe Film

[editor at eratiopostmodernpoetry.com]

.
DEATH OF POE film sets fest premiere.    

Baltimore filmmaker Mark Redfield’s new feature THE DEATH OF POE, based 
on the final week in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, will receive its world premiere 
next month at the 17th edition of Britain’s longest-running horror movie 
event, the Festival of Fantastic Films. The fest, where Redfield’s version of DR. 
JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE won the Best Independent Film prize four years ago, 
will be held in Manchester, England over the weekend of September 1-3, 
reports Fangoria.com.


Poe’s final days are a mystery which has long intrigued horror scholars. He 
traveled from Richmond, Virginia to New York, but disappeared midway and 
was found, several days later, wandering around Baltimore, where he died on 
October 7, 1849. “The picture is based entirely on the known facts 
surrounding his death,” Redfield tells Fangoria.com. “As for the actual cause 
of his death [and the days that cannot be accounted for], screenwriter Stuart 
Voytilla and I chose the most likely theories and incorporated them. 
Historians will be glad to know that we avoided the ‘rabies’ theory!


And don’t expect a typically staid biopic, either; Redfield confirms this will be 
a true genre experience. “THE DEATH OF POE isn’t a biography,” he says. “It’s 
a nightmarish postcard, if you will, of Poe’s last week on Earth. The picture 
plays very much as if Poe experienced the last week of his life in the final 
moments before he died and found peace. It has an uncanny sense about it, 
and people who have seen it come away liking Poe, and rethinking the 
popular conception that he was an out-of-control alcoholic. Buñuel and 
Duchamp would’ve liked this picture, I believe!”


As writer, director, producer and star of the film, Redfield must have learned 
a great deal about the author during its making. “That's difficult to answer,” 
he says. “One always assumes one ‘knows Poe’—until you reread him, read 
his letters and what others wrote about him. After the research and coming to 
understand our own film, and how it plays, my current view is perhaps a bit 
existentialist: that Poe was suicidal after his beloved Virginia’s death, and 
regardless of what the corporeal real world offered him, he had an artist’s 
compulsion to create, to the very end.”


Of course, Poe’s own tales have been adapted numerous times for the screen, 
most notably by Roger Corman, but Redfield’s own personal favorite, when 
pressed, is an unusual one. “The first film to spring to mind is the UPA 
cartoon of THE TELL-TALE HEART, narrated by James Mason and released in 
1953. It captures the spirit of Poe’s writing beautifully. If you can find it, add 
it to your collection, and watch it before one of the Corman-Price movies!” 
For more on THE DEATH OF POE, check out the film’s official website.  

http://www.redfieldarts.com/DeathOfPoe.html


This is not Sly's Poe.  (Remember that one?  I wonder what happened to it?) 


Happy summer, everybody,  

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino 


http://thepostmodernromantic.blogspot.com/  

http://eratio.blogspot.com/


.