It’s Edgar Allen Poe’s 200th birthday and in the Guardian’s Film Blog Danny Leigh assesses Poe’s influence on film. Here’s part of what he says:
“Naturally, he could claim territorial rights over pretty much anything that might be called horror. Beyond that, however, given that The Murders in the Rue Morgue essentially created the detective story, there's a case to be made that his shadow falls long across the entire sprawling genres of thriller and crime drama. And that's without factoring in his monkeying around with the divide between fiction and reality in presenting The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a memoir, its hero's gruesome misadventures aboard the whaling ship Grampus a factual document drawn from life – a meta-marketing device which last showed up in the phenomenon that was The Blair Witch Project.”
Time to go back and re-read your favorite Poe story and remind yourself of how good he was!
