Jeffrey Combs IS Edgar Allan Poe in Stuart Gordon's Adaptation of "The Black Cat" for Masters of Terror
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It will surprise no one to learn that my first favorite writer was Edgar Allan Poe. I suspect that’s true of all weird kids and pint-sized oddballs. He is an exceedingly obvious, predictable choice for any number of reasons.
Poe wrote scary stories and sinister poems that children could read and appreciate. He was age-appropriate and a product of. bygone era but he wasn’t boring or respectable. Hell, he even inspired a segment in the very first “Treehouse of Horrors” episode of The Simpsons.
The poet and author was spooky as hell. He was gothic. He was morbid. He appealed to readers who were strange and unusual because he himself was strange and unusual.
I appreciated that about Poe, just as I liked that about my first favorite filmmaker, Tim Burton.
But I also appreciated that, in addition to being one of our nation’s most beloved and important writers Poe was also famously a world-class fuck-up.
Poe drank too much. He had a gambling problem. The literary innovator’s dad abandoned his family. His mother died when he was two years old. Tragedy, death and desperation was a part of Poe’s life from the very beginning. They would follow him doggedly throughout his troubled and too short life.
Like Jerry Lee Lewis, Poe married his thirteen year old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who subsequently died of Tuberculosis at twenty-four. Poe himself would die under mysterious circumstances at forty.
Funny, he doesn’t LOOK tormented!
Like H.P. Lovecraft, Poe seemed to live the life that he wrote about. Like Lovecraft, he looked exactly like you think he would. He looked haunted by something more than the ravages of a hard life filled with despair and woe.
I liked Poe but I also related to him because I related to anyone who struggled and failed.
Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of “The Black Cat” for Masters of Horror combines Poe’s terror tale about a man with a very troubled relationship with both felines and reality with the biographical details of Poe's own life.
For the all-important role of Edgar Allan Poe, troubled genius, Gordon unsurprisingly went with his leading man of choice, Jeffrey Combs, who dug Poe so much he did a one-man show about him.
Combs plays Poe as a man at the end of his tether. He’s broke. He’s desperate. He has a wife he loves dearly but he cannot provide her with a life of stability and security, only one of perpetual struggle and anxiety.
Then there’s his drinking problem. Alcohol transforms Poe from a studious and responsible Dr. Jeckyl into a savage and borderline feral Mr. Hyde. It is the sinister elixir that brings out the worst in a man already struggling mightily just to get by.
At the risk of hyperbole, I have never related to any character as strongly as I did Poe here. True, my wife is not struggling with Tuberculoses and I’m thankfully not a poet but everything else felt, if anything, too close to home.
Poe becomes convinced that his cat Pluto has become a demonic force intent on killing his wife. So he crushes a tiny bird in his hand and frames the poor feline for the crime before stabbing the kitty in the eyeball.
When that doesn’t do the trick he hangs the cursed creature. Like most people I’m not particularly bothered by violence against humans as long as it is not sexual in nature and the violence is not committed against children. But if a dog or a cat is abused or killed in a movie or a television show I lose my shit. There’s something inherently transgressive against violence committed against a pet. Even though the cat is stabbed and hung in Poe’s short story as well there’s something about actually seeing an animal being hung from a noose that makes it disturbing on a whole different visceral level.
As is his custom, Combs begins the story half-mad and crazy with hunger and desperation and just proceeds to get crazier and more deranged as things proceed. Gordon and co-scriptwriter Dennis Paoli have turned the short story’s unnamed, decidedly unreliable narrator into Poe but made his just as unreliable.
Thanks to a potent combination of alcohol, madness, grief and confusion Poe has a very slippery grasp on reality. He does not, for example, seem to definitively know whether his wife is dead or whether that was just some manner of nightmare or hallucination.
“The Black Cat” is forever sliding in and out of fantasy. It is difficult, if not impossible to definitively determine what is real and what is not.
“The Black Cat” ends on a deeply unsatisfying note. Gordon pulls the rug from under us one last time by revealing that everything that we’ve seen has been a dream, or rather the creative process by which Poe wrote the short story of the title.
Gordon posits Poe as a method writer who had to essentially go into a fugue state and live in the haunted, bloody and cursed world of his work in order to create his nasty nuggets and fright fables.
Edgar Allen Poe is a real person. Gordon probably wouldn’t have a problem depicting someone who actually lived as a madman and a wife murderer. But he very well could have drawn the line at portraying Poe as a murderer of animals.
So “The Black Hat” has the happy ending that Poe did not experience in real life. His wife is not dead. He is not a cat murderer or a bird murderer or a wife murderer. Instead he’s someone who has just written a short story that will live on forever and eventually inspire a moderately disappointing segment of a short lived but much missed horror anthology series.
Happy endings don’t have a place in Gordon’s dark world. They don’t fit his pessimistic worldview. Yet “The Black Cat” ends on an up note all the same.
“The Black Cat” is far from an embarrassment but I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as the other segment Gordon directed for Masters of Horror or his sole contribution to Fear Itself.
It’s not bad but it does not meet the high standards Gordon set for himself during an extraordinary if too brief career.
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