Culture writer Lamisa Worthy details the KCL Strand Film Festival’s screening of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.
There are few writers whose name has so vivaciously fused with an adjective as Edgar Allan Poe’s has with “macabre”. To invoke Poe is to imagine a world of lingering dread, billowing curtains, and flickering candlelight narrated by the fractured mind of a haunted protagonist.
At this year’s 9th annual Strand Film Festival, KCL’s Department of Film Studies hosted a ‘Poe on Screen’ event, featuring short films such as Robert Eggers’ The Tell-Tale Heart (2008), and Jean Epstein’s silent The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). The latter was accompanied by a live violin score by Marika Tyler-Clark.
Eggers’ short, adapted from one of Poe’s most famous tales, is almost austere in its simplicity. A servant, driven mad by his master’s “evil” eye, meticulously executes a gruesome murder, only to be undone by his intense guilt and sensory hallucinations. On page, the tale is one of monotony, with the horror generated by the narrator’s sensory breakdown. Eggers translates this in a way that avoids over-explanation. Dialogue is sparse, allowing for the atmospheric tension to bear the weight of suspense and horror. The film’s visual language renders the domestic space uncanny, with the claustrophobic camera work embodying the very terror Poe’s prose implies. In this sense, film proves uniquely complementary to Poe’s project, externalising the paranoia of the tale without diluting it with unnecessary exposition.
Eggers’ most striking choice was his use of a puppet for the old man. Though at first jarring in its oddity, it is that artificiality that is most haunting. Existing between object and person, the puppet amplifies the story’s central ambiguity and uncanny horror. In retrospect, the film feels like a blueprint for Eggers’ later works, such as The Witch (2015) and Nosferatu (2024), where we see a similar fascination with the Gothic aesthetic, psychological isolation, and archaic visuals.
If Eggers’ film is a controlled spiral, Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher is expansive and delirious, taking impressionistic horror to its extremes. It follows Roderick Usher, an artist convinced that his portrait of his wife, Madeline, is draining her life. Soon she dies and is entombed, but returns during a storm, leading to the mansion’s collapse.
To call Epstein’s film a faithful adaptation would be misleading. In fact, its departures from Poe were significant enough to prompt Luis Buñuel, who had worked on the screenplay, to leave the project entirely. And yet, for all its creative liberties, it miraculously retains the quintessential essence of Poe, with its atmospheric horror compensating for what it lacks in textual fidelity.
The film is a masterclass in early cinematic expressionism, merging abstract imagery and experimental editing to intensify the narrative’s dreamlike terror. The camera drifts, starting somewhat calm, and then in moments of intensity, fracturing into rapid cuts. By the final act, images are layered on top of each other in a way that mirrors Roderick’s psychological deterioration. At times, it truly feels like a fever dream. Epstein manages to anticipate later avant-garde cinema, whilst still firmly rooting his vision within the Gothic.
The event featured a live violin accompaniment to this screening by Marika Tyler-Clark. Her score supplied an emotional dimension to the film, making the danger seem much more imminent. As the narrative itself darkened, Clark’s music swelled into something more insistent, particularly striking during the entombment sequence, where the hammering of nails is intensified to make the suspense visceral. One attendee dubbed this element the ‘best part of the event’, especially with Clark’s ‘impressive use of the loop pedal’.
Together, these films suggest that Poe’s adaptability and influence remain persistent, even in the contemporary. Even with the most recent adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher by Mike Flanagan (2023), Poe’s macabre tales continue to captivate audiences. With the recent resurgence of Gothic media in an era preoccupied with collapse in all forms, this screening feels especially well placed. Festivals like this prompt us to not only look back on some of the genre’s origins, but to recognise their enduring relevance today.
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