From The House of Usher to The Louse of Usher:
Résumé
When considering the ways in which “expansion” comes into play in film adaptation, one
is naturally drawn to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, an author who wrote nearly exclusively very
short works (tales and poems) and whose vast appeal among readers, especially those of younger
generations, has driven countless film-makers over the past century to try to expand his short written
works into full-length feature films. One might think that the sheer number of times each short work
by Poe has been adapted, successfully or not, would deter more recent film-makers from once again
attempting the task, that they might see themselves as running the risk of beating Poe’s dead horse, as
it were. However, the appeal of Poe’s brand of Gothic story-telling and the drive among film-makers
to adapt his works appear to be as strangely “unkillable” as his own M. Valdemar or the infamous old
man’s forever-beating “tell-tale heart.”
By simply looking at the number of feature films and shorts adapted, by decade, from the
works of Poe over the last 60 years or so, one notices a few key trends. Firstly, and not surprisingly,
nearly every decade since the 1950’s has seen a greater number of film shorts made than feature films,
as shorts by definition require far less “expansion.” Secondly, one cannot help but notice that both
shorts and features follow the same trend over time, with two very clear peaks – one in the 1960’s, with
13 features and 14 shorts, and one over the last decade, with 14 features and a whopping 34 shorts (see
Fig. 1). Thus, the 1960’s and the 2000’s seem to form two distinct and distinctive “Poe cycles” in terms
of film adaptation, and the focus of this study will be to compare the expansion techniques used in each
of these two cycles.
A closer look at the cinematic devices and expansion techniques used during these two key waves of
Poe adaptations (the more recent of which is yet to break) reveals a few noted similarities, particularly in
terms of low budgets and B-movie quality, but, more importantly, two remarkably different approaches
to expanding a short work through adaptation, as well as two very different notions of “fidelity” to
Poe’s work.