To Know Poe

My sojourn to Montreal to take in a week of the FanTasia film festival has ended, so now it’s time to get into some of the actual films… well, not quite.

Before that, let’s talk Poe. This year’s FanTasia program included a two-night run of Nevermore: An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe, performed in Montreal’s gorgeous former movie theatre, the Rialto, which dates back to the silent era. Poe was the original Master of Horror, of course, and countless film adaptations of his stories have been produced, but what makes this live theatre performance particularly special for film fans?

Easy: the horror film powerhouse trio of director Stuart Gordon, actor Jeffrey Combs and writer Dennis Paoli. If you’re more than even the most casual of horror fans, you’ve seen Re-Animator, the very loose 1985 adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story, which was co-written by Paoli and Gordon, directed by Gordon and starred Combs as the comically narcissistic and mad scientist Herbert West. The trio teamed up again for From Beyond (1986), The Pit and the Pendulum (1991) and the Masters of Horror series episode The Black Cat (2007). Beyond that, Gordon has also directed a whack of cool low-budget films, including Dagon, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Edmond; Paoli did the screenplay for Abel Ferrara’s underrated 1993 Bodysnatchers (yes, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake); and Combs has been in all kinds of things, including a whack of Star Trek episodes, from more than one of the latter-day series.

For a couple years now, they’ve been touring around Nevermore: An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe and I’ve been dying to see it. The one man show – which is close to two hours long – has Combs as Poe performing a recital of his work, but self-sabotaging the evening by drinking and bad mouthing his peers, eventually spiraling into a stumbling state of self-loathing and despair. Combs gives the definitive Poe performance, gripping the crowd with his passionate delivery, flair for bringing the writer’s words to life and (often comical, often crushingly self-destructive) faux drunken bravado. It’s a captivating display of cryptic, wounded humanity, and obviously the closest thing a Poe fan can get to hearing the author, who died in October of 1849, read his own work.

If you’re in the San Diego area at the end of the year, you can catch Nevermore here. Other presentations pop up on Combs’ official site, here. However, if you’re in the vast majority, and won’t be able to see Nevermore, yet really want to see Combs as the doomed author, you gotta get your hands on the aforementioned Masters of Horror (the series that ran for two seasons in 2005 to 2007, in which each episode was an hour-long movie directed by a notable “master of horror”) installment The Black Cat (here). It combines the Poe story of the same name with Poe himself (Combs, obviously) being driven murderously mad by the black cat that’s inspiring the famous tale. It’s the best episode in the series, and soars on the strengths of Combs’ increasingly manic performance, the inventive storytelling device and classy direction. Combs, Paoli and Stuart: The Masters of Poe.

-Dave Alexander