The Raven

9/3/2022

The Raven succeeded in 1935 where Roger Corman and Vincent Price failed 28 years later. The 1963 version of The Raven was written by Richard Matheson, who is quoted by Wikipedia as saying, "After hearing that they wanted to make a movie out of a poem, I felt it was a total joke, so comedy was the only way to do it." Matheson's mistake was precisely that he approached the material lightly, though; it's because Raven '35 takes itself deathly seriously — director Lew Landerss and screenwriter David Boehm are more popish than the Pope (or, in this case, more Poe-pish than Poe) — that the film transcends the horror genre and enters, albeit unwittingly, the realm of (self) parody. Consider this: early in the film the characters attend a dance recital entitled "The Spirit of Poe," in which