Spirits of the Dead

SYNOPSIS Dismissed as a gloomy and sentimental hack by American and British critics in his day, Edgar Allan Poe was nonetheless revered in France as a poete maudit and master of the short story by Charles Baudelaire, praised as a sublime poet by Mallarme, celebrated as a lucid theoretician of poet effects by Valery. The difference could not have been more stark. And yet, when the filmic poets of European Cinema came together to adapt Poe s stories for SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (Histoires Extraordinaires) they were largely derided, with only Fellini s Toby Dammit segment receiving unanimous praise, while the American adaptations of Poe s stories, by Roger Corman and AIP, received both popular and critical acclaim. Fitting then, that the wheel should come full circle, as US author and Critic Tim Lucas mounts this compelling re-examination of a film which he has long defended as a Classic of the genre, and which in his own words changed his life . Embracing the poetic and the sublime, Lucas takes to task the common misconception that this is a film of parts, to look at it as a richly imagined, sensual, cohesive, and poetic whole. A film which aims for something other than straight forward scares, that eschews the clinical Freudianism of the Corman movies, for something more deeply felt. Poe himself claimed that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. For Tim Lucas, SPIRITS OF THE DEAD does just that.

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