I’m not objecting to the aesthetic.
Yes, it’s gaudy and overwrought, with heaping piles of thanatological imagery served up – but, shoot, it’s Poe. You don’t go to Poe when you want terse terror. Sloppy and melodramatic makes more sense.
5 thoughts on “The FALL OF THE HALL OF USHER Netflix trailer.”
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That was somebody who read the Cliff’s Notes from Poe and decided to make a movie out of it.
It was written nearly 200 years ago by a polymath who used big words.
I have no confidence that the current crop of Hollywood screenwriters is capable of reading the actual story.
Nor that it could be produced without appealing to THE MODERN AUDIENCE.
Poe codified the short story, and held that it must have Unity of Theme, and that every word must drive towards a single emotional impact. This is fundamentally incompatible with delivering THE MESSAGE.
So yeah, guaranteed suckage unless it’s self-funded by radically counterculture Poe fans.
OhGod.
I wrote that appraisal before watching the trailer.
And it’s so much worse than I feared.
I made it forty seconds before I had to recoil in horror at the travesty.
If I’d thought about it more, I’d have realized that any sufficiently radicalized countercultural Poe fans would have chosen Masque of the Red Death.
That would be based.
They might have read the actual story. But then they said, “Forget everything you just read, except the title.”