The Raven

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 a dancer performs a choreography while we listen to the titular poem over a musical background and see, on one side of the stage, the author in the process of capturing his masterpiece on paper. "The Spirit of Poe" would not be out of place in The Tall Guy, in which Jeff Goldblum had the title role in a satirical musical about the Elephant Man called "Elephant!"

Among the spectators is the morbid Dr. Vollin (Bela Lugosi), who is not only obsessed with Edgar Allan, but also has a personal interest in ballerina Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware); Vollin reluctantly operated on Jean after a car accident, and only after her father, Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), assured him that all other doctors agreed that he was the only one who can save her — and save her he does, falling in love with her in the process.

The Judge is grateful but not that grateful, and understandably not wanting the saturnine Vollin for a son-in-law, tries to put a stop to the matter, in turn leading Vollin to hatch a nefarious plot against the Thatchers, with the unexpected but timely help of the fugitive murderer Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff). This Bateman is, to borrow Grampa Simpson’s expression, dumb as a mu...