The Black Cat
Don’t let him cross your path. Especially if he’s got an axe.
Source:
“The Black Cat,” by Edgar Allan Poe
Screen:
Masters of Horror: The Black Cat
Compare/Contrast:
I have a confession to make. I write fiction (not the confession), and I’d say I’m reasonably good at it (still not the confession), but I think I may have to consider myself a failure because, despite what Hollywood has taught us time and again, my real life and the fiction I create have never become hypnotically intertwined in a nightmare of my own invention. I’ve never woken up in the middle of the night to find one my characters sitting on the edge of the bed, muttering sentence fragments. I’ve never confused the people I care about with people who aren’t really there.
I’m sorry about this. I’ve been letting down the team.
Thankfully, this was not a thing that Edgar Allan Poe was guilty of, at least according to Stuart Gordon’s terrific Masters Of Horror episode, The Black Cat. In Gordon’s world, Poe had phantoms up the wazoo, and some of those phantoms inspired his work, and vice versa. It’s a conceit that usually bores the crap out of me—there’s something agonizingly literal about reducing art to the plugged in variables of an algebraic equation—but Gordon makes it work. Between him and an excellent lead performance from Jeffrey Combs, we have on our hands a true rarity: a great Poe adaptation.
The IMDB credits Poe with an astonishing 214 movies and TV shows, ranging from the early 1900’s to sometime next year. Most of them suck. The best are probably the Corman films, like Masque Of The Red Death; weird, unsettling concoctions that represent some of the strongest things Corman ever directed. The rest, well… Let’s be honest—I haven’t seen that many of the 214. So it’s bad form for me to pass judgment on them, as I’m sure they’re not all terrible. But when it comes to writers who’s work inspires great cinema, Poe is not a name that leaps to mind.
Why is that, exactly? He’s an effective writer, no question, and that his stories have lasted this long has to mean something good about them. I grew up reading “Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” (occasionally in expurgated form; I didn’t know about the dismembering bit in “Heart” until I got to college), and the rest, and the their plots have been an accepted element of popular culture for a century at least. Admittedly, their power to shock is mostly gone. It’s hard to imagine anyone responding these days in the same way audiences responded when the stories were fresh, experiencing for the first time the way the sophisticated tone (“He uses all these words, it simply must be literary!”) belies all the carnage and unsettling, intimate psychological terrors. We can still recognize that in his fiction, but we’re expecting it.
But the work persists, so there’s power there. The language Poe uses is a big part of that power, and it’s one of the most obvious reasons why adapting his work for movies has proven so difficult. Without the set tone, the plots aren’t anywhere near as haunting. Plenty of things happen in Poe’s stories, but most of them are too short to fill a feature length film; and stretching out, say, the revenge plot of “Cask of Amontillado” isn’t going to do the narrative any good. Without his voice, it’s just creepy stuff done by creepy people. There’s no art to it, no soul.
Take “The Black Cat.” The actual story isn’t simple, exactly, but there’s barely enough there for an episode of Night Gallery. A man with a drinking problem indulges in some animal torture on the family cat. He kills the cat, and a house-fire hides the evidence. Then he kills his wife and walls up her body in the basement. Only he accidentally walls up a cat in there too (which may or may not be the reincarnation of a cat he’d earlier killed), and when the cops come, they find the body of the man’s wife because the cat keeps screaming.
It’s freaky, but it couldn’t last 90 minutes. We don’t really see how the narrator changes, there’s no real arc to his character (there should be, as he’s supposed to be a loving husband who turns into a psychopath, but there’s no change at all between the two points, apart from his actions), and while a movie could provide those details, it would only be doing so to fill time. Anybody who reads “The Black Cat” and really wishes for a flashback to the narrator’s childhood where he watched his father drown a kitten is missing the point.
“Cat” is one of the few Poe stories that still gets under my skin these days. It’s very gruesome; there’s something viscerally unpleasant about that cat getting its eye plucked out, and that final image, of the cat sitting atop the narrator’s wife’s corpse, is vicious. Plus, there’s that sense of personal betrayal. The narrator doesn’t just kill a friendly landlord or entomb an acquaintance, he torments a pet and murders his wife. Women in Poe’s fiction generally don’t amount to much, and the wife here barely exists beyond her role in the household, but she’s still enough of a presence that her death is upsetting.
I wasn’t exactly desperate to see all this brought to the screen. I like the Corman adaptations I’d seen, but none them were exactly scary; more spooky and fun. A proper adaptation of “The Black Cat” would have to be claustrophobic, frightening, and it would have to simulate the animal cruelty to work. This, I would expect, would’ve been the sticking point for most folks.
So god bless Stuart Gordon for not skimping on the gore when it came time for his version. The Black Cat is his second Masters of Horror episode; the first, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreams Of The Witch-House is good, but Cat is something special. At sixty minutes, (including opening and closing credits) it doesn’t quite count as a full length feature, but it’s close enough; and really, the length works to the film’s advantage. It’s a deeply unsettling character study that has, at its center, the perfect lead for one of Poe’s stories: Poe himself.
This is a different Poe than you might expect, though. He’s a drunk, sure, and he’s got that crazy black hair and club-shaped nose, but this Poe has a Southern accent, and instead of the dour, timid melancholy suggested by nearly every photograph and painting of the man in existence, Cat’s Poe is theatrical, impassioned, and deeply self-loathing. We’ve talked about Jeffrey Combs before, and this is some of the best work of his I’ve seen. This is a Poe who, while almost certainly exaggerated, feels real, and not just a reflection of his stories.
Still, Combs’ Poe is haunted by his work, and one of the clever touches of Cat is to show him despondent about muted critical reception to his poetry, while at the same time demonstrating why he may have been less than willing to celebrate the “macabre tales” that made him so famous. Gordon manages to take the old saw of the artist trapped in his art and make it seem fresh; here, Poe’s obvious feelings of inadequacy, both in his failure to provide for his ailing young wife Virginia (Elyse Levesque) and the alcoholism that eats up his income and leaves them destitute, are translated into the more explicit horrors that the author is best known for today. While he seems honest in his passion for poems, might not there also be an element of fear? Of wanting to avoid going back to the well that dredged up “The Tell-Tale Heart,” simply because it would mean facing his demons in a more direct fashion than he’s truly comfortable with?
Again, there’s no way of telling how the real Poe felt (although he did consider his poetry to be the best of his work), but the delicacy with which this is all convey is impressively deft. “Delicacy” may not be the word that springs to mind when trying to describe a story that involves more than its fair share of gore (one of the joys of watching Gordon is that no matter how intellectual he gets, if a situation calls for the gruesome, he brings it in spades), but there’s a maturity there that’s remains impressive even on repeat viewings, after the initial shock-value has worn off. In general, Masters Of Horror episodes are wed more to plot than character, as is usually the way with anthology shows; but here we have a character study that manages to satisfy the requirements of the series without sacrificing depth.
The story uses elements of Poe’s fiction, most particularly the original “Black Cat,” and combines them with some basic biography. We have Poe and Virginia living in near poverty, with Virginia already on her way to death by consumption, and Poe switching between attentive husband and useless souse. He begs an advance off a publisher on the strength of his next story, only to waste that advance at a tavern—and there’s a terrific gag here where Poe bets the bartender he can “stand on one finger,” and then proceeds to stand on the bartender’s own index finger. Poe’s a drunk, and something of a mean one. There’s a certain air of desperation about Combs that runs through the hour, of a man who knows he’s failing at life, and knows the blame lays entirely at his feet, but can’t stop himself from making the same mistakes.
Back home, Poe finds his wife preparing to sell her piano to a stranger; Poe insists she play and sing something for them, and she does, but in the middle of a song, she coughs up gouts of blood. When the doctor comes, he tells Poe his wife is consumptive (“the white plague,” Poe calls it), but refuses to do much more for her because Poe can’t pay him. So here he’s stuck; he has to write a story to get the rest of the cash to help Virginia, but, as always seems the case when things are desperate, he can’t come up with a single idea.
And that’s when the cat starts screwing with him. Pluto first appears in the opening scene, hissing at Poe and watching him and Virginia in their unsuccessful attempt to make love. (Both parties are willing, but when Virgina coughs up some blood, it ruins the mood.) Poe starts to blame the cat for his wife’s poor health, and when Pluto attacks their pet canary, Poe snaps, and gouges out one of the feline’s eyes. Virginia hears the noise and gets out of bed, her nightgown still covered with blood, but before she can figure out what’s really going on, she dies.
Okay, we’re going to get spoiler-y now. It won’t wreck your enjoyment of the episode, and you’d probably figure out the twist on your own without my help (you’re smart, that’s what I’ve always liked about you), but in case you want to see this cold, you should just skip out now. Don’t worry, the rest of the paragraphs will be here when you get back.
So then, it turns out—and we won’t actually find this out till the end—this is all a dream. Poe goes into some kind of fugue state after the doctor leaves; he doesn’t mutilate his cat, Virginia doesn’t die (then), and all the other crazy stuff that follows is basically just his worst fears mixed with whatever creative impulses drove his writing. Probably the earliest clue we get of this is at Virginia’s funeral; two men are discussing how Poe couldn’t support his wife, and how she was so much younger than him, and his cousin. All of these things are true, but it’s not the sort of talk you’d have over a corpse with the bereaved not five feet away. It’s more an expression of Poe’s worst fears about his relationship with a woman he clearly loves.
If that clue was too subtle for you, then there’s the fact that, after Poe sets the apartment ablaze and hangs his cat, Virginia wakes up. The two managed to escape the fire, and set up shop in another town, attempting to start over; but Poe’s still drinking their money away, and Virginia’s still sick. A new black cat arrives, this one with a white ruff around its neck just where the rope went its neck, a persistent symbol of Poe’s unshakable guilt. Things proceed much like the original story from then on; Poe tries to kill the new cat, kills Virginia instead (although here it’s more of an accident), and is undone when he accidentally walls the cat up in the basement besides his wife’s corpse.
Obviously Poe is dealing with some personal issues here. The reoccurring cat is, essentially, unshakeable guilt, that feeling of deep shame and inwardly directed loathing that one has committed such terrible offenses that no escape or forgiveness is ever possible. Poe’s stories are always told in retrospect; his narrators are already despicable before they utter their first word. What makes “Cat” so compelling is the grain of identifiable truth under all that malevolent embellishment. Who hasn’t been ashamed of themselves? And who hasn’t, deep down, suspected that shame never would follow on our heels no matter how far we traveled?
As well, there’s the relationship between Poe and Virginia. One of the biggest weaknesses of Poe’s writing is his inability to deal with female characters; they’re either lost souls to be pined for, or props to be eliminated. Here we have a suggestion at the cause. Virginia is loving, attentive, beautiful, and kind, and Poe clearly adores her. But she’s also a constant reminder of his failures. Bad enough to let down someone you love. Worse still to let down someone who loves you, who is endlessly patient with you and forgives you your sins. The narrator of “The Black Cat” kills his wife because she tries to protect their cat, but in his Poe’s fantasy, while it’s accidental, the act still has an air of inevitability to it. And while he mourns her, he’s also relieved. There’s no one left to disappoint.
The end of Black Cat has Poe coming back to his sense. Virginia is still alive, Pluto’s just fine—and there’s still those blank sheets of paper sitting on his desk, demanding he fill them. But hey, he’s got this terrific story now! Just needs to change some names and maybe pare it down a bit, but it’s all there. So a happy ending, of sorts. Too bad Virgina’s nightgown is still spattered with blood. She’ll die soon, and Poe will still fail her, and he’ll still be a drunken son-of-a-bitch. The pages will be filled, though. Whatever else happens, the pages will be filled.
Anyway, check it out. The DVD shouldn’t be too hard to find, and it’s got a great audio commentary with Gordon and Combs.
Source: QQQ.5
Screen: QQQ.5
Now check out (if you haven’t already) the reviews at And You Call Yourself A Scientist and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly:
Lyz’s reviews:
Edgar Allen Poe
The Avenging Consience
The Raven
Chad’s review:
The Premature Burial