The Raven

Saw The Raven, a 1915 film inspired by the famous Edgar Allen Poe poem. Edgar Allen is the main character here. The film fictionalizes his life to mesh with the events in the poem The Raven to make the poem into a truthful account. To this end he has girlfriend named Lenore (spoiler: she doesn't last long) and several times lapses into morbid contemplation of his troubled life. The film makes good use of a double-exposure technique that must have just been invented because they rely on it heavily. Fortunately, ghostly double-images are well suited to a spooky film, so it doesn't get (very) tiresome. The film relies much more on pathos and morbidity as that was what was considered scary back then (nowadays of course a less imaginative but more visceral approach is used.) Hilariously, the repeated word 'nevermore' is rendered in a bone-font. The film is silent, slow, and grainy but the acting is jumpy and scuttling. It makes an odd juxtaposition which has actually come back into vogue again with the seemingly ubiquitous security-camera footage employed in modern horror. Here, the mannered acting and deliberate pace are supposed to be conventional and the film-stock is only deteriorated by chance. Taken as a modern film, it is slow but ominous. I would love to see it with a more aggressive soundtrack (instead of the sepulchral organ music I saw it with. Let's get some industrial sounds in here!)