One of the greatest names in Western literature, Edgar Allan Poe is considered a founder of dark horror and became a source of inspiration for so many horror stories, in literature and beyond. With his descriptive and melancholic writing style, the author revolutionized the gothic genre by shifting the narrative focus from supernatural horror elements and setting, like monsters and medieval castles, to a more psychological horror, exploring guilt, madness and self-destruction.
In search for answers in the human psyche, he shows that true horror lies in the mind and the dark impulses we create inside of our heads. When describing places and physical elements, Poe has an approach more closely tied to the realm of metaphors, exploring the externalization and materialization of human torment.
Another very striking feature of Edgar’s writing is the narrative style: told in the first person, his narrators are often unreliable, tormented by their own minds and emotional instability. Almost like a claustrophobic and desperate confession, their contradictions reveal the delusions, paranoia and obsessions that consume the narrator-character throughout the text.
His specialty are short stories, as he believes a powerful narrative must be read in one sitting, sustaining an intense impact from the beginning to the end of the work. Very common to the horror genre, his goal is to evoke strong and shocking emotions. This is a characteristic part of a concept called “the unity of effect”, developed by Allan Poe himself throughout the construction of his stories. In his view, all the elements within a text must work together to create this single, powerful emotional effect on readers.
His impact on the making of literature and the horror genre were so significant that the cultural industry continues to reference his creations to this day. In honor of Halloween, check out some of his best works!
The Raven
With a poem format, this story is marked by the loneliness of one’s mind consumed by grief. A student is paid a visit by a raven after the death of his beloved, Lenore. The character, mesmerized and scared by the figure of the animal, asks it all types of questions, always related to his late lover. Every desperate interrogative is responded by the raven with “Nevermore”. Then, the speaker clings to his pain, finding a morbid fixation in his own suffering, as he already knows the answers to all of his doubts but still hopes to rely on the “what ifs”.
There are various interpretations of the poem regarding the figure of the raven, all of them always connected to the dark world of Allan Poe. One of them is the externalization of the narrator’s grief, in which he reaches such a high level of madness and melancholy that starts to hallucinate about his own anxieties. Connected to his subconsciousness, the questions he asks about the encounter with Lenore’s soul in the afterlife already have an answer, even though he fails to accept it. As the raven arrives, it perches on a bust of Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, and that can also be a metaphor to the materialization of the narrator’s own mind in the bird.
Another analysis on the raven’s presence is much less reflective and more closely tied to actual horror. As the speaker himself says, the animal can be a demonic or prophetic figure, sent to torment the mind of the main character and imprison his soul in the shadows.
The cask of Amontillado
This short tale is a psychological horror story, exploring obsession and revenge on the lines of terror and dark matters. It takes place in Italy during the Carnival season, when a nobleman named Montresor swears to himself to destroy a friend, Fortunato, after an unexplained insult he claims to have suffered. The narrator then seduces a drunk Fortunato to the catacombs of his palace under the false pretext of tasting a rare and expensive beverage called Amontillado. Since the friend is known for his passion for wines, he excitedly accepts the invite. After the two of them are finally deep inside the crypt, Montresor chains Fortunato to the walls and buries him alive, sealing his friend’s fate brick by brick between the skeletal remains of his relatives.
The narrative’s great mystery lies precisely in the details of this unsettling nature, an agonizing death constructed as a perfect revenge. While showing Fortunato around the castle, Montresor points out the inscription on his family’s coat of arms: “Nemo me impune lacessit” — no one provokes me with impunity. In addition, the word “cask”, a wine barrel, shares a linguistic root with “casket”, a tomb. When looking at the nuances of the elements presented in the story, everything is connected in an almost prophetic way to Fortunato’s murder and Montresor’s vengeance.
It’s interesting to note not only Poe’s talent to create dark and immersive atmospheres, but also his ability to explore the subtleties that language itself has to offer. Another very distinctive feature of his works is his attention to detail and symbolism, whether in the structure of the text or in the physical elements within the narrative.
The Black Cat
Using one of the most famous elements of horror superstition, a black cat, this macabre narrative follows the human descent into madness. A once gentle, animal-loving man, abruptly becomes vile and aggressive after becoming severely addicted to alcohol. With completely unpredictable actions, the narrator begins to enrage about every aspect of his living, including his marriage and his relationship with his animals. His dearest cat, Pluto, becomes the main target after a night of heavy drinking: he gouges out the cat’s eye with a pen-knife and later hangs Pluto from a tree. That same night, almost immediately afterward, his property caught fire, destroying all of his possessions and wealth — except for a single wall that ended up with a burned outline of a giant cat with a rope around its neck.
The narrator then finds and brings home an almost identical cat as the last one, aside from a patch of white fur shaped into gallows on its chest. As the paranoia begins to grow, he starts to despise the new animal. In a fit of rage, while trying to reach for the cat with an axe, the narrator’s wife joins the fight to stop him, and ends up with her head split in two by her own husband. He then hides her corpse in between the walls, but can’t control his pride during a police investigation and taps his cane against the newly built wall. A loud, unearthly weep echoes from behind the panel, revealing the decomposing corpse of his wife with the missing black cat sitting directly upon her head.
The enraged guilt becomes the man’s darkest weapon, transforming the story and revealing an unreliable narrator that is too scared to believe his own mind. A mix between hallucinations and supernatural events, this might be one of Poe’s scariest and most horrifying stories.
The legacy Edgar Allan Poe left behind
Even though he died young, at the age of 40 in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe wrote about 70 stories that are still referenced in various works of the cultural industry to this day. A great example in literature is the novella Venha Ver o Pôr do Sol (freely translated to Come Watch the Sunset), by Lygia Fagundes Telles. The author was greatly influenced by “The Cask of Amontillado”, drawing on the same themes of a macabre revenge and sinister death to craft what has become a masterpiece of suspense and psychological horror in Brazilian literature.
Still on the subject of books, another author who openly drew inspiration from many of Poe’s works was H.P. Lovecraft, the leading figure in the weird fiction genre. Lovecraft admitted that Edgar is one of his biggest role models when it comes to fiction, and has referenced many of his narratives in his own works. He even wrote a poem in honor of the American writer called Where Once Poe Walked, which evokes the ghostly figure of Allan Poe walking among the graves of a cemetery in Rhode Island.
Drawing on some visual references, Tim Burton was very much inspired by Allan Poe’s aesthetics in many of his movies. The filmmaker is known for his gothic and dreary style, as he is also a big name when it comes to the spooky horror genre. In honor of Edgar’s legacy on macabre art, Burton created the animated short film Vincent: the story of a boy who, inspired by Poe’s works, wanted to become like him — a man of the shadows, full of melancholy and pain in his heart. Narrated in the form of a poem, the references within the verses are taken directly from Edgar’s literary works. Even with Burton’s signature style in the film’s stop-motion aesthetic, the gray tones and even the shape of the elements and characters are linked to the American writer.
His legacy is unmatched: having left a permanent mark on the world of literary horror, this author remains one of the genre’s most influential figures and continues to inspire many cultural works even beyond the scary theme. His stories became so iconic the elements inside of them take a part as his persona — from ravens and black cats to macabre scenario descriptions, Edgar Allan Poe is the “foundind-father” of spooky literature.
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The article above was edited by Eloá Costa.
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