IMDb 6.9 / 10
IMDb 6.5 / 10
IMDb 6.4 / 10
Edgar Allan Poe’s poem is eighteen stanzas about a man, a bird and a word, and there’s no film in it. That hasn’t stopped anybody. These three productions borrow the title and build something else entirely, and all three are more interesting than that sounds. What they have in common is Poe as decoration. In 1935 he’s a madman’s obsession, in 1963 a title on a poster, and in 2012 a detective.
I have a soft spot for this kind of cheerful theft. The studios slapped Poe’s name on whatever they had, and the results run from nasty to silly to period procedural, and I find that more entertaining than a faithful reading of the poem could ever be. The 1935 film is the one I’d reach for first, Corman’s is the one I’d pick for a laugh, and the 2012 thriller is the one I’d skip.
The Raven (1935): IMDb 6.9
Bela Lugosi plays Dr Richard Vollin, a retired surgeon who collects Poe memorabilia and keeps working replicas of the torture devices from The Pit and the Pendulum in his basement. Boris Karloff plays an escaped murderer whose face Vollin deliberately mutilates to make him obedient. It runs sixty-one minutes and wastes none of them. Lugosi is at full volume throughout, enjoying himself more than in anything else he made, and Karloff plays the ruined convict for real pathos. The violence was strong enough for 1935 that it helped trigger a British ban on horror imports and contributed to Universal stepping back from the genre. IMDb has it at 6.9.
The Raven (1963): IMDb 6.5
Roger Corman’s version is a comedy. Vincent Price plays a magician whose visiting raven turns out to be Peter Lorre, transformed after losing a duel to Boris Karloff. The three of them spend the film insulting each other on the way to a wizard’s duel.
Richard Matheson wrote it, and the script is loose enough that Lorre improvised a good deal of his part, reportedly to Karloff’s irritation.
That detail delights me. Three horror veterans trading insults on screen while one of them annoys another off it is exactly the energy the film runs on. A young Jack Nicholson plays Lorre’s son and is the stiffest thing in the film, and that’s a funny thing to say about the actor he became.
It cost about $350,000 and made roughly $1.5 million, part of Corman’s run of Poe pictures for American International. IMDb has it at 6.5, and the final duel between Price and Karloff is the reason to watch.
Corman’s Poe Cycle
Between 1960 and 1964, Roger Corman made eight films at American International under Poe’s name: House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum, Premature Burial, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Haunted Palace, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia. Vincent Price starred in most of them. They were made fast and cheap, usually in a couple of weeks, with sets recycled between productions and Floyd Crosby shooting them in wide, saturated color that makes them look far more expensive than they were. The Raven is the odd one out because it’s a comedy, and it’s also the one that shows the whole cycle for what it was: Poe was a brand, and the films did whatever the budget allowed underneath it.
For Writers
Corman built eight films in four years by reusing sets, crew and a marketable name, and several of them are very good. A repeatable structure lets you produce a body of work while others are still planning their first. When you write, build a structure you can run again, a series format, a fixed length, a recurring character, so each new project starts from something instead of from nothing. Design a template you could fill three more times. Then fill it, and see which of the three outlives the format.
The Raven (2012): IMDb 6.4
James McTeigue’s film makes Poe himself the detective. It’s 1849 in Baltimore, a killer is staging murders from Poe’s stories, and the police enlist the author to help catch him before the next one.
John Cusack plays Poe, Luke Evans plays the detective, Alice Eve plays the woman taken to force Poe’s cooperation, and Brendan Gleeson plays her father. The murders are staged out of The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Masque of the Red Death.
Critics were hard on it. Its Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 22 percent against an IMDb score of 6.4, a wide gap, and audiences liked the look and the conceit more than reviewers did. I’m with the critics on this one. Casting Poe as the detective in his own stories is a clever hook, and I think the film wastes it on a routine chase.
For Writers
The 2012 film scores 6.4 with audiences and 22 percent with critics, one of the wider splits you’ll see. A gap that size usually means a work gives its audience what they came for and fails the critics’ standards. If your book splits readers that way, check which group you wrote for before deciding anything is broken. Compare your worst professional review with your best reader review. If they’re describing the same features in opposite terms, you’ve hit your audience and there’s nothing to fix. Missing your audience is the problem that needs solving.
The Poem Nobody Films
Poe’s poem has one speaker, one bird and no plot. The narrator asks whether he’ll see his lost Lenore again, the raven says nevermore, and the poem’s whole power is in the repetition and the collapse of a man who keeps asking questions he knows the answer to. There’s nothing there to film, so every production borrows the name and grafts on a story. The 1935 version makes the poem a madman’s fixation. Corman’s makes it a joke. The 2012 film uses it as a police procedural device.
That’s a fair response to the problem. The alternative, a faithful adaptation of eighteen stanzas about grief, would be an experimental short, and a few filmmakers have tried it at that length.
For Writers
Three films take a poem with no plot and build three different stories around its name. Not everything you love can be adapted directly, and the useful question is what the source does to a reader instead of what happens in it. When you borrow from another work, identify the effect you want to reproduce and design your own events to produce it. Write down what the original made you feel. Then build a structure of your own that delivers that feeling, instead of transposing scenes that won’t survive the move. Faithful isn’t the same as effective.
Karloff in Two of Them
Boris Karloff appears in both the 1935 and 1963 versions, twenty-eight years apart, and the pairing is a small history of horror in itself. In 1935 he’s the brutalized convict in a film so severe that governments reacted to it. In 1963 he’s a comic villain playing off Vincent Price.
That shift tracks the genre. Universal’s monsters went from disturbing in the early 1930s to comic by the late 1940s, and by the 1960s the actors who built them were being used for nostalgia.
Karloff is good in both, and he’s the reason I’d pair them. He’s the only performer who bridges the two films, and watching them back to back is the best argument for seeing either. I like what that arc says about him: the genre slid from terror to nostalgia around him, and he stayed worth watching through the whole shift.
Which to Watch
The 1935 film if you want horror. It’s short, mean, and Lugosi is extraordinary in it. The 1963 film if you want to watch three great horror actors enjoy themselves, with the wizard duel at the end.
The 2012 version is the weakest of the three and it has one very good idea: Poe forced to read his own work as a set of instructions. The execution doesn’t match the conceit.
No rating from me on any of them. The IMDb scores sit within half a point of each other, and that undersells how different the three films are.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Three films share a title and a source that has no plot, and each one invents a different story to fill it. When you adapt something with no usable structure, stop looking for the events and find the feeling, then build your own events to produce it. A famous name gets the reader to pick the book up, and the events you build are what keep them reading.
Which version of The Raven is best?
The IMDb numbers put them within half a point of each other: 6.9 for 1935, 6.5 for 1963 and 6.4 for 2012. The 1935 film is the strongest horror picture of the three, and Corman’s is the most fun.
If you only have time for one, make it the 1935 film. It’s the only one of the three with real menace, and Lugosi at full volume for sixty-one minutes beats the whole running time of the 2012 version. None of them has much to do with the poem, and I don’t hold that against any of them.
