A Cask of Amontillado For My Real Friends
My sham friends get the Medoc.
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In sixth grade, I had an Edgar Allen Poe phase. It started when my English teacher made everyone in our class memorize a poem. She had a list and we each had to pick a poem from that list. Seems like a recipe for getting your favorite poems mangled by sixth-graders, but to each their own. I chose “The Raven.” I’m not sure why, that little fact has been lost in the whirlpools of time and memory, but I did choose it. For this assignment, I didn’t have to memorize the whole thing. It’s a pretty long poem, so the teacher just required the first few stanzas to be memorized. In a couple of weeks, I had them down pat.
The assignment was capped with an in-class presentation of our memorized poems. I don’t remember much about that presentation but I’m assuming it went fine. Knowing myself, I probably forgot one or two lines but managed to get through the rest with a little bit of elan. What is important to this newsletter is that I started reading a lot more Poe after that.
I am by no means a Poe completist. I’ve read the big ones and seen some of the movies based on his stories but haven’t even come close to making it through everything he’s written. My sixth-grade infatuation with him didn’t last very long. I quickly moved on to Stephen King and other more modern authors with less stodgy grammar, but it still had a massive influence on me. Poe’s Gothic overtones, his focus on decay, and his predilection with religion can be seen all throughout my own creative works. I continue to watch movies, play video games, and read books that have those same themes as well. While it didn’t express itself for a while my love of horror films almost certainly comes from having chosen to memorize part of The Raven in sixth-grade English class.
While I haven’t read much Poe recently, there are two major works that really stuck with me – The Cask of Amontillado and The Masque of the Red Death. I still like The Raven, but The Simpsons in one of their early “Treehouse of Horror” episodes lambasted it enough that it lost a little of its appeal. It’s an all-timer Simpsons bit by the way, highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t seen it.
I should be clear here, “stuck with me” doesn’t mean that I think they’re super scary or anything like that. Sorry, Poe, it’s 2023. Your little words aren’t going to give me nightmares. Can you even imagine? I’ve seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hostel. Despite their age, however, both of those works by Poe contain images, phrases, and ideas that keep a lot of space in my mind. Montresor building a brick wall in his rotting basement, Prince Prospero running through his own party, dashing wildly through gaily colored rooms. These images stick out in my mind, clear as day. Sorry, guess I should have put a spoiler alert or something there. But, whatever. These stories are well over 100 years old. Get a grip.
It's in images like these where the power of Poe really lies. His ability to conjure up mesmerizing scenes out of the alien. To make that on which its face is kind of funny and twist it into something full of horror and the unknown. Take The Cask of Amontillado for example. This story takes place during a carnival. Fortunato, the poor soul who ends up trapped behind a brick wall by the narrator Montresor, is literally dressed like a medieval court jester. As Poe writes, “The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells.” He looks ridiculous. Throughout the story, Poe keeps writing about how his bells were jingling. The basic plot of the story is that the narrator tricks a drunk guy dressed as a fool into his wine cellar and then builds a brick wall around him. It’s basically a Looney Tunes fight between Wile E Coyote and Road Runner. It’s a wild plot. And yet Poe is able to give it gravitas, showing the unwound madness of the narrator in just the right amount, and turns this ridiculous little story into a classic horror story.
The same is true for The Masque of the Red Death. The Masque of the Red Death takes place during a party held by a very rich man and attended by most of his retinue. Each room at the party is decorated in a different color. It’d be a great theme for a frat party honestly. Except for the end of the story where the Red Death – a personification of greed and the plague – kills everyone. That would not make for a great frat party theme. Once again, though, Poe adds to the basic story, using setting, character, and his knack for vivid description to tell an in turns terrifying and thrilling story. The man knows how to use mood to his advantage.
Poe’s influence over modern Western horror is hard to overstate. The focus on mood and tone, the sometimes shoehorned-in moral themes, a willingness to embrace fantasy, and a deep sense of the macabre all filter throughout most Western horror movies. Midsommar is as much indebted to Poe as is Saw. Though the things that scare people change over time and across cultures, even within a country, there are still threads that can be traced across hundreds of years to one single guy. Pretty cool when you think about it.
That’s a pretty sixth-grade essay thing to end this newsletter on, but I started with a memory from sixth grade so I’m comfortable with ending it that way. It’s spooky season here in the United States, where most of my readers reside, so if I may, I suggest sitting down and reading some Edgar Allen Poe. Most of his famous works are pretty short, they’ll take you no more than an hour to get through. Enjoy the weird twisty grammar of his sentences, the odd names, and Gothic underpinnings. Drink a glass of blood-red wine, maybe a Pinot Noir, while you do. After you finish whichever work you choose, throw on one of the movie adaptations of his works. Maybe Mike Flanagan’s Fall of the House of Usher. Maybe the old Vincent Price Masque of the Red Death or the Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi’s The Raven. They’re both short and kind of wild.
Have fun and embrace the gothic.
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