Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 19, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
“Is all that we see or seem/but a dream within a dream?” That verse by Edgar Allan Poe is read on screen by the author himself (played by Jeffrey Combs) at the beginning of Masters of Horror’s adaptation of The Black Cat, and it offers a fair foreshadowing of what director Stuart Gordon and his frequent screenwriting collaborator Dennis Paoli are up to. The episode, this team’s second stab at Poe after the 1990 feature The Pit and the Pendulum, is a puzzlebox of scenes occurring in reality and in the author’s famously tortured mind, of characters who die and live again—or do they? By the end, it becomes rather hard to sort out, but Combs’ typically committed performance and Gordon’s artistry keep it compelling.
The Black Cat is lensed by Jon Joffin in evocative monochromatic tones punctuated by splashes of bright red blood—and, significantly, the port that Poe indulges in far too much. The story catches up to him in early-1800s Philadelphia, as his efforts in a poetic vein, clearly motivated by his love for his young wife Virginia, or “Sissy” (Elyse Levesque), are rejected by a publisher who insists he deliver instead another of his “fantastic tales.” The fact that Poe’s mind never ceases conjuring morbid fantasies is made clear when he imagines throttling the man, only for the scene to cut back to Poe sitting meekly in his chair. It’s a familiar gimmick, but one that signposts how at least part of what will follow will take place only within the author’s skull.
As if the rejection of his most heartfelt work, and his tab running out at the local bar, weren’t bad enough, Virginia is suffering from consumption and coughing up blood at regular intervals. Not to mention that her black cat seems to have it in for Poe, as well as the house’s other pets (including a parakeet named Annabel, one of Gordon and co.’s few winks at the audience). It’s evident that neither Poe’s beloved nor her cat are destined to come to good ends, but in this case it’s Virginia who has nine lives, expiring and then returning to life more than once as Poe descends into madness. Before long, the cutaways to what’s real seemingly cease to exist, and the effect becomes as disorienting as it is intriguing.
The real sticking point for some viewers, however, will be the violence that Poe performs upon his feline tormentor. Gordon has noted that this animal abuse held the potential to upset people even more than the threatening of a baby in his previous Masters entry, Dreams in the Witch-House, and he was right; if what is done to the cat here had been inflicted on Dreams’ infant, that episode would never have gotten on the air. Hard as they are to watch—these may be Masters’ most upsetting moments since Takashi Miike’s Imprint—they feel justified in the story Gordon and his team are telling. It should also be noted that the man-vs.-feline struggles, of the sort that have proven difficult to pull off convincingly throughout screen history, are carried off quite well via trained real kitties, KNB EFX-created mockups and Combs’ convincing interaction with them.
The actor, in fact, evokes Poe’s mania, torment and even his romantic side with equal skill, creating a fully formed portrait of the artist as a very troubled man. (The author’s work is so often associated with the European Gothic, rather than the Southern kind, that it’s at first a bit jarring to hear him speak with a Virginia accent, until a line of dialogue reminds that he spent early years in Richmond.) Levesque is sympathetic as his lady love, though she sometimes comes off a bit too contemporary, as when she addresses Poe as “Eddie.” And from the Edward Gorey-esque opening-titles art (backed by music from Curse of El Charro director Richard Ragsdale that evokes Gordon’s oddly absent mainstay composer Richard Band) onward, the craft and pacing are perfectly scaled for Masters’ modestly budgeted one-hour format.
