Since Poe’s works were already in the public domain by the time that motion pictures were invented, his stories have led to literally hundreds of cinematic adaptations, the roaring majority of which bear very little resemblance to the source material. Roger Corman, the “King of the B-Movies,” made eight films based on Poe stories in the early and mid-1960s that built his film empire. The gloomy hauntings and morbid murders and terrifying resurrections and insane torture devices and haunted houses and mysterious body doubles and killer pandemics that populate his stories have become staples of horror films to the point where it would not be inaccurate to say that Poe has had more of an effect on the genre than anyone else in history. Although the first horror novel was probably Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, the legendary canon of Baltimore-based writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) clearly qualifies him as the father of modern horror.
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