October Horror Challenge 2023 #71: "Extraordinary Tales"

I've seen this movie before. That happens sometimes when you watch as many movies as i do, you forget which things you've seen before and which you haven't. In this movie's case, it's a kid's movie based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe, so of course I watched it as soon as I could after it originally came out, and I don't remember what year that was, but as soon as I put this movie in, I recognized it. Whoops. Oh well, there's no rule against rewatching a movie I've seen before, and I remember liking this movie, so I'll give it a watch again. Why not? got time.

This movie opens with a talking crow in a cemetery talking to death, who happens to be a woman in this story, and the crow is spinning his tales of sorrow and death. This is a morbid little movie. The first story the crow tells is an adaptation of the Poe classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."In this story a man obsessed with death finds out that his morbid obsession has harmed his fsmily. Thesecond story, the crow retells "The Telltale Heart," which i loved so much when i was a kid that i memorized the whole story. In this tale, a man becomes obsessed with his neighbor who has a deformed eye, and this obsessionlrads him to do something terrible. The third story is adapted from Poe'sstory "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," which is about a doctor who wants to study what happens after death, so he convinces one of his dying patients to allow him to hypnotize him and see if he could come back to life if he dies while he is hypnotized. The fourth story is loosely basedon Poe's tale "The Pit and the Pendulum," about (you guessed it) a man obsessed with death, and the final story comes from Poe's work "The Masque of the Red Death." That one is about a rich man who throws a masqueradeball and discovers to his horror that he has an uninvited guest.

This is pretty heavy stuff for a lot of kidd. i read Poe when i was a kid, but I was definitely a weird kid. i wasn't allowed to go to school, so i had to teach myself to read and write, and my home life was darl enough that i tended toward books that were dark, macabfe, and scary. I wasn'tallowed to read Stephen King novels until i was 12, but my mom considered Poe'sworkto be classics, so i wss allowed to read those, and i devoured them. All of Poe's characters seem to be obsessed with death. Poe himself was pretty obsessed with death after all the death and pain he suffered in his life. I once saw the actor John Astin perform in a play about the life of Edgar Allen Poe, and he went through some harrowing stuff, the poor guy. So this cartoon is right up my alley and i ge r to pretend to be a kid again as i watched it. This would be a fun one to watch with your kids.