YouTube link here. No kitties. Spooky!
A little early on the spooky stuff, Tony grabs the reins of this episode extra hard. No life talk, no emails, nothing enriching. It’s just horror, horror, horror, all the way down! Well, except a few large parts of it. But mostly horror. Enjoy!
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I wonder if a better word than creepy for what you are describing in Poe, is the uncanny. I like the word in German even better–“unheimlich”–’cause it literally means, not home-like. We don’t feel at home in that world. It’s a world that is always in this kind of liminal space. It reminds me of a quotation from Macbeth. When he’s contemplating killing Duncan he says that to think about murder “Shakes so my single state of man/ That function is smother’d in surmise,/ And nothing is but what is not.”
*Spoiler Alert* (at least a bit of a spoiler for the first episode which is the only one I’ve seen so far)
The difference between the show and the story is summarized by Madeline’s character to me. In the story, she represents the liminal space between life and death. But the show is more about power and death (so horror Succession seems like a really good description). Madeline doesn’t represent that line between life and death, but the fantasy that power will overcome death. That’s what that primal scene with her mother seems to have led her to believe.
Having now finished the show, I can say that the plot elements of Poe stories get more and more involved as it goes on, but… again, never really gets the feeling of a Poe story.
Also, Trish and I have a theory working that the show takes place explicitly in a world in which Poe never existed. 🙂
That theory makes sense to me.