Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Halloween With Edgar

If there is a better way to observe Halloween than by listening to Bela Lugosi reading "The Tell-Tale Heart," it doesn't exist on this planet:




More Poe-themed entertainment for your tricked-and-treated soul:  The delightful nostalgia-themed blog Embarrassing Treasures compiled a list of radio adaptations of Poe's stories.  The links to the broadcasts can be found here and here.

As accompaniment, I can only add a few words of great wisdom--words that are too often ignored in our blood-and-gore drenched culture:

"But the truth is that, with a single exception, there is no one of these stories in which the scholar should recognise the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call Germanic, for no better reason than that some of the secondary names of German literature have become identified with its folly. If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,--that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results."
-From the preface to "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," 1840

[Bonus video:  Thanks to Tim Smith of the "Baltimore Sun," I recently discovered this beautiful musical rendition of "Annabel Lee," sung by the late Welsh tenor Robert Tear, with AndrĂ© Previn on piano.  I knew I had to share it on the blog somehow, and it makes a suitably haunting song for this occasion. A good Samhain's Eve to one and all.]