Some of you may remember The Following, an initially thrilling crime drama on Fox that aired for three seasons from 2013 onward. In it, James Purefoy plays Joe Carroll, a seductive serial killer who amasses a cult following to do his evil bidding. What establishes Joe as a madman is the fact that he's a university professor with a passion for Edgar Allan Poe. Joe believes Poe celebrates death and killing as a cleaning force. Joe's followers wear masks of Poe's face.
The great American short-story writer and poet is the singular motif of that occasionally stomach-churning series. In one defining scene, a Joe Carroll follower strips naked, pierces herself in the eye and kills herself by applying an ice pick to her head. This is all connected, somehow, to Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive (airing on American Masters, Monday, PBS at 9 p.m.) seeks to rescue Poe from all that. And it is timely – Poe's gothic tales of horror are routinely associated with Halloween. The program takes the view that Poe is defined by his work, such as his famous poem, The Raven, and creepy tales The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. It attempts to redefine Poe the man, separate from the work.
As such, it is a fascinating excursion into myth making and into dark places in American history. It also has uncanny reverberations that make it relevant today.
The first fact established is that Poe's life was emphatically made myth by the first obituary after his death in 1849. Written by Rufus Griswold, a rival and a man who came to loathe Poe, it established him as a madman, a lunatic figure obsessed with death, dying and cruelty. Poe's bizarre and chilling stories had made him mildly famous and readers were curious about the man who wrote them. Griswold provided what the public perversely wanted – a portrait of an angry, conceited and melancholy man who dwelled in a private hell.
This American Masters program, which has actor Denis O'Hare (This Is Us, American Horror Story) playing Poe in re-creations and readings and is narrated by Kathleen Turner, takes us through Poe's often shambolic life as a writer, editor and critic. It gives us a Poe who had a brutal start in life and was beset by forces that he could not control, mainly an economy in turmoil that kept upending his career.
His mother, Eliza Poe, was a star of musical comedy when she died of tuberculosis at the age of 24. She had three children and had just been abandoned by a feckless husband. Knowing she was dying, Eliza appealed to her friends and fans to help her kids, and Edgar was taken in by the Allan family. His stepmother adored him and his stepfather, a successful businessman, scorned the boy. What we get is a picture of Poe as a Victorian orphan – such as those in Brontë novels – who is forever traumatized by the need to find a home and hearth where they are welcome and comfortable.
Poe wasn't frail, as many believe. He was a good athlete and tough, driven to win. He did, however, accumulate debts and was forever scarred by his stepfather's refusal to support his education. The stepfather left him nothing in his will, while illegitimate children he'd fathered were given sums of money.
It is also established that what set Griswold and others against Poe was his eventual role as a critic. It was a time when original American fiction was emerging and often overpraised. Poe was one tough opinion maker. One biographer says his nickname as a reviewer was "The Tomahawk Man."
As a result, the originality of Poe's own writing went unrecognized by other writers who resented him. Film director Roger Corman gives a pithy definition of Poe's talent for terror and eroticism in the program. Poe himself was combative, wanting to be taken seriously.
He was also obsessed with the fragile family of cousins he had constructed around him. In 1836, Poe married Virginia Clemm. She was 13; he was 27; they both lied that she was 21. It is pointed out that this was not unusual at the time. He drank heavily and fell out with countless editors and bosses. A hard man to like, in other words.
But what ruined Poe, experts say, was the economy of the time and his brutal honesty. He declined to puff up the work of others in return for employment that would come his way. A craftsman, he constructed stories of horror that would inspire other writers up until today. In his day, his work often inspired envy.
Poe lived during a time of stunning economic turmoil. During the Martin Van Buren presidency, there was mass bankruptcy, food riots and many fortunes evaporated. Those who backed magazines that employed Poe went broke. He ended up begging for money and work and his alcoholism made him near unemployable. All of that is reflected in his work, if not directly, then in a sideways manner that captures an age of fear and dread. In a way, Poe's era, with its social, political and economic turmoil, is not unlike today's United States.
The upshot of this American Masters is a gripping, nuanced profile of the creator of modern horror, warts and all. He famously wrote, "The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led." He meant he understood the appeal of fear. He was not to know that a wildly imaginative picture of his life and work would define his reputation, from his obituary to contemporary TV. But he's worth knowing, this real Edgar Allan Poe.