Filmmaker Roger Corman discusses some of the challenges he faced in bringing Edgar Allan Poe’s stories to life in a full-length film.
Major support for Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support for this film is provided in part by National Endowment for the Arts, Joy Fishman, and Wallace S Wilson.
The main challenge with 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and the other Poe stories was the fact that they were very short -- sometimes, as with 'The Pit and the Pendulum,' just two or three pages -- and we had to create a full-length motion picture. So Dick Matheson, the writer who wrote most of them, and I found our solution in using the Poe story as the third act of the picture, and then inventing the first and second acts, trying to envision what Poe might have done to lead up to it in order to make a full-length film.
