Edgar Allan Poe‘s legendary poem The Raven has proven itself a malleable inspiration for filmmakers down the years. It’s been twisted into a duelling star vehicle for Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, moulded to fit Vincent Price as part of Roger Corman‘s Poe cycle, and tangentially provided the narrative for a period detective drama. Christopher Hatton’s earnest but slightly dull supernatural horror positions itself as something of an origin story for Poe himself, imagining a traumatic sequence of events that would come to inspire the poem and go some way to explaining the writer’s mysteriously curtailed life.
We encounter cadet Poe (William Moseley) on a training exercise in upstate New York as part of a unit of variously expendable young officers in training. The group come across a horribly mauled man tied to an elaborately constructed wooden rack, suggesting something ritualistic has occurred. The man manages to gasp one word, “Raven,” before he dies. Deducing that the man lived nearby and that his death should be investigated, Poe and comrades take the body to the nearby settlement of Raven’s Hollow. The little town is eerily sparsely populated, and the locals are far from helpful, hissing something about an unkillable creature call ‘The Raven’. The stubborn, honourable Poe resolves to get to the bottom of the mystery.
As you would expect given its subject, Raven’s Hollow leans heavily into classic Gothic, albeit with lashings of bright red blood provided striking contrast with the otherwise bleak, desaturated visuals. All the tropes are present and correct: sinister locals (British stalwarts Kate Dickie and David Hayman), ostentatiously foggy graveyards, doom-laden harbingers. Alongside these are the scattered references to Poe’s work (characters called Usher and Lenore, a literal tell-tale heart for example); a melancholy Goth version of the current trend for cameos and Easter eggs standing in place of actual narrative.
And the narrative in Raven’s Hollow lumbers along in a gloomy and predictable way and the mostly fine actors are rather burdened by dialogue as starchy as the units freshly-laundered uniforms. Some impressive production design and willingness to up the stakes on the gore mitigates this, with Hatton staging some fine set-pieces that sporadically dissipates the constant choking mist and portentous script.
It must be said that Raven’s Hollow achieves its aims within the confines of its modest B-movie budget. There is a recreation of a Hammer-esque atmosphere that is more successful than anything the beloved studio has managed since its resurrection; a palpable sense of decay and degeneration which is stiflingly palpable. Plus, the presence of the estimable Kate Dickie pretty much guarantees a film will never be a total write-off. But despite its old-school charm and occasional gouts of arterial splatter, it’s still a pedestrian affair, with a half-cocked romantic subplot involving comely landlady’s daughter Melanie Zanetti adding uninspired padding to a tale that didn’t need it.
Raven’s Hollow isn’t a disaster, yet nor is particularly memorable; and it’s questionable how much attention it would muster without the narrative connection to its famous literary hero.
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