“The Black Cat”. “Premature Burial”. “The Cask of Amontillado”. “The Raven”. And now, The Raven, starring Edgar Allan Poe? You betcha. If Poe was the father of the modern detective story, then The Raven is a film that does the old boy justice. It’s a horror film that feels like a police procedural with a love story thrown in. It isn’t the easiest movie to classify, but all the better. The Raven is fun thrill ride of a movie. Thrilling, edge-of-my-seat stuff, and it’s a movie I can heartily recommend.
It’s 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland. A woman and her young daughter are found viciously murdered…but the police are stumped when it’s found that all the doors and windows were locked from the inside. How was it done? One policeman decides that the murders echo those of a story he’d read by a Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. So Detective Fields, a man who is as close to forensics as one could be in 1849, decides to ask Poe for his “special knowledge” in the hopes that the murders can be solved. But these killings are only the beginning, and soon Fields, Poe and the whole of nineteenth century Baltimore are caught in the trap of a twisted but brilliant killer.
