The Cinematic Cycle of Poe: Cinematic Reanimations of Madness, Guilt, and the Grotesque in Adaptation and Visual Narrative

Authors : Serap Sarıbaş

Pages : 95-116

Doi:10.59280/film.1745858

View : 72 | Download : 270

Publication Date : 2025-12-31

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This study investigates the cinematic adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s literary corpus through an interdisciplinary and aesthetic-theoretical lens, aiming to reveal how Poe’s narratives are rewritten, transformed, and re-materialized within the dynamics of modern visual culture. Structured around the conceptual framework of a “cinematic cycle,” the analysis focuses on the aesthetic reconfiguration of central themes such as madness, guilt, and the grotesque across a spectrum of cinematic genres and temporalities. Ranging from Roger Corman’s expressive Gothic poetics of the 1960s to Brad Anderson’s critical engagement with institutional madness; from Raul Garcia’s stylized and fragmentary animation aesthetics to Robert Eggers’ historically inflected minimalism, the selected corpus exposes the narrative fractures, crises of representation, and dissolutions of subjectivity encountered in the visual translation of Poe’s textual universe. The study is grounded in Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Michel Foucault’s epistemology of madness and power, Judith Butler’s performativity, and Catherine Spooner’s theorization of contemporary Gothic aesthetics. The central argument is that Poe adaptations function not merely as cinematic transfers of literary texts but as complex processes through which Poe’s thematic ontology is multiplied, displaced, and reconstituted. Poe’s cinematic representations are approached as aesthetic palimpsests, producing a multilayered Gothic continuity that oscillates between narrative erasure and aesthetic resonance within visual memory. In this context, adaptation is theorized not only as an intertextual act but also as an ontological intervention that reprocesses visual codes and symbolic structures. The reanimation of Poe’s aesthetic through cinema is thus positioned as a constitutive component of modern Gothic memory.
Keywords : Gotik Sinema, Uyarlama Kuramı, Grotesk Estetik, Görsel Palimpset, Edgar Allan Poe

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