Robert Eggers, Edgar Allan Poe, and Daphne du Maurier
Dream films Robert Eggers could create
I am a big fan of Robert Eggers’s films. They are beautiful and horrific in the best way. The art direction, the cinematography, the acting, everything is incredibly pleasing. As a fan, I wanted to talk about two stories I would LOVE to see Eggers and his team work on.
The Fall of The House of Usher
Link to story: https://www.poemuseum.org/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher
“In this unnerved — in this pitiable condition — I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.”
“The Fall of The House of Usher” is one of my personal favorite short stories. I vividly remember the first time I came upon it in middle school. A thunderclap echoed around me just as I read the title. It blew my mind then, and it blows my mind now.
In this tale, we follow the narrator as he arrives at his childhood friend’s home. Frederick Usher has summoned him in hopes that his presence will bring a more positive influence to the dismal place. Usher’s been ill. His sister is dying. Maybe some friendly company will lighten his spirits and combat his terror. Unfortunately for the trio, the narrator’s presence doesn’t help for long.
This story is the definition of “atmosphere.” I once wrote down all the adjectives used to prove to myself that words matter when developing the mood of a story. On the first page, we get “dull, dark, soundless, oppressive, dreary, melancholy, insufferable, sternest, desolate, terrible, bleak, vacant, rank, decayed, bitter, hideous” and on and on. It’s a heavy story, almost tangibly so. It sucks you in like quicksand.
Eggers loves to sink into a time period, loves to research the architecture, the clothes, the small details that all lend themselves towards a greater sensation. This is absolutely the story for it. On a granular level, everything the narrator encounters is soaked with foreboding. The decaying corpse of a house, the stairs, the doors, the almost indiscernible fissure that zigzags its way across the crumbling walls. And Eggers likes to prod those details into symbols. Again, this is the story for that. Roderick Usher’s house is no mere residential dwelling; it’s an ancestral home, literally filled with symbolic gestures of those long dead and those currently dying. There’s so much to explore visually. There are hundreds of ideas to suggest and linger on.
Scenes I’d kill to see Eggers interpret: the horrible house itself on the horizon; the lady Madeline slowly passing in and out of our vision through distant rooms; the music, paintings, and literature that the narrator and Usher discuss; their silent entombing of the lady Madeline’s body into the little, damp crypt; the extreme change in Usher’s physical countenance; and, of course, the horrific second-to-final scene of the lady Madeline’s return during the duet of storm and story.
“MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!”
Eggers (and his team) would remain faithful to Poe and faithful to the story. He would add so much texture to the overall completed project. I can imagine the film he’d produce, the story nearly untouched. The characters themselves would come to life in such a horrific way. Seeing Usher’s decay in real-time would be devastating and supremely unsettling. I feel almost desperate to watch this movie.
Please, let us see it!
The Birds
Link to Story: https://mrnsmith.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/the-birds-by-daphne-du-maurier.pdf
“Go quickly past that second gate,” whispered his wife. “The postman’s lying there. I don’t want Jill to see.”
I have read “The Birds” at least fifteen times, and it NEVER fails to scare the shit out of me. I was reading it before bed the other night and had to shut my book early because my heart was pounding too hard. This story is CERTAINLY not conducive to a sleep routine. (I’m currently in the process of trying to trick myself into sleeping at night with a long wind-down routine. Birds slaughtering children probably shouldn’t be included in it.)
We begin with a change in the wind. A morning unlike the ones before it. It’s suddenly winter. We meet Nat Hocken, a former military man who now works light jobs around the farms. He contemplates the morning sea as he sits cliffside eating a pasty his wife made for him. He watches the birds, wonders about their restless behavior. We watch the birds “restless, uneasy, spending themselves in motion; now wheeling, circling the sky, now settling to feed on the rich, new-turned soil; but even when they fed, it was as though they did so without hunger, without desire. Restlessness drove them to the skies again.” Already we feel a ripple of dread, of foreboding. The tension builds beautifully.
This, of course, is a scene that Eggers would absolutely nail, especially having already built this kind of tension in The Lighthouse with the seagulls. He’s already worked with murderous, portentous birds. Here we would just be flipping the ante up to 11.
“Some of them will kill themselves that way,” he thought, “but not enough. Never enough.”
But there are other scenes I NEED to see Eggers and his team recreate: beating the birds in his children’s rooms in almost complete darkness (the skitterings, the shrieks, the clawing, and blood); the gulls, first thought to be white caps on the ocean waves, rising and falling in the ocean, waiting for the tide to turn; the gannet barreling towards him through the air as he screams and pounds for the door to be opened; the sounds of planes flying and then the horrible, unmistakable crashes that follow; the scorched corpses of birds falling from the chimney into the fire, the children screaming and crying; the dead bodies of their neighbors felled by birds, lying in the yard and the farmhouse; the final image of Nat smoking his last cigarette amid the sounds of birds clawing, tearing, splintering their way into the house.
It’s a damn good story. And it hasn’t been done well. The original movie took the idea and ran with it. Hitchcock is inarguably a master at what he does, but the film was limited in its ability to produce real terror, real horror. The technology couldn’t recreate anything near real-seeming birds or bird behavior. And, because he left the original story and took it to the city with a new set of characters, he left behind the isolation, the suffocating distance between neighbors and help, the dramatic landscapes, the waning of supplies, the growing desperation, the rolling presence of the ocean… Eggers is a proven master of atmosphere, of landscapes, of portents. He would nail these scenes. He really wouldn’t have to do much to the script. The dialogue is fantastic and stripped down. The story doesn’t wend itself anywhere unnecessary. There’s nothing to be cut. And there’s a lot of space for Eggers to explore and add his personal touch.
What do you think? What other famous stories do you think Eggers should interpret? I want to hear what YOU think. Let me know in the comments. I can’t wait to hear your ideas.
