Reblog of Edgar Allan Poe: Swinging Like A Pendulum Do
Here’s a short story I wrote almost 2 years ago.
It’s a short story featuring the late great TCM Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne:
Edgar Allan Poe: Swinging Like A Pendulum Do
It was an old movie from the 1930s on television. Johnson had heard of the film The Pit and The Pendulum based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.
But he wasn’t familiar with the 1930s version. He had only heard of a movie version from the 1960s with Vincent Price.
But this 1930s version was totally new to him and here he was a big classic horror movies fan. The Pit and The Pendulum from 1936 with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.
Try as he might, he could not recall Karloff and Lugosi ever making such a film. Lugosi had made The Black Cat with Karloff. He had made The Raven. He had made Murders In The Rue Morgue. All based on works by Poe.
But Johnson had never heard of Lugosi doing a movie version of Poe’s The Pit…
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Orson Welles, Atargatis and Athena
Orson Welles, Atargatis and Athena
Orson Welles ordered his 4th glass of wine 🍷 of the evening.
As he sampled it, he hoped he wasn’t turning into a lush.
Being a lush might be good enough for Sir John Falstaff but it wasn’t good enough for him Orson Welles.
He had too much he wanted to tell the world.
As Welles took another sip of the wine 🍷, he reflected on his failed marriage to Rita Hayworth whom he had formally divorced on November 10th of last year (the current evening in which he sat drinking wine in The Mermaid Wine Bistro and Lounge was June 24th 1948).
What had happened that caused his marriage to go wrong?
Probably many factors Welles thought as he gazed at his reflection in the blood red liquid of the glass.
He reflected back to the time he had considered making his own film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – one that he thought would be vastly superior to the 1931 Universal Pictures film version with Bela Lugosi.
Financing for the project had fell through but he had done several screen tests for it.
Including one with a beautiful Romanian brunette woman who interestingly enough called herself Draculina.
During the screen test, Welles who had been reading the role of Jonathan Harker to her playing the role of one of Dracula’s wives was very impressed by her extremely authentic vampiress like performance.
During the test, Draculina had gotten so into character (she must have been an avid student of Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavsky), she had leaned over and given Welles a very passionate bite and hickey on the neck.
Unfortunately, Draculina did this just as Rita entered the studio.
That certainly didn’t help the relationship between husband and wife, Welles thought as he finished his glass and ordered a fifth.
The director turned his attention to other matters.
He thought about the peculiar dream he had had last night in which a lobster had appeared to him and communicated with him telepathically.
The lobster explained that his name was Michelangelo and he was a psychic lobster who was communicating with him from London in the year 2018.
Michelangelo explained to him that the Syro-Phoenician mermaid goddess Atargatis (who was the mother of Semiramis the 1st Babylonian Queen) was intending to destroy the State of Israel 🇮🇱 in that year of 2018.
It was at that moment that the phone rang waking Welles from his deep sleep.
It was a wrong number.
“No, this isn’t Floppety’s Flop House,” Welles slammed the receiver down angrily.
Welles finished his 5th glass of wine 🍷 and decided not to order another.
Otherwise he might really turn into a Sir John Falstaff.
He reached for his overcoat and hat.
He then stumbled out into the night and waved down a taxi that would drive him home.
When he arrived and fumbled around in his pocket for the keys to his room, Welles thought about the strange dream.
If this Atargatis woman of the sea was going to try to destroy Israel in 2018, that meant the nation would survive at least another 70 years.
Israeli independence had only been declared by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion last month and already it was locked into a war of survival with its Arab neighbours.
Why had this psychic crustacean contacted him anyways, Welles wondered?
What could he a man of the theatre do about a Syro-Phoenician mermaid goddess planned invasion 70 years down the road?
“Oh Lord, send me wisdom,” Welles prayed aloud as he opened the door to his room.
Standing there waiting for him was Athena the Greek goddess of wisdom.
-A vampire novel chapter
written by Christopher
Sunday June 24th
2018.
Haiku About Bela Lugosi As Count Dracula
Haiku About Bela Lugosi As Count Dracula
He bids you velcome
And look he doesn’t drink wine
he prefers your blood
The Old Dark House
The Old Dark House
The old dark house on top of the hill
the sort that would give Lugosi a thrill
it stands there dark and foreboding to see
right next to a lifeless leafless tree
its thatched roof is gray and fallen to ruin
its garden is weeds so nothing to prune
all hope abandoned by those who entered here
and the gloom it grew with each passing year
now it stands on the hill a cathedral of death
and makes its spectators gasp and struggle for breath
that old dark house is a monument to fear
and that’s why no one has entered for many a year.
-A gothic poem written by Christopher
Thursday January 16th
2014.
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