I wish I could say I was already an avid fan of Poe’s written work, but I had a good excuse for not reading him. I was only seven years old at the time, too young to appreciate his dense prose and his convoluted themes. But I was certainly old enough to be thrilled by the movies that were loosely based on his stories. There were seven Poe films made by legendary director Roger Corman, and I saw every single one of them, usually the very week they arrived in the theaters. I had no choice but to go; my mother made me. My mother is a Chinese immigrant who arrived in the United States in her early twenties, speaking almost no English. Even to this day her grasp of the English language is shaky at best. Back then, in 1960, it was truly a struggle for her to read an Englishlanguage book or newspaper. What she did grasp, however, were American horror films. How much English do you need to know, after all, to feel the terror of a good old-fashioned movie monster?
What do You think about In The Shadow Of The Master?
