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Source:SciFi Wire

November 23, 2009

SciFi Wire recently spoke to V For Vendetta director James McTeigue while out promoting Ninja Assassin and the filmmaker brought up his next movie The Raven, which we first reported about back here and had McTiegue talk to us about here.

Considering the grisly way that people met their ends in Poe's stories, the article goes on to imply that he's the original "torture porn" author. (Let's not be ridiculous though.) The Raven posits a story about what would happen if Poe were faced with the very murders he wrote about. In the movie, at the end of Poe's life, a serial killer challenges him to solve a series of killings inspired by his own fiction.

"The Raven, Tell-Tale Heart, Premature Burial, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado" are all incorporated stories name-checked by McTeigue for the film.

"It's sort of Se7en meets a series of Poe stories," he explains. "It's set in 1850s Baltimore, and it's about creating Poe's version of 1850s Baltimore, him moving through it. So it has a lot of the Poe stories interwoven into it."

Don't expect a big star in the sure-to-be coveted Poe role. "I think a lot of people in their mind's eye have a vision of how Poe should look," says McTeigue. "There's that kind of iconic photograph of him, where his head looks like a light bulb and his hair is out and he's got the little moustache, but he wasn't like that all the time. I want to pay service to that. Clooney and Pitt, they're good actors, but in my vision of it, they're not the people I'm thinking of."

Might we suggest Jeffrey Combs whom has already mastered the role both in The Black Cat episode of Masters Of Horror, as well as in the one-man show Nevermore: An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe?

Location scouting has begun, as well as initial casting. McTeigue hopes to begin shooting in mid-March 2010.