Play Me for a Fool: Horror-Inducing Madness from Edgar Allan Poe to <i>The Dark Eye</i> (1995)

Abstract Madness often serves as the driving force behind the actions of Edgar Allan Poe’s protagonists, making their psyche a central component of his horror stories. Theme, however, is only one element that contributes to the horror affect/effect in Poe’s oeuvre: his talent for evoking horror through narrative structure and tone (Punter 1996) positions form as another crucial aspect of his poetics. When adapting Poe’s tales for a different medium, authors and artists need to confront both the thematic clusters that Poe favored and the stylistic choices that he deployed in conjunction with his themes. This contribution explores how the 1995 video game The Dark Eye adapts several works by Poe, focusing on the transposition of madness-induced horror. The game is of particular relevance because it approaches Poe’s stories in four different manners: first, the game adapts three of Poe’s best-known stories (“The Cask of Amontillado,” “Berenice,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”) for interactive gameplay. Second, it features full or abridged versions of Poe’s poems and stories (“Annabel Lee” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” recited, and “To Helen” and “The Premature Burial,” in written form). Third, it constructs a framing narrative which retrieves Poe’s themes, merging several stories, and proceduralizes his horror-inducing style for the video game environment. Fourth, it makes ample use of Poe’s Gothic atmosphere to induce horror and terror not only narratively, but also visually and aurally. The contribution thus argues that The Dark Eye serves as an all-encompassing attempt to adapt Poe’s madness-related stories beyond the mere thematic dimension, showing that Poe’s innovations can persist across different media.