Horror Review: The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

In The Pale Blue Eye (2022), a retired police officer, Augustus Landor, is asked to solve a gruesome case of organ theft at the US Military Academy of West Point. The Academy’s honour is at stake and they’d appreciate it very much if Landor would solve this quickly and discretely. Unfortunately for Colonel Thayer and Captain Hitchcock, the case of corpse tampering turns out to have been preceded by murder and that won’t be the only death at West Point. The fact that the cadet standing guard over the first dead body was sent away by someone he claims was dressed as an officer makes things even trickier. Landor isn’t alone, though. Another cadet by the name of Edgar Allan Poe takes an interest in the case and offers his help. Soon, things take a turn for the very, very weird. Warning: SPOILERS.

Since this involves Edgar Allan Poe, you can expect a macabre, Gothic atmosphere, a young woman afflicted by a strange illness, a weird family, occultism, death, and poetry. So, write what you know? (Since our webcomic series presents some Lovecraftian elements as being real and the inspiration behind Lovecraft’s stories, I’ll refrain from complaining about how this type of “origin story” ends up undermining their real-life subjects’ creativity and imagination by saying they based everything on real events and people instead of making it up) Everyone has secrets in The Pale Blue Eye - the eccentric Marquis family, Landor, whose daughter ran away and hasn’t been seen since, and Poe himself. For much of the movie, I wondered if he was going to be revealed as a serial killer. That would’ve been pretty crazy, but not the first time Poe was slandered after his death. His first biography was written by someone who hated him and took the opportunity to ascribe all manner of vices to his deceased rival. You know, like the fact that he gambled, was possibly an alcoholic, and married his thirteen-year-old first cousin when he was twenty-six. Oh, wait, that actually happened, which makes me wonder what the other guy lied about. Drug addiction? But fear not, The Pale Blue Eye gives Poe an age appropriate (sort of) love interest and presents him as a lovable eccentric. Supposedly. Really, I just thought he was annoying. I googled to see if this portrayal of him was accurate, but didn’t find much. He may have been a real person, but this character feels more like some fanfiction version of Poe based on his stories.

Landor’s investigation reveals some ritual leftovers like candle wax and lines drawn on the floor of the ice house, which also happens to be the perfect place to store a recently removed human heart thanks to its coolness. This means that contrary to Poe’s theory, the heart wasn’t taken by a poet for it’s symbolism, which frankly should’ve been obvious and shows an astounding lack of imagination on his part. I know this is set nearly sixty years before Jack, the Ripper, but still. Thanks to Landor’s friend, Jean Pépé, who’s an expert in the occult, he and Poe learn that the whole thing may be connected to Henri Le Clerc and his very rare book Discours du Diable, which is believed to hold the secret to immortality. These type of rituals use animal hearts, too, and guess what, a cow and a sheep have also turned up dead and missing their hearts. Could this have anything to do with the Marquis family and the sickly Lea Marquis, whose father is the Academy’s doctor and brother Artemus is the leader of the “bad bunch” that Leroy Fry, the victim, was supposedly a part of? Well, it’s not as if there are any other suspicious people around. Things get complicated when Poe falls for Lea. She’s impressed by his ability to speak French and he takes her for a walk in the local cemetery. This angers Ballinger, another cadet and member of the Bad Bunch. He attacks his rival and later turns up dead and de-hearted, just like Fry. Landor even points out to Poe how much of a coincidence that is, especially since he had also argued with Fry, though he doesn’t really think he’s the killer. Hmm, that’s… suspicious. Why wouldn’t he suspect this very weird young man he barely knows? I admit that I just rolled my eyes at that while watching and didn’t think there could be something else there. The movie keeps the focus on Fry’s death being related with his friends, even having his grieving mother tell Landor that Ballinger gave her his diary and encouraged her to burn it. Weirdly, Landor says he found nothing of interest in it, even though Fry went to the trouble of writing it in code… Another one of his Bad Bunch friends, Stoddard, runs away before he ends up hanged and missing a heart. Artemus, on the other hand, sticks around and doesn’t seem remotely worried that he might be next.

And now, it’s time for crazy family shenanigans when Landor and Poe have dinner with the Marquis after Ballinger’s funeral. The house looks disappointingly ordinary, but its occupants make up for its normalcy by being extra weird. Well, it’s mostly Julia Marquis, who begins by praising her son’s looks in a very odd way, and then freaks out and leaves the table. I get that Gillian Anderson is supposed to be playing a disturbed woman, but the acting is just bad. After dinner, Landor has the opportunity to wander around the house unattended, looking for clues, while Poe makes googly eyes at Lea. He finds an old officer’s jacket that Julia helpfully reveals Artemus used to wear as a kid. Hmm, why would she say that? Even if she didn’t know the particular significance of that jacket, which frankly is hard to believe, why would she help Landor in any way? Because, yes, SPOILER ALERT, the crazy weird people with a sick relative turn out to be the ones performing black magic rituals to cheat death using human hearts. Shocker. The Marquis family is so crazy weird that Thayer and Hitchcock have no problem believing that their doctor and his cadet son were responsible for such horrible acts. Aw, and right when Poe made Lea a poem and agreed to do… something for love, which doesn’t sound good.

Landor confronts Dr Marquis with the fact that he has the rare Discours du Diable and a painting of Le Clerc himself in his study. Well, that does seem pretty damning, though we can’t choose our ancestors. Landor goes on to accuse Lea of… communicating with Le Clerc’s spirit during her seizures, thus receiving instructions on how to perform the ritual to improve her health. WTF? Why would Landor even think of that? Accusing them of resorting to magic and using the ritual in the book to help her makes sense, but talking to a dead guy? Seriously? Dr Marquis doesn’t deny it, not even the part about communicating with a spirit. He does claim Lea and Artemus told him that they didn’t kill anyone and only stole Fry’s heart from the morgue. And where are the doctor’s innocent, non-murderous children at the moment? Why, at the ice house, getting ready to perform another ritual using Poe’s heart, obviously. This is the sole reason I decided to write this review in the first place and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fully convey the utter ridiculousness of this sequence, but I’ll do my best. Let’s start with how those ginormous puffy sleeves that were in fashion in the 1830s somehow manage to neuter the always sinister Latin incantations. It’s impossible to take any of this seriously, even when Lea paints her face with blood and Artemus gets ready to cut out Poe’s heart. The fact that their loony, terribly acted mother Julia is also there doesn’t help. They could’ve at least been wearing the usual back mass hooded robes instead. This looks like something out of a Poe parody rather than a straight up adaptation (yes, I know this isn’t an adaptation of one of his stories, but it’s not supposed to be a comedy either). Landor shows up and everything gets even more ridiculous as he fights Artemus while Lea and Julia yell in Latin. Some of the candles fall and everything starts catching fire, which leads to one of the wooden beams falling and hilariously knocking out Lea. Artemus refuses to leave his sister, but Landor manages to drag Poe and Julia out of there before the whole place burns down.

Well, that’s it then. The crazy killers are dead, Dr Marquis quits his job at the Academy, and the judge decides not to prosecute Julia because he decrees that she already suffered enough. Hitchcock and Thayer thank Landor and the former even apologizes for having doubted him. Poe, meanwhile, makes a full recovery. But wait, there’s still a lot of movie left. Why? Because, PLOT TWIST! Poe goes to see Landor and accuses him of being the real killer. He compared Landor’s handwriting from a note he left for him with the one on a fragment of a note found on Fry’s corpse inviting him to a meeting and realized that they had been written by the same person. He then learned the real story of what happened to Landor’s daughter - she didn’t run away but instead killed herself after being raped by three West Point cadets on her way home from a ball. She didn’t know who they were, but she took a pendant from one of them with the initials L F (= Leroy Fry). Fry didn’t tell Landor the names of the others, but he found out after decoding his diary. He was the one who killed Ballinger and the farm animals to make everyone think these were ritualistic murders. Surprisingly, Stoddard did run away and isn’t buried in Landor’s backyard. Poe is mad that the people who were going to cut out his heart had their reputations forever tarnished because of Landor’s machinations. Really, he is furious about Lea’s unfair fate. So, I guess he was a willing sacrifice? Lea kept saying love = sacrifice and she did ask him what he’d be willing to do for her, but drugged Poe seemed somewhat ambivalent at having his heart removed. He at no point clarifies that, though he has ample opportunity to. Despite his anger, he ends up burning the incriminatory evidence before leaving. Landor goes to the cliff from where his daughter jumped and… let’s go of her ribbon, which floats away. I thought he was going to kill himself since he even accepted that he wasn’t going to get Stoddard, but nope. He doesn’t seem tortured with remorse, either, which I guess means this is more The Cask of Amontillado than The Tell-Tale Heart. Well, now it’s over.

The true murder plot was good and if The Pale Blue Eye had stuck to that, I wouldn’t be reviewing it. While many of his stories have supernatural elements, Poe also wrote many non-supernatural tales. The movie could easily have presented a macabre tale with a Gothic atmosphere with only that storyline. Or it could’ve committed to the black magic one (minus the puffy sleeves), and dropped Landor’s revenge. Putting the two together turned this into a mess. How awfully convenient for Landor that Artemus and Lea decided to remove his victim’s heart thus making it seem the work of a madman. Yes, Poe mentions this, but acknowledging the coincidence doesn’t change the fact that it was pretty crazy. Seriously, what are the odds that Lea’s dead ancestor would choose the exact same time frame to start giving her instructions on how to perform his super secret immortality ritual? Why even add that? Just say they read the book. Also, there’s something I don’t get. Lea’s father talks about how she improved greatly with Le Clerc’s rituals, but if Fry’s heart was the first and only human heart (Landor was the one who took Ballinger’s, remember?) they got and that wasn’t that long ago, what were they doing before? We’ll never know because this storyline was very underdeveloped, especially when compared to the revenge plot, but the movie just couldn’t resist the showiness of some House of Usher wackiness. I know that this is an adaptation and I have no idea if it’s any better in the book, though the final ritual probably looks less ridiculous in writing. What I also don’t know is if the real Poe believed he was getting messages from his dead mother, or if that was just another way of turning the creator into one of his creations (because simply being creative is too boring). Also, while Landor not suspecting Poe makes sense after the final twist, it doesn’t explain why Thayer and Hitchcock were so quick to accept he couldn’t have done it. Yes, he’s not a big man, but surely he’s not that physically weak if he was accepted in the Academy and hasn’t been expelled yet. Honestly, I think I would’ve liked Poe more if he had been a Poe fan rather than the man himself. His exaggerated Gothic affectations weren’t just annoying - they came across as an act rather than his real personality.

The Pale Blue Eye (2022) looks good, but is overlong and the Marquis storyline just doesn’t work. Still, it’s better than the movies I usually review.

By Danforth