Poe Movies is a passion project driven by Thad and Season Ciechanowski, a filmmaker and ex teacher who loves Edgar A. Poe, history, literature, cinema, horror, and corvids. The project makes entertaining education content for their YouTube Channel. They also make Emmy Award-winning film adaptations of Poe’s stories.

Sara Crocoll Smith is the award-winning editor-in-chief of Love Letters to Poe. She is also the author of the ghostly gothic horror series Hopeful Horror. She's recently released the second volume in the Love Letters to Poe anthology series called Houses of Usher, thirty Usher inspired stories and poems. Hear more about her love for Poe in her interview on The 6 Degrees of Edgar Allan Poe podcast from the October 2021 special edition episode on The International Edgar Allan Poe Festival.

Read a sample of the award-nominated Love Letters to Poe, Volume I: A Toast to Edgar Allan Poe by joining the newsletter.

Holly Knightley is a supernatural suspense author and lifelong devotee of the macabre. She draws inspiration from the ethereal works of Edgar Allan Poe, whose spectral tales have ignited her love of all things dark and spooky since youth. She calls New Jersey home, where she resides with her husband and their four furbabies.

Levi is an independent Edgar Allan Poe scholar from Rhode Island. He has specialized on Poe's ties to Providence and on Sarah Helen Whitman (the poetess from Providence to whom Poe was engaged for a brief time in 1848. Levi created and guides "A Walking Tour of Poe's Providence" that had a successful debut in 2021.

When he's not studying Poe, you can probably find him sipping an iced coffee (like a true New Englander) and exploring old cemeteries with his Pitbull-mix named Ginny Poe. Levi is an amateur artist, historian, writer, and anticipates being an amateur at most other things in the future. To learn more about Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, visit Levi's website at edgarallanpoeri.com. You can also find him on Facebook and Instagram by searching "Levi Lionel Leland."

Virginia read her first Poe stories when she was nearly 9 years old. The Black Cat and The Gold Bug started it all for Virginia, picking them out all on her own in the elementary school library.

Over the years the interest in Poe grew from fascination into a never-ending love. No matter if she is performing with her dance company, working as an MUA or writing lyrics, all aspects of her life has been and continues to be shaped by Edgar and his works. Virginia and Levi host the POEcast, Beyond the Oblong Box.

A. A. Rubin only exists only in dreams within dreams. He writes everything from formal poetry to comics, literary fiction to science fiction and fantasy—and almost everything in between. A member of the SFWA and the HWA, a Poe Saturday Visiter nominee, and a first place winner of the Poe-It-Like-Poe contest (The 6 Degrees of Edgar Allan Poe), his work has appeared recently in Love Letters to Poe, Ahoy! Comics, and the Cowboy Jamboree. He can be reached on social media as @TheSurrealAri, or through his website www.aarubin.com. A connoisseur of fine amontillado, he has been known to clean mysterious white stains off the bust of Pallas which sits on his writing desk. He loves with a love that is more than love.

Please go support his Backerkit for The Awful Alphabet.

Chris Semtner is the curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum and author of several books and articles about Poe, dark history, and visual art. He has been interviewed for BBC4, NHK (Japan), PBS, Travel Channel, Military History, truTV, NPR, Czech Radio, C-SPAN, and other networks in addition to publications including the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, and Forbes.com. See him tell the stories behind the Poe Museum's artifacts in The Curator's Crypt on the Poe Museum's YouTube channel. You can find his latest books, Haunting Poe: Edgar Allan Poe's Afterlife in Richmond and Beyond and The Poe Shrine: Building the World's Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection, on Amazon, in the Poe Museum's gift shop, and wherever books are sold.

In Chris' picture, Edgar, one of the Poe Museum cats is also pictured.

Chris Semtner - Artist, Author

The Poe Museum – Richmond, VA

Poe Museum - YouTube

Edgar And Pluto (@edgarandpluto) • Instagram photos and videos

Trisha Leigh Shufelt is an author, artist, and poet of several books including the Ghosts of Nevermore, inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Other Poe related works include the Poe Tarot, bronze winner of a Coalition of Visionary Resources Award and Saturday Visiter Award nominee for 2022. The Poe Tarot incorporates Poe quotes and whimsical/macabre images from Poe’s vast body of works. She recently published her fifth poetry book, the Ghosts of Winterbourne, which continues her gothic poetry style. She also writes dark fantasy novels under the pen name Andaleigh Archer. You can find more information at www.artinsoul.org and follow Trisha at facebook.com/TrishaLeighPoetry.

Dr. Jeff Thompson has written more than one book about Dan Curtis and his productions. What appeals to him about Curtis’ television and film work versus the prolific work of others is as follows: “I began watching Dark Shadows (1966-1971) in 1967 when I was eight years old. I watched the show until the end and read Dan “Marilyn” Ross’s Dark Shadows Gothic novels and Gold Key’s Dark Shadows comic books along the way. I began writing for Dark Shadows fanzines such as The World of Dark Shadows in 1975 and continued writing for them into the 1990s. By then, I also was writing articles for Movie Club, Midnight Marquee, and other magazines. By the 2000s, I was writing about Dark Shadows for multi-author books such as You’re Next! (2008). In the 2010s, I wrote the introductions to eight Hermes Press books reprinting the Dark Shadows comic books and newspaper comic strip. In 2006, I was completing the course work for my Ph.D. in English and popular culture, and I was pondering the topic for my doctoral dissertation. I was thinking about writing about film noir in general and Chinatown (1974) in particular when Dan Curtis died in March. A terrific website called Scoop asked me to write Dan Curtis’s obituary for its weekly e-zine. I wrote the article essentially off the top of my head because I had studied and written about Curtis’s life and works for decades. Suddenly, I realized that I should write my dissertation about Dan Curtis, whose diverse oeuvre of horror, mystery, Western, war, drama, and more should be documented.

I wrote my dissertation about Curtis’s horror productions in 2006-2007 and earned my Ph.D. in May 2007. I then contacted McFarland, a publisher in North Carolina, about shaping my dissertation into a book. In early 2009, McFarland published The Television Horrors of Dan Curtis: Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker, and Other Productions, 1966-2006, and my book was nominated for the Rondo Award.

After I wrote The Television Horrors of Dan Curtis, I realized that there was much more to say about Dan Curtis in addition to his unforgettable horror productions. I went on to write House of Dan Curtis: The Television Mysteries of the Dark Shadows Auteur (2009), focusing on Curtis’s crime dramas and Wide World Mystery productions, and the Rondo Award-nominated Nights of Dan Curtis: The Television Epics of the Dark Shadows Auteur (2016), spotlighting Curtis’s Dracula, The Last Ride of the Dalton Gang, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and Intruders: They Are Among Us. All three of my books cover all four dozen of Curtis’s productions, but each book takes a more in-depth look at different ones.”

In 2019-2020, I produced revised second editions of all three books because researching and writing each of my books had increased and refined my knowledge of Dan Curtis’s productions, including dozens that Curtis had planned but never produced (e.g. Diary of a Gunfighter, The Last of the Crazy People, Wuthering Heights, et al.). Curtis’s work—paired with Robert Cobert’s music—always appealed to me because it is daring, sometimes shocking, and always heartfelt. Curtis could tell almost any kind of story and did.

Here is how he became hooked on Dark Shadows: “In September 1967, I was home sick from school and turning the television channels. I came upon a scene that two decades later became the first clip on one of MPI Home Video’s Dark Shadows compilation tapes. A girl and a boy my age were in a spooky cellar containing a coffin. The coffin lid opened, and the vampire Barnabas Collins emerged. I was instantly hooked on Dark Shadows and watched, read, drew, wrote, collected, and (at Dark Shadows Festivals) performed from that moment on! (I wrote and directed humorous skits that other fans and I performed at the Festivals.) At home, I have a Dark Shadows guest bedroom, a Joan Bennett wall, and a Psycho bathroom!”

The reason he decided to do second editions of his three books: “In 2019-2020, I brought out revised second editions of my 2009, 2010, and 2016 books because in the intervening years, I had learned much more about Dan Curtis’s productions and because new Dark Shadows events had occurred (e.g. the Big Finish audio dramas, a new movie, the documentary Master of Dark Shadows, anniversaries, deaths, etc.). My new editions feature a great deal of never-before-seen photographs of and new information about Dan Curtis, Dark Shadows, and Curtis’s many other productions. I invite you to read and enjoy my new opera! “That’s plural for opus; I presume you’ve written more than one,” as Christopher Plummer says to Christopher Reeve in the exquisite 1980 film Somewhere in Time, written by Dan Curtis’s friend and frequent collaborator Richard Matheson (The Night Stalker, Dracula, Trilogy of Terror, et al.).”

All authors have a funny or cool story to share regarding their books whether it be a superb fan letter, or an autograph from a Dan Curtis cast member that came out of the blue: “I always love reading a good review of one of my books, a congratulatory email from an enthusiastic reader, or a nice post card from someone like film-music expert Jon Burlingame (“great work, beautiful presentation, love all the references to music throughout”) or film-music composer Robert Cobert himself (“Congratulations! What a great job! Incredible scholarship! Dan would have loved it!”). Curtis’s friend and frequent collaborator William F. Nolan (The Norliss Tapes, The Turn of the Screw, Burnt Offerings) wrote,

Another terrific book on Dan, who was shamefully ignored as a “TV hack” (so incredibly untrue!). He was a master, a great pal, a man who loved his work, who laughed and ranted and worked to make each thing he did as perfect as possible. What a great director! You deserve much credit for your fine books on Dan. He would have been proud. “Would have”? Hell, he is proud of you wherever he may be!”

Published works:

The Television Horrors of Dan Curtis: Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker and Other Productions, 2d ed.

House of Dan Curtis, Second Edition: The Television Mysteries of the Dark Shadows Auteur

Nights of Dan Curtis, Second Edition: The Television Epics of the Dark Shadows Auteur

Email: jthompson@tnstate.edu