Director Brad Anderson’s horror-thriller “Eliza Graves,” which Millennium Films will put before the cameras on June 24 according to Deadline, is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” Joe Gangemi wrote the script; Mel Gibson is one of the producers.
Updated to around 1900, it will star Jim Sturgess as a graduate of Harvard Medical School who joins the staff of a remote psychiatric hospital and falls in love with a patient, to be played by Kate Beckinsale. He gradually discovers that the “doctors” are the inmates and the “inmates” are the doctors.
Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley have also been cast in the film. If Kingsley’s role is that of one of the hospital’s doctors, as is rumored, it will prompt comparisons with his head psychiatrist in Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” (2010).
Poe’s story originated the Freudian (and Borgesian) idea of lunatics taking over an asylum and fed “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” (1920). Robert Wiene’s German Expressionist masterpiece was predated by the Edison comedy “Lunatics in Power” (1909) and Maurice Tourneur’s horrific two-reeler of a 1903 Grand Guignol play based on Poe’s story that was released as “The Lunatics” in the US. Philippe de Broca’s 1966 counterculture comedy-drama “King of Hearts,” about mental patients who take over a French town booby-trapped by retreating German soldiers near the end of World War I, suggests that the instigators of war are the true madmen.
In the Tourneur film, eye-gouging and throat-slitting are the cures for madness used by the insane doctors, Tarr and Fether. In Poe’s tale – a hilarious, pro-reformist satire of psychiatric hospital conditions rather than a flesh-creeper – a traveler in the South of France visits an asylum (as if it were a tourist spot) in “a dank and gloomy wood” because he’s heard that its system of soothing patients and allowing them to run free has proved efficacious.
Once admitted by the dignified gentleman superintendent, Monsieur Maillard, he falls immediately for a beautiful woman singing an aria at the piano – presumably the origin of Beckinsale’s character in “Eliza Graves” – and is told by Maillard that she’s not an inmate but one of his relatives. Both, in fact, are patients.
At an elaborate but cacophonous dinner, the narrator gradually realizes that his resplendently attired fellow guests are all mad men and women who have tarred and feathered the staff and locked them up. Individual guests mock the behaviors of patients who are, in fact, themselves: one imagines himself a teapot, others think they are a donkey, a Cordova cheese, a frog, a pumpkin, a champagne bottle, a spinning top, a cockerel, and a pinch of snuff. The story augurs not only “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” but “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
(The beautiful woman, who thinks clothes indecent, attempts to take hers off and wear them inside herself – a detail that will pique the interest of Beckinsale’s male fans.)
At the end, the narrator, having taken a beating and continued his European tour, reports that the soothing system has since been restored by the real doctors, who had escaped confinement by leaving through a sewer. He also mentions that the mad superintendent was the original superintendent. Poe had written “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” after his crisis year of 1844, and, as Jeffrey Meyers has written, it explores “the thin borderline between the lunatic and sane,” suggesting “that crazy people may have superior insight” and condemning “the tendency to call insane those people whose ideas and behavior differ from the norm.”
Another Poe biographer, Kenneth Silverman, writes that Poe’s awareness of his own fragile hold on sanity is indicated by his name, “Allan,” nearly resurfacing in the names of Maillard and those of fellow keeper-inmates Laplace, Boullard, and Gaillard. If “Eliza Graves” proves insightful enough to take a cue from Poe’s wordplay, its eponymous mad beauty ought to be the ghost of a woman prematurely buried alive.