Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse turned into one of 2019’s most memorable horror films, but the powerful movie actually owes a fair bit to Edgar Allen Poe.

Robert Eggers is quickly becoming a major name in the horror genre as his more patient approach to the gothic style of filmmaking has worked out very well for the director. While many horror films increasingly cater towards unearned jump scares or rampant special effects, Eggers continually creates atmospheric nightmares like The Witch and The Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse, Eggers’ follow-up feature to The Witch, may be a more polarizing picture, but it’s deemed by many to be a masterpiece with the old fashioned tone poem that it delivers. The Lighthouse is a surreal fever dream that’s full of breathtaking black-and-white cinematography, unhinged performances from Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, and a challenging relationship that’s not interested in being defined. The imagery within The Lighthouse has stuck with most audiences long after the film has ended, but the compelling nature of the movie may owe some of its success to literary horror legend, Edgar Allen Poe.

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The Lighthouse Adapts An Unfinished Edgar Allen Poe Story

“The Light-House” is the final piece of writing that Edgar Allen Poe worked on before his death; his untimely passing resulted in the story’s ending remaining incomplete. All that Poe had finished in the story was a mere two pages, some of which have speculated is meant to be the entirety of the story, and implies the narrator’s premature death. Poe’s “The Light-House” is expressed through the diary entries of a lonely lighthouse keeper. The entries only cover a few days, but they express the narrator’s growing loneliness and feelings of paranoia.

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Beyond the setting and the overwhelming themes of isolation and loneliness, there’s very little in common between Eggers’ film and Poe’s short story. Eggers shacks two people up in a lighthouse and gives them more to worry about, like a washed up body on shore and increasing delusions, but it’s fascinating to see how the barebones structure was able to be taken and improved upon.

Curiously, it was actually Robert Eggers’ brother, Max, who initially began work on The Lighthouse as a project back when Robert was working on The Witch. Max had hit a stand still on adapting Poe’s incomplete short story, and Robert decided to help him with it by adding his own ideas and inspirations to the structure that Max had put together. As the two brothers worked together, The Lighthouse grew and evolved beyond Poe’s ideas and turned into the allegorical finished film. The Lighthouse leaves a lot open to interpretation, but it’s this more lucid perspective that the story adopts that helps elevate to something special.

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About The Author


Daniel Kurland
(373 Articles Published)

Daniel Kurland is a freelance writer, comedian, and critic, who lives in the cultural mosaic that is Brooklyn, New York. Daniel’s work can be read on ScreenRant, Splitsider, Bloody Disgusting, Den of Geek, and across the Internet. He recently completed work on a noir anthology graphic novel titled, “Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Noir: A Rag of Bizarre Noir and Hard Boiled Tales” and he’s currently toiling away on his first novel.

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Daniel knows that “Psycho II” is better than the original, that the finale of “How I Met Your Mother” doesn’t deserve the hate that it receives, and that Garth Ennis’ run of “Animal Man” may be the best superhero story of all time. He’s a fan of white grape juice and appreciates a good Fuji apple.

The owls are not what they seem.

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