Christian Bale and horror author Edgar Allan Poe team up to hunt down a killer in the trailer for Netflix’s The Pale Blue Eye. The film is based on the 2006 Louis Bayard novel of the same name, the title of which is taken from Poe’s famous short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It was adapted and directed by Scott Cooper, who most recently directed the folklore horror film Antlers. Previously, he has helmed projects including 2017’s Hostiles and 2015’s Black Mass.
The film follows a retired detective named Augustus Landor (Bale). In 1830. He is tasked with looking into an important case involving a series of murders at the West Point military academy in New York. Over the course of his investigation, he will befriend and work with a young student at the Academy, Edgar Allan Poe himself (Harry Potter‘s Harry Melling).
Today, Netflix shared the first official trailer for The Pale Blue Eye. It’s just a 40-second teaser, but it is jam-packed with quick flashes of some of the nightmarish imagery that will await viewers of the film, which drops on Netflix on January 6, 2023. The threat of murder hangs over the entire clip, which reveals the official looks for both Bale’s Landor and Melling’s Poe.
How Much is The Pale Blue Eye Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Real Life?
The Pale Blue Eye obviously takes many cues from Poe’s later work to bring its story to life, including a victim’s heart being removed just like in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” While Poe is best remembered as a horror writer in the modern era, he is also a pioneer of detective fiction, so the project also draws on the murder mystery chops he showed off in stories like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” However, beyond that, very little of what is depicted in the film seems to be true to life.
It is true that Poe was a cadet at West Point through July 1830, at which point he had already published two books, to little fanfare (his first being 1827’s Tamerlane and Other Poems, the same year he lied about his age to enlist in the army). The Pale Blue Eye otherwise presents a fictionalized account of what he might have gone through at that time. Considering how this story is meant to serve as an inspiration for his later harrowing tales, it will most likely be a gruesome and macabre mystery through and through.
