Karen Black starred in over 130 movies, but only about seven of
them have been meant to scare.
In fact, she maintains an amiable air that doesn’t quite
mesh with the morbidity of Edgar Allan Poe. But Black has over 40
years of experience in acting and is eager to flaunt her
versatility.
“As fully as you can imagine what is written and as fully
as you can allow it to honestly affect you and stir you,
that’s probably how good you’re going to be and how
well you’re going to communicate (the story),” she
said.
Black has managed to take time off filming a TV series with Eric
Roberts and Sean Young to pay a visit to Royce Hall where she will
read Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Black, an actress whose resume includes “Five Easy
Pieces” and “The Player,” also starred in Alfred
Hitchcock’s last film, “Family Plot.”
It wasn’t a horror flick, and Black is opposed to
pigeonholing Hitchcock with a misleading label.
“Hitchcock can’t be the master of horror,” she
said. “What is the meaning of horror? Horror seems to be not
intellectual; Hitchcock’s films were pre-frontal (the lobe of
the brain where rational thinking occurs).”
Similarly, Black sees Poe’s merit on a higher plane than
simply a writer of pulp and gore.
“It’s a beautiful, valuable piece of literature;
it’s high culture; it’s a high aesthetic,” she
said. “You can take any subject and its aesthetics would be
equal to the quality of the communication, rather than what the
communication is about. That’s true with any art. You can
take a photograph of a house and it can be a wonderful work of art,
but it could (also) be horrible trash, depending on the
quality.”
“Poe is a legend; the quality of his work is incredibly
high,” Black added.
Black believes that reading requires skills similar to acting,
especially in recreating Poe’s southern drawl.
“I really do think that his mind’s voice had a
Richmond accent,” she said. “If you use it, you find
things just flow out of you, and all of these adverbs and
adjectives are just a part of the flow of the air and the tongue
and the speech. It’s flowing forth.”
Black’s newest film, “House of 1,000 Corpses,”
will be released by Universal next spring. Though it is unashamedly
horror, directed by heavy metal rocker Rob Zombie, Black says it is
a good film aesthetically, not contradicting her more philosophical
bent on understanding the living, not the dead.
“I don’t understand fear,” she said.
“What’s it like to live this life, that’s what
I’m interested in.”