Prelude (1927)
Article 5580 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-28-2018
Directed by Castleton Knight
Featuring Castleton Knight
Country: UK
What it is: Early music video

To the strains of Rachmoninoff’s Prelude, a man imagines he’s being buried alive.

This is, for all practical reasons, an early music video. It visually interprets Rachmoninoff’s Prelude as the story of a man who, upon reading the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Premature Burial”, falls asleep and dreams he has been buried alive. It’s a visually rich short with a few horror touches. My favorite is that we see the coffin turn partially transparent (the lines of the wood grain remain visible) and we see the trapped man struggling in terror. It’s very efficient and very well done. I have only one minor complaint; given his fame, you would have hoped they would have made sure that Poe’s name would have been spelled correctly.