When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe.

Host:
The night was steeped in fog, the kind that wrapped around lamp posts like tired ghosts. The cobblestone street shimmered faintly under a thin sheen of rain, and from somewhere far off came the sound of a church bell tolling midnight. A small cinema marquee glowed weakly in the mist — its lights half-dead, its letters crooked:
“MIDNIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE: ARGENTO & POE.”

Inside, the old theatre breathed like a sleeping beast. The projector hummed, throwing a flickering light across rows of empty seats. Dust motes spun like slow galaxies in the pale beam. And on the cracked screen, images stuttered — a blood-red door, a trembling raven, a pair of eyes wide with terror.

Jack sat alone in the back row, a dark coat wrapped around him, his grey eyes reflecting the violent color of the screen. A cigarette glowed faintly between his fingers, the smoke curling upward like something alive.

Jeeny slipped into the row beside him, her black hair damp from the rain, her brown eyes catching the eerie light. She held no popcorn, no drink — just a small book in her hands: The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, its corners bent, its spine worn from love.

Host:
She opened the book slowly, the pages whispering in the quiet like an incantation. And as she did, Dario Argento’s words seemed to drift down from the projector’s hum, mingling with the rain and the faint scent of burning film:

"When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe."

Jeeny:
(softly)
You ever notice how every artist remembers their first ghost?

Jack:
(glances at her)
You mean the kind that lives in a book?

Jeeny:
Exactly. Poe was that ghost for him. For Argento. For me. For anyone who ever looked at the dark and thought, “What if it’s trying to tell me something?”

Jack:
(smiles faintly)
Poe doesn’t talk to you. He haunts you. There’s a difference.

Jeeny:
(laughs softly)
Haunting is just conversation with better lighting.

Host:
A flicker of light painted their faces — white, red, black — the palette of fear and fascination. The film’s dialogue was muted by the hum of the projector, but its images screamed silently in the darkness.

Jack’s cigarette burned down to ash. He didn’t notice.

Jack:
So Argento read Poe and learned how to turn terror into beauty.
He painted nightmares. Made them elegant.

Jeeny:
Because he understood that fear isn’t always meant to repulse. Sometimes it’s meant to reveal.

Jack:
(quietly)
Reveal what?

Jeeny:
Our reflection — the one we spend our whole lives pretending doesn’t blink back.

Host:
Her words lingered like smoke, curling into the dim air. On the screen, a woman screamed — her voice muted by decades, her fear timeless. Jack’s eyes flickered in the glow, caught between cynicism and understanding.

Jack:
You ever think maybe we romanticize the dark because it’s easier than living in the light?

Jeeny:
No. We romanticize it because the light forgets us. The dark remembers.

Jack:
That sounds like something Poe would’ve said.

Jeeny:
(smiling faintly)
Or Argento would’ve filmed.

Host:
The film reel began to stutter — the image jerking, distorting, until the screen filled with a sudden burst of white light. For a moment, the entire room glowed — blinding, holy — then the picture returned, slow and trembling.

Jeeny:
You know what I think? Argento didn’t just read Poe. He inhaled him. Turned his sentences into color, his sorrow into motion. Poe wrote about the heart; Argento filmed the pulse.

Jack:
Maybe that’s why both of them feel like fever dreams. You wake up and wonder if you imagined it — or if it imagined you.

Jeeny:
Exactly. They don’t just tell stories. They invite you to lose control.

Host:
The projector light flickered again, catching the outline of Jeeny’s face — soft, luminous, half-shadowed. Jack looked at her the way one looks at a reflection in a broken mirror — aware it’s both familiar and forever unreachable.

Jack:
When I was seventeen, I read The Tell-Tale Heart.
I remember thinking, “This isn’t horror. This is honesty with blood on it.”

Jeeny:
(nods)
That’s the thing, isn’t it? Horror isn’t about the monster outside. It’s about recognizing the one inside and realizing it’s been narrating your story the whole time.

Jack:
So maybe Argento read Poe not because he loved the fear, but because he recognized himself in it — the artist who couldn’t stop dissecting his own shadow.

Jeeny:
(smiling faintly)
And in doing that, he taught us how to look at ours.

Host:
Outside, the rain deepened, hammering softly against the theatre’s windows — a rhythm like the steady beating of a heart beneath the floorboards.

Jack closed his eyes, listening.

Jack:
You hear that?

Jeeny:
The rain?

Jack:
No. The world. The way it keeps repeating itself — heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat. Poe heard it. Argento filmed it. And we’re still pretending it’s just the sound of weather.

Jeeny:
Maybe it’s both. Maybe the world’s always been haunted — we just stopped listening.

Host:
The film reached its final scene — a single candle flickering in a vast black room, the flame bending as if breathing. The credits began to crawl in slow, elegant handwriting across the screen, casting the names of the forgotten like spells into the air.

Jeeny closed her book softly. Jack stubbed out his cigarette. Neither moved to leave.

Jeeny:
You know, it’s strange — how many of us were first shaped by Poe, and we didn’t even realize it. Every time we write about sorrow, or longing, or that slow pull toward the edge — we’re still answering him.

Jack:
(smirks)
Yeah. Every artist is just a teenager still writing back to their ghosts.

Jeeny:
And maybe that’s why Argento said what he did. Because when you read Poe young, he doesn’t just influence your work — he infects it.

Host:
The light from the screen dimmed slowly, leaving only the afterglow — pale and fading. The theatre was quiet now, but the air still hummed with the weight of imagery, of memory, of unspoken truth.

Jack:
So, we write. We film. We bleed a little on paper — and call it art. All of it, just another attempt to understand the things that scared us before we had the words to name them.

Jeeny:
Or the courage to admit they still scare us.

Host:
The projector clicked off. The darkness thickened. A faint echo of the last heartbeat from the soundtrack lingered — rhythmic, insistent, alive.

Outside, the rain slowed.

And as they sat in the quiet glow of a dying film, Poe’s shadow and Argento’s color merged — not in horror, but in beauty.

Because that’s what all true horror really is:
a mirror held up to the trembling soul,
painted with light,
spoken in blood,
and remembered by every teenager who ever read the dark
and found, in its silence,
the sound of their own heart.