The Black Cat (Masters of Horror)

"The Black Cat" is the eleventh episode of the second season of the American anthology television series Masters of Horror. Directed by Stuart Gordon and written by Gordon and Dennis Paoli, the episode stars Jeffrey Combs as writer Edgar Allan Poe, who becomes increasingly psychologically unstable as a series of setbacks and tragedies combine with his alcoholism and dark imagination.

Though the plot is a generally faithful adaptation of Poe's 1843 short story The Black Cat, it is also a metafictional narrative, setting Poe himself as the story's protagonist, blending fictionalized elements of his actual biography with details from the story and culminating in the writing of the story itself. Combs, Gordon and Paoli had already adapted a different Poe story in 1991's The Pit and the Pendulum and would return to the character of Poe in the same respective roles for the successful one-man stage show Nevermore: An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe which premiered at The Steve Allen Theater in 2009 and has since been revived several times.