The Sleepy Hollow International Film Festival is shaping into one of the most unique and exciting events of the year. For their inaugural show, they will have special screenings of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, Brian DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise, The Crow, and so much more.
On Saturday October 12th, the festival will bring in Jeffrey Combs to perform his one man stage show, Nevermore: An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe, for their attendees. Directed by Stuart Gordon and written by Dennis Paoli, Nevermore follows Edgar Allan Poe as he performs a recital which grows darker as his demons begin to take control. Originally performed at the Steve Allen Theater in Los Angeles, Nevermore’s run was only meant to last a couple weeks, but word of mouth spread and Combs took residency there for months He’s continued to bring the show across the country for audiences to enjoy, but this show in New York will be part of something a bit more special.
“The guys from SHIFF approached me and asked if I would be interested in being the Saturday night entertainment for the film festival. They had seen the show in L.A. and felt it would be a good fit for the overall theme,” Combs states. Since the festival aims to celebrate artistic inspiration and achievement through film and literature, it seems to be a no-brainer. He continues, “I was deeply honored to have been asked and it didn’t take me long to say ‘yes’. As it’s getting closer and closer, I’m really looking forward to it.”
Edgar Allan Poe was a unique and strong personality, an artist with a vision and a dark side. Getting into Poe’s head takes time and preparation for Combs, who is quick to share his ritual. “First and foremost, I like to read his works. It’s amazing, every time I turn my focus to it, I learn something new. When I was running lines the other day, I had read a poem and realized I’d never read it quite that way before. That’s the sign of a really good writer, when it’s multi-layered and there’s new discoveries all the time. There’s a deep and wide intellect going on there, so many levels,” he relates. Getting ready isn’t as easy as interpreting a few poems. “My biggest obstacle is getting back into the mindset when I haven’t done it in awhile. There’s a lot of dialogue for me, but it’s pretty well-imprinted in my brain. It’s just a matter of refreshing, but it’s not just the words. There are emotional and physical requirements along with the vocal prep and I oversee all the tech stuff. The show’s pretty simple but I oversee it all, making me a one man production guy, too,” Combs divulges.
In a 2007 episode of Masters of Horror titled “The Black Cat,” Combs reunited with his Re-Animator pals, director Stuart Gordon and writer Dennis Paoli. They crafted one of the best episodes of the series and his performance as Poe was so inspiring to Gordon, the idea of a stage show was almost immediate. Combs remembers, “Stuart told me I should do a one man show when we were shooting ‘The Black Cat’. I brushed it off and never thought it would happen. But over the next year, he would gently urge me and I finally caved and asked what it would be like. That’s when things really started to pick up and we developed the story and framework before we went to Dennis. He’s actually a professor in Gothic literature at Hunter College in New York. He started his own research finding all the connective quotes that provide the catalyst for moving from set-piece to set-piece.” He continues, “It’s an imaginary recital which Poe did do in his life, but of course we take some dramatic license with it. You have to in order to get all the colors in there. He was a highly gifted, brilliant person but he was also tragically full of sorrow and disappointment, almost his entire life. I can really relate to Poe in some ways, we all can I think, any good piece of theater will touch you in some way. Poe is very accessible as a writer, in prose and in poetry. It’s not so far convoluted that you can’t follow it. It’s a gift to me to be able to go out there and do it, but it’s also frightening. Since it’s just me, there’s no one there to pick up a line if I miss one, there’s just no help.”
Jeffrey Combs is a consummate professional and a stage-trained performer, but does he still get the jitters when he takes the stage? Combs answers, “I never like to say I get nervous, it’s more of an excitement but it’s a solo ride and it all falls on me. It’s kind of like skiing, I know where the turns and slopes are, I know how to lean in and stoop down. It’s an exhilarating feeling.” Nevermore has been a part of his life for a very long time now and the possibility of burning out on it is very real. He relates, “I’ve been doing the show for ten years now and it still charges me up to perform it. I probably wouldn’t say that if I had been doing it continually for ten years, though. I do get plenty of breaks from it, so revisiting it is always charged with a sense of it being new. I still really look forward to it and I really enjoy what I get out of it, like the communions that happen between myself and the audience. There’s nothing like that at all. “
With the success of Nevermore on stage, one would have thought with the background of those involved, a movie or filmed version would have happened by now. It turns out, they tried but it wasn’t as easy to pull off as they thought. Combs explains, “Years ago, I think it was 2010, someone offered up the idea of a Kickstarter campaign to capture my performance. Very quickly, Stuart said we shouldn’t do that but to turn it into a movie instead. When that decision was made, the budget tripled of what we were going to originally ask for. It all proved to be really challenging and we weren’t very good technically or savvy about how to use Kickstarter, and we made a lot of mistakes. That campaign eventually crashed and burned because we were asking for quite a lot of money.”
“I later realized that if we had started a Kickstarter campaign and it involved a Lovecraft project, we wouldn’t have had a problem reaching our goal. For some reason, with Poe, there was a different answer. I realized that Lovecraft has this pop culture following and Poe’s is more with the literary community. It’s disappointing to see people get excited more for one and not the other,” Combs observes. “Lovecraft adored Poe and tried to emulate him in many ways, but who wouldn’t want to. For me, Poe is the king and why wouldn’t the king be supported? I put the blame for the failure of our campaign on the lack of experience putting it together. We’ve tried over the years to get the movie made, but it’s proving to be very challenging,” he says dismayed.
As frustrating as it may be to get their passion project off the ground, Combs is still keeping insanely busy with a slew of new projects he’s extremely excited about, he just can’t talk about them. One such project is the upcoming Creepshow series on Shudder. He teases, “I’m pretty limited to what I can say. I had to sign an NDA (Non-Disclousre Agreement) but I really enjoyed working on the new Creepshow and I think it’s going to be a really interesting series. It’s very stylized in many ways and I liked how they were shooting it. It attracted some really great performers, and Greg Nicotero is the guy to do it.” This may be the biggest of the projects he has on the horizon, but it most certainly isn’t the only one. He proceeds, “I’ve done so many other things, but again, I can’t say anything. I do my share of voice-over work, again, I can’t tell you on what. It never used to be that way. They’re just trying to keep secrets in a timewhen it’s so much more difficult to do so.”
While the curiosity is eating away at his fans, they can still get their fix and attend his performance of Nevermore at Sleepy Hollow International Film Festival on October 12th. You can order tickets for the show here, as well as for all the other exciting events the festival has to offer.
Related Article: Shudder Debuts First Trailer for ‘Creepshow’ Series
