Audio Review: The System of Goudron and Professor Plume presented by the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air on WYPR mdtheatreguide.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mdtheatreguide.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
During the 1800s, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Premature Burial, vivisepulture â or live burial â was a very real and common concern. There were, in Poeâs lifetime, many instances of contorted skeletons discovered in coffins and physicians who, lacking credentials, pronounced comatose or unconscious patients dead. Coffins, accordingly, were sometimes fitted with bells and pipes, lest the occupant wake up, a strategy that became increasingly popular thanks to the Victorian campaigners of the Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive.
Poe would revisit the theme of taphophobia â the fear of being buried alive â in the short stories Berenice, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher, tales that were later and variously adapted for the screen by Erich von Stroheim, Jan Å vankmajer and Roger Corman.