Watch The First Trailer For The Raven

Looks like another literary hero is getting a badass modern upgrade.

Even though Edgar Allen Poe was a real person, he seems more like a dark mythological figure to us. In reality, he was an alcoholic who wrote creepy poems about dead ladies and tuberculosis. Not great source material for a movie.

But V For Vendetta director James McTeige‘s new film, The Raven, gives Poe (John Cusack) a whole lot of edge. The film’s trailer has just been released, and it is definitely not based on Poe’s famous poem of the same name.

In the trailer, a young detective (Luke Evans) is hunting down a serial killer when he notices the murderer has been replicating the deaths in Poe’s work.

Visually, the The Raven bears a lot of similarities to the new Sherlock Holmes films, which are kind of hit-or-miss for me. However, if you’ve ever been to middle school, you know that Poe wrote some of the strangest, most gruesome deaths of all time, and those will be very interesting to see translated to the screen.

The Raven hits theaters March 9, 2012.

Check out the trailer and the official synopsis below, and let us know what you think!

In this gritty thriller, Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack, Being John Malkovich) joins forces with a young Baltimore detective (Luke Evans, Immortals) to hunt down a mad serial killer who’s using Poe’s own works as the basis in a string of brutal murders. Directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta, Ninja Assassin), the film also stars Alice Eve (Sex and the City 2) and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Faster).

When a mother and daughter are found brutally murdered in 19th century Baltimore, Detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) makes a startling discovery: the crime resembles a fictional murder described in gory detail in the local newspaper—part of a collection of stories penned by struggling writer and social pariah Edgar Allan Poe. But even as Poe is questioned by police, another grisly murder occurs, also inspired by a popular Poe story.

Realizing a serial killer is on the loose using Poe’s writings as the backdrop for his bloody rampage, Fields enlists the author’s help in stopping the attacks. But when it appears someone close to Poe may become the murderer’s next victim, the stakes become even higher and the inventor of the detective story calls on his own powers of deduction to try to solve the case before it’s too late.