Raven's Hollow

 Using historical figures as fictional characters has a long and illustrious history - my favorite example, in both quality and quantity, would have to be Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. There's also a sub-category of this that inserts writers into stories that vaguely resemble something they might have written, a la Cast a Deadly Spell.
 Raven's Hollow does this but for Edgar Allan Poe, and in a somewhat unusual choice, mostly restricts its references and quotes to the man's poetic work* especially, of course, the Raven.

 After a cold open where a girl is chased and killed by that most terrifying of monsters -a cloud of CGI fallen leaves- we cut the titles, and then to a scene where Poe (William Moseley) runs across a crucified, disembowelled man while riding out on some sort of military drill with four other cadets. We know he's Edgar Allan Poe, because his mates use both Edgar and Poe when they address him.

 While cutting him down, the dying man whispers 'Raven' and promptly dies. The group, egged on by Poe, decide to take the corpse to a nearby settlement - the titular Raven's Hollow.

 Once there they get the obligatory folk horror passive aggressive reception from the townsfolk, and start suspecting not all is what it seems. Poe, being the inquisitive type, opts to stay in town to see if he can solve the mystery... and the movie starts falling apart soon afterwards.

 As more characters are introduced and we start learning the facts, it becomes clear that the raven is some sort of evil spirt monster, and that the town is somehow complicit in its murders. As events escalate they... well, they basically stop making sense, and the plot starts just stumbling forward in ways that don't fit well together. Dialog turns from cogent conversations to people spouting unrelated lines and exposition at one another. Poe -who, remember, wrote detective stories well before Conan Doyle came up with Sherlock Holmes- is presented as an analytical thinker, but the sort of conclusions he jumps to here are highly suspect (he turns out to be correct every time, of course.)

 At least this leads to him deducing that taking opium will protect him from the monster's mind tricks (!), which results in a scene of him tripping balls and seeing locomotive-like jets of steam come out of his horse. Finally an origin story for Poe's opium habit.

 All this is a shame, because the movie looks very good - All autumnal landscapes and creepy, semi-abandoned townships; who'd have thought Latvia'd make a good stand-in for upstate New York? The wardrobe looks great, too, and the color coordination seems to be on-point. The direction is assured and there are some great touches here and there - I particularly like a scene where Poe's face becomes increasingly bathed in red light as he approaches a bloody tableaux in a church. None of this disguises that it's a low-budget production, but it at least puts in the effort and mostly succeeds. Unfortunately the monster itself is a major letdown, a crappily designed thing rendered in sub-par CGI.
 The acting is good, too! Besides Moseley, who manages to say a lot of nonsense and seemingly mean it, all the actors (including the awesomely named Oberon K.A. Adjepong, Kate Dickey from The Witch, and Melanie Zanetti) do a lot to help keep the tone consistent.

 Beyond it just not being a satisfying story in and of itself, it's also not particularly faithful to Poe's style; it doesn't come off like something he would ever write. There are a few references, of course: character names, minor incidents, and Poe quotes his own poetry during the movie, but it all feels pretty hollow (pun not intended), and honestly... how someone could get to The Raven from the events of this movie is anyone's guess.