Oxygen: Breathless sci-fi dubbed in English can’t touch Gallic original

English version of lost-in-space drama breaks too often with the original script

Tara Brady
Mélanie Laurent

Mélanie Laurent

During the 1800s, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Premature Burial, vivisepulture – or live burial – was a very real and common concern. There were, in Poe’s 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 – the fear of being buried alive – 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 Švankmajer and Roger Corman.

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