Edgar Allan Poe excelled in a number of different types of endeavors. He brought originality to literary criticism, he was a poet, he created the gothic tales of terror and science fiction, and in addition, he was acknowledged as the father of detective fiction. Although the writer died half a century before the moving picture was invented, his poems, short stories and even his biography inspired the first film-makers as well as contemporary artists. Nevertheless, Poe as a writer is difficult to adapt. For being easy to understand, he avoided writing complicated plots. He did not write dramas using a lot of actors, he hardly used dialogues but told his tales in first person singular, and he preferred solving the conflicts at a leisurely pace, step by step, rather than finishing in a prolonged way. He used the very tools which are forbidden by the rules of modern film-script writing. [...] In my essay I will trace Poe’s world represented in the cinematic art on the basis of the chronological order of what I consider the most important films. I divide them into two main fields: silent and sound films. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that the quality of movies made on the basis of Poe’s short stories is not dependent on the quality of the original stories but it is determined by the ability of the modern directors and script writers.