Name: The Tell Tale Heart
Genre: Animation, Short, Horror
Released: 2005-09-13
Duration: 10 min
Rating: 7.3
Cast: Bela Lugosi

Another valiant attempt to out Poe the poem

I had a chance to see this very good short film at the Rochester International Film Festival ("Movies on a Shoestring") in May, 2006. "The Tell Tale Heart" is quite a challenging poem to render to screen effectively and Garcia makes a valiant effort to do it justice. His use of black-and-white (that is, maximum contrast with literally just black-and-white) 3-D animation brings forth foreboding shadows and is quite effective. The scratchy Bela Lugosi reading has its own haunting charm, but didn't fit with the contrasty punch provided by the visuals. I think I would have enjoyed the film more if it were bolder in its audio.

I'm not sure, though: the poem is so strong in its own written/spoken medium that to add visuals does not do it justice. I think it needs to be significantly adapted to screen to make it work -- simply adding solid visuals to a solid telling somehow fails to get to the heart of the tale.

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The Tell Tale Heart

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