The Tell Tale Heart (2005) User Reviews

Another valiant attempt to out Poe the poem

[Jayce · 6/10 · 10 May 2006]

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.

Another animated Tell-Tale Heart

[Rectangular_businessman · 7/10 · 5 January 2023]

Another animated adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's the Tell-Tale heart.

Its strongest aspect are the stylish black and white visuals, very reminiscent of Christian Volckman's Reinassance. (This short predates that movie by a year, though)

Now, while I have nothing against Bela Lugosi, I think this animation would have been much better without any narrating audio, since the scenes were pretty clear by themselves, and the voiceover used here was either distracting or redundant most of the time.

Movies are a different medium than literature, and sometimes, what works in paper not necesarily works on screen.

Still, an okay adaptation with nice visuals, disregard of the very intrusive narration.

6.5/10.