The Tell-Tale Heart, Now With Ninety Percent Less Tell-Tale Heart
High-school drama teachers love The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 story of madness and murder. Told in the first person, it's short enough that the kid in class with the best retention skills can memorize it, and melodramatic enough that any kid in class can solo-overact his or her way through it without looking like too much of a scenery-chewing jackass.
(I myself once rode the monologue to some performance award or other at a high-school drama competition. I even started pulling up the boards covering the stage lights during the story's climax - ACTING!)
But the truth is, it's a damn good yarn, as are several of Poe's more chilling tales. As a poet, Poe knew how to choose his words for look and specific emphasis as well as effect, and his imaginative perspectives on regular folks losing their shit still resonate today, when mothers drown their children because God told them to and people stab each other over bumper stickers.
Now, there's a cinematic "adaptation" of the story in the works. The movie is about a heart-transplant recipient being stalked by whomever murdered the person whose heart the patient received. Which, as anyone who has actually read Poe's narrative knows, has exactly nothing at all to do with The Tell-Tale Heart.
Why call it an adaptation of the Poe story at all? To draw in the thousands of ticket buyers who used to be teenaged drama geeks? To cash in on that influential cross-section of the public made up of scholars of macabre 18th century American literature? Why not just call it One-Third of the Plot of 21 Grams, Only, You Know, Scary?
(I myself once rode the monologue to some performance award or other at a high-school drama competition. I even started pulling up the boards covering the stage lights during the story's climax - ACTING!)
But the truth is, it's a damn good yarn, as are several of Poe's more chilling tales. As a poet, Poe knew how to choose his words for look and specific emphasis as well as effect, and his imaginative perspectives on regular folks losing their shit still resonate today, when mothers drown their children because God told them to and people stab each other over bumper stickers.
Now, there's a cinematic "adaptation" of the story in the works. The movie is about a heart-transplant recipient being stalked by whomever murdered the person whose heart the patient received. Which, as anyone who has actually read Poe's narrative knows, has exactly nothing at all to do with The Tell-Tale Heart.
Why call it an adaptation of the Poe story at all? To draw in the thousands of ticket buyers who used to be teenaged drama geeks? To cash in on that influential cross-section of the public made up of scholars of macabre 18th century American literature? Why not just call it One-Third of the Plot of 21 Grams, Only, You Know, Scary?
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