His victim was an old man with a filmy ‘vulture eye’, as he calls it. It is relayed by a young man called Wilson who endeavours to convince the audience of his sanity whilst simultaneously describing a murder he committed. But credit to Jung for giving us this little bit of crazy fun. In the animation above by Annette Jungadapted from Poe’s chilling talethe madman Ed resolves to take the life of an old man with a creepy, staring eye. The tell-tale heart is a play based on the short story by American writer Edgar Allen Poe. As many different times as I’ve seen it done, however, there always seem to me to be avenues or possibilities in the story that remain unexplored. And I don’t recall ever seeing it suggested before that the narrator is actually the old man’s son, though I guess it’s a fair enough reading. I like the attention to detail in things like the headboard of the old man’s bed being a spiderweb.

There have been a number of film versions of “The Tell-Tale Heart” but this one by Annette Jung is perhaps the liveliest and most inventive. When I described the wise precautions I took with a concealment of the body. You still think me mad, man, you would think so no longer. He was stone stone dead, his I would trouble me no more. The sound would be heard by your neighbor. The jumping from different styles of animation and colour schemes gives the film even more energy to add to its already fierce pace, which tells the story in under 7 minutes (there are over a minute of end credits to fill out the rest of the running time). Listen, the beating of the old man's heart and now a new anxiety sees me. The narrator’s hair makes him look like he’s receiving electroshock while certain motifs, like the fly (perhaps borrowed from the moth in the 1953 version) and the giant eyes play up the sense of exaggerated, grotesque decay. The art is Gorey-esque, but brightened with a lot of vibrant colour and vibrating animation. So in this version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” there’s nothing surprising about the humour. He was a master of the spoof, and even sent up genres that he invented, at the same time as he was inventing them! And it’s fair to ask in a lot of cases just how seriously he intended them to be taken. You hear his stories in your head being read by Vincent Price and illustrated by Edward Gorey. There’s always been something a bit cartoonish about Edgar Allan Poe.

The tell tale heart by annette jung