The beating of the heart as a memorial.
Director's Note
With my reinterpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, I want to build a bridge between classic Gothic horror and the message of a repressed European past. The short film is set in the German Empire of the 19th century, at a time when revolutionaries were striving for freedom and equality, while the dukes wanted to preserve the status quo.
The main character in our story, the dukes son, believes he can erase the past by killing his father's serf, but it is precisely this act that makes the serf the last witness to his own transgression, the urge to erase memory.
What begins as an intimate chamber drama becomes an act of violence in the name of power and exploitation. The victim who returns from the grave is not a figure of horror in this story, but a figure of reflection. He embodies what we must not forget: the prosperity we enjoy today stems, then as now, from a common root of robbery and oppression.
The Telltale Heart is thus intended to be a wake-up call – a film that not only wants to scare you, but take you back in time. Because to observe attentively means to remember.
