Tuesday 2/4/25
So much writing. About to finish what this comes from. Very good. Pleased with it.
Speaking of the heart: What about when the organ comes to be buried beneath floorboards? Or so is presumed? The works of Edgar Allan Poe aren’t exactly to be confused with the warming doggerel found inside of Hallmark cards, but love can make obsessives out of all of us. Brian Desmond Hurst’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1945) is the first talkie adaptation of Poe’s 1843 story and also a nearly silent film; call it a paradoxical dichotomy.
The cast was largely compromised of amateur actors, which lends a believable aspect to the fantastical conceit. Hurst was good at this kind of thing; a haunting realism runs throughout his exceedingly haunting 1951 adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (which, incidentally, came out the same year as the Poe story) titled Scrooge, and his less-than-an-hour-long Poe outing is grounded—no pun intended—in the believable, which we can’t say too often with Poe’s works (e.g. “The Pit and the Pendulum”). They feel large when they are in truth compact, the stuff of a single (oft-brief) sitting, but Hurst’s movie is potent because it has an exactitude to its workings, the sense that we’re dialed in, focused, though not dispatched via obsession into the realm of madness, as with our murderous central character.
The movie was risibly retitled Bucket of Blood for the American market, but then again, word on the British streets was that people couldn’t handle the film’s gruesomeness. Judge for yourself (and then be judged for what you were when you leave this world, because fair is only fair). Less risible is that guilt is a part of romance, and certainly romances that founder. Did we do enough? Were we enough? Why did we make the choices we did? Why were we selfish? We keep the mementos, which now are often preserved for us on social media, a sort of digital graveyard of that which was, reminding us any time we scroll back of our losses, and what can prompt bouts of self-flagellation. In short, we are not far removed from the beating heart beneath those bedroom floorboards of this Hurst adaptation.
Most people can recall times that they lay in bed, thinking about the person for whom they pine, or replaying the events of an exchange with them, or some recently-concluded hours that were spent in their presence, or maybe some romantic progress; and for all of the bad things we may worry over at night, there may be nothing more that we think about in that same setting than a first kiss.
The best horror movies cause a similar reaction after we view them. Sleep doesn’t come easy, as we cycle through their events again and again, as with Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film, Let the Right One In, which features an unlikely union and dead-clever idea—the affectionate friendship between a vampire girl and bullied twelve-year-old boy.
Valentine’s Day is thought to center wholly on romantic love, but the most successful romantic relationships are undergirded by friendship. Every type of love admits something of friendship. This is a disturbing film that manages to be more touching than it is unsettling. The pool scene—in which the boy’s vampire friend comes to his rescue—is a tour-de-force of horror staging, cinematography, pace, editing, gore, and beauty. See it once and it’ll never leave you.
Let the Right One In makes for an apt date film, too. Because if you invite your paramour/steady/husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/what have you for a Valentine’s screening of this modern masterpiece on your couch, and whomever they may be isn’t on board with this film’s cause, you know what you must do: Dump them, without hesitation, impunity, nor chance for their return. Okay—that could be going overboard. But seriously, think about it.
Or else you could invite Boris Karloff into your Valentine’s viewing rotation with Edward Dmytryk’s 1941 picture, The Devil Commands, an adaptation of William Sloane’s 1939 novel, The Edge of Running Water. Sloane wrote two novels. His first, 1937’s To Walk the Night, is better—you needn’t apologize if you read it and think there’s no better American novel from the twentieth century—but The Edge of Running Water holds its own. Sloane crafted literature that worked as popular entertainment, in which science fiction, mystery, terror, the dead, and friends—to add to one of our themes—were writ large but billed equally in precisely honed and balanced narrative arcs.
Karloff stars as brokenhearted scientist Julian Blair, who has lost his wife—in the Reaper sense—and will do anything to commune with her again. He’s isolated himself in New England—a region that works best for this brand of endeavor, you could say—and is hellbent—operative word—on building a machine that restarts that love connection. Anne Revere plays the phony medium who is such a big part of the book, with which other liberties are taken, but that’s fine. In The Devil Commands, we have a man doing what he believes he needs to do, and the movie itself has a similar attitude. It’s a taut, effective picture, a hidden stalwart that you’re glad to have found when you do encounter it.
When we lose love—or lose the person who is our love—we come to know a pain that stands apart from most other forms of hurt, save in the rarest of human lives with their own unique extenuating circumstances. Who knows what we may then do. There is the bottle, the cessation of self-care, behaviors that we look back on later with embarrassment or horror of a non-cinematic stripe, and yet understanding for why we were doing what we were, or became what we did. For all of those people, this is a movie for you.
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