The Avenging Conscience

D.W. Griffith indulged his lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe in this ambitious amalgam of the writer’s poetry and prose: (Annabel Lee) and (The Tell-Tale Heart), flavored with shades of (The Pit and the Pendulum), (The Black Cat), and (The Conqueror Worm). Poe’s tales are interwoven in one tragedy-laden narrative of a young man (Henry B. Walthall) who yearns to escape from his overbearing, one-eyed uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken). After the nephew murders the ogre, he and his lover (Blanche Sweet) are wracked by guilt and tormented by nightmares, ghosts, and demonic entities that drive them to even more horrifying extremes. (official distributor synopsis)