THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE

After making a film about his beloved Edgar Allan Poe in 1909, Griffith directed ‘The Avenging Conscience’ a few years later, using the short story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ as a model and inserting explicit references to the poem ‘Annabel Lee’, written by the Boston writer in 1849. ‘The Avenging Conscience’ was made with the help of many fantastic scenes and was shot at the same time as Griffith was making his ambitious 12-reel project on the epic history of the American Civil War, ‘The Birth of a Nation’. Poe’s various short stories are interwoven throughout this work, making it a kind of gothic tragedy, in which a young man (Henry B. Walthall), raised in the shadow of a despotic uncle, longs to escape his family and so, with the girl he has fallen in love with, goes so far as to think of murder…