Tell Tale | |
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![]() Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Michael Cuesta |
Written by | David Callaham |
Based on | "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe |
Produced by |
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Starring | |
Cinematography | Terry Stacey |
Edited by |
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Music by | David Buckley |
Production companies |
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Distributed by | Genius Products [1] |
Release date |
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Running time | 93 minutes |
Countries |
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Language | English |
Budget | $12 million |
Tell-Tale is a 2009 science fiction horror film [2] inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story "The Tell-Tale Heart". It is directed by Michael Cuesta and stars Josh Lucas, Lena Headey, and Brian Cox and is produced by Tony Scott and Ridley Scott. [3] A man's recently transplanted heart leads him on a frantic search to find the donor's killer before a similar fate befalls him. [4]
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In Providence, a husband and his wife die in a botched robbery; we see flickers of his last memories. His heart goes to Terry Bernard, a single father raising a girl with a rare degenerative disease. After the operation, Terry has flashes of memory from the last moments of the dead donor's life. Then, he recognizes one of the donor's killers and follows him into an alley. Within days, Terry becomes an unwilling avenger, with a police detective on his trail. Meanwhile, he begins a romance with his daughter's doctor, his moods complicated by memory flashes, the donor's deepening presence in both Terry's mind and body, and the unexplained bond among the donor's killers.
The film received a DVD and Blu-ray Disc release on 25 May 2010. [8]
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843. It is told by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of the narrator's sanity while simultaneously describing a murder the narrator committed. The victim was an old man with a filmy pale blue "vulture-eye", as the narrator calls it. The narrator emphasizes the careful calculation of the murder, attempting the perfect crime, complete with dismembering the body in the bathtub and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately, the narrator's actions result in hearing a thumping sound, which the narrator interprets as the dead man's beating heart.
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