The Tell Tale Heart, the human body, and horror movies today

I have always found Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart to be incredibly frightening and creepy. The images portrayed by Poe and the dark imagery has served as a classic  example of horror literature. The eerie fear of the old man’s eyes reminds me of a lot of themes in scary movies. Usually, there is one factor that serves as an omen. For example, in Jeeper’s Creeper’s, the beast is after eyes and different body parts to keep himself in tact. The eyes are often seen as the window to the soul. The man’s extreme obsession with the eyes alludes to this. How can a simple body part become so incredibly enticing? Also, the heart is of much importance in this poem. Although he kills the man, he still imagines his heart beating and hears the sound of it even though it has been silenced. The heart is once again one of those organs that holds a lot of symbolic meaning in our culture. Sayings such as “the heart wants what it wants” connect it to love and human relation. I find it interesting that the narrator has such a fascination with all of these body parts, yet it is his own mind that’s deteriorating. It is the loss of his own sanity that causes his violent actions. The brain is often forgotten as an actual organ. Just like the rest of your body can get sick, so can the brain. Mental insanity—like any other disease—is a physical ailment.

Often times in modern day horror films we portray the supernatural as the most frightening thing. Recently, this theme of the supernatural has been interrupted. The new movie released and produces by M. Night Shmayalan, The Visit examines just how scary the mentally insane can be. As two siblings go to visit their 15 year estranged grandparents, they quickly realize that something is not right with their grandparent’s mental state. After a series of events, the children discover that their grandparents are in fact not their actual grandparents, but two patients from the local mental hospital they volunteer at that killed them and wish to experience real grandchildren and family. But, they cannot keep up the allusion of sanity and quickly fall victims to their mental illnesses. 

Poe touches on the incredibly real affects of mental illness and deterioration. Oftentimes the most scary things can simply be real humans. Not images of demons or ghosts, but real humans with mental illnesses. This paired with his emphasis on other human body parts keeps The Tell Tale Heart as a frightening tale.