The Tell-Tale Heart is a 1960

1960 in film

The year 1960 in film involved some significant events, with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho the top-grossing release in the U.S.-Events:* April 20 - for the first time since coming home from military service in Germany, Elvis Presley returns to Hollywood, California to film G.I...

 British

Cinema of the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has had a major influence on modern cinema. The first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park, London in 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. It is generally regarded that the British film industry...

 horror film

Horror film

Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

 directed by Ernest Morris. The screenplay by Brian Clemens

Brian Clemens

Brian Horace Clemens OBE is a British screenwriter and television producer, possibly best known for his work on The Avengers and The Professionals...

 and Eldon Howard is a loose adaptation of the 1843 short story of the same title

The Tell-Tale Heart

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe first published in 1843. It follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a "vulture eye". The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides the body by dismembering it and hiding it under the...

 by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

.

Plot

Edgar Marsh, a shy librarian obsessed with erotica

Erotica

Erotica are works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or sexually arousing descriptions...

, becomes infatuated with his neighbor Betty Clare when he sees her undressing in her bedroom. He invites her to dinner, and although she clearly is uncomfortable with the attention he pays her, he showers her with jewelry and fantasizes about their future. Complications arise when he introduces her to his friend Carl Loomis, whom Betty finds far more attractive and appealing. In order to eliminate the competition, Edgar bludgeons Carl to death with a poker and buries him beneath the floorboards in his piano room. His overwhelming guilt leads him to believe a ticking metronome

Metronome

A metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks — settable in beats per minute. These ticks represent a fixed, regular aural pulse; some metronomes also include synchronized visual motion...

 and the incessant dripping of a faucet actually are the sound of his victim's heart still beating.

Cast

• Laurence Payne
  Laurence Payne
  Laurence Payne was an English actor and novelist.-Early life:Laurence Stanley Payne was born in London. His father died when he was three years old, and he and his elder brother and sister were brought up in by their mother, a Wesleyan Methodist in Wood Green, London...
  
   ..... Edgar Marsh
• Adrienne Corri
  Adrienne Corri
  Adrienne Corri is an actress of Italian parentage.She is probably best known for her role as the rape victim Mrs. Alexander in the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, and for her appearances as Valerie in Jean Renoir's The River and as Lara's mother in David Lean's Dr. Zhivago...
  
   ..... Betty Clare
• Dermot Walsh
  Dermot Walsh
  Dermot Walsh was an Irish stage, film and television actor, known for portraying Richard the Lionheart in the 1962 television series Richard the Lionheart.-Early life:...
  
  ..... Carl Loomis