The audience is not told that a dream begins.  To understand that, one must see the film through twice.  But it is perfectly legitimate to deceive us.  Through our ignorance we share the young man’s hallucinations, entering into them as imperceptibly as he does.  We think it is the next morning.  Poe would start the story just here, and here the veritable Poe-esque quality begins.

After debate within himself as to means, the nephew murders his uncle and buries him in the thick wall of the chimney.  The Italian laborer witnesses the death-struggle through the window.  While our consciences are aching and the world crashes round us, he levies black-mail.  Then for due compensation the Italian becomes an armed sentinel.  The boy fears detection.

Yet the foolish youth thinks he will be happy.  But every time he runs to meet his sweetheart he is appalled by hallucinations over her shoulder.  The cadaverous ghost of the uncle is shown on the screen several times.  It is an appearance visible to the young man and the audience only.  Later the ghost is implied by the actions of the guilty one.  We merely imagine it.  This is a piece of sound technique.  We no more need a dray full of ghosts than a dray full of jumping furniture.

The village in general has never suspected the nephew.  Only two people suspect him:  the broken-hearted girl and an old friend of his father.  This gentleman puts a detective on the trail. (The detective is impersonated by Ralph Lewis.) The gradual breakdown of the victim is traced by dramatic degrees.  This is the second case of the thing I have argued as being generally impossible in a photoplay chronicle of a private person, and which the considerations of chapter twelve indicate as exceptional.  We trace the innermost psychology of one special citizen step by step to the crisis, and that path is actually the primary interest of the story.  The climax is the confession to the detective.  With this self-exposure the direct Poe-quality of the technique comes to an end.  Moreover, Poe would end the story here.  But the Poe-dream is set like a dark jewel in a gold ring, of which more anon.

Let us dwell upon the confession.  The first stage of this conscience-climax is reached by the dramatization of The Tell-tale Heart reminiscence in the memory of the dreaming man.  The episode makes a singular application of the theories with which this chapter begins.  For furniture-in-motion we have the detective’s pencil.  For trappings and inventions in motion we have his tapping shoe and the busy clock pendulum.  Because this scene is so powerful the photoplay is described in this chapter rather than any other, though the application is more spiritual than literal.  The half-mad boy begins to divulge that he thinks that the habitual ticking of the clock is satanically timed to the beating of the dead man’s heart.  Here more unearthliness hovers round a pendulum than any merely mechanical trick-movements could impart.