People are voting emotionally.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This D. W. Griffith film is an early effort by the director and shows his developing skill on the lead up to epics such as Intolerance. It's about a young man who falls in love with a girl. This love drives a wedge between him and his uncle who has set a path for him that does not allow for such frivolous distractions. This situation drives the man to murder his overbearing uncle. This event leads to madness and psychological breakdown.The story is based on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' with elements of 'Annabel Lee' and 'The Black Cat' thrown in for good measure. It's a rare horror outing for Griffiths. Indeed it is one of the very first fully form horror films at all. As such it is of interest. It contains several eerie and macabre details like the ghostly spectre of the uncle back from the dead and thoughts of murder represented by a spider on web and ants attacking a larger insect en mass. It's very primitive stuff overall but that is to be expected considering its age. Worth a look if you are interested in the genesis of the horror film though.

By today's standards, "The Avenging Conscience" is a pretty poor movie, as it uses sledgehammer symbolism to make its point---subtle, it certainly isn't! While this is nominally a reworking of Poe's "A Tell-Tale Heart", director D.W. Griffith wants to make sure the audience knows this again and again and again. So much could have been done with less--and the way it's done here you keep wondering why it wasn't trimmed significantly and all the direct and indirect references to the original story removed. For example, early in the story, the guy who eventually commits the murder is shown sitting at his desk reading the Poe story as well as the poem "Annabelle Lee" (and the main character's girlfriend is named Annabelle)! Then, images of Poe are plastered across the screen! Later, when the young man (Henry Walthall) is getting the idea of killing his uncle, you see closeups of a spider killing a fly and then (repeatedly) footage of a swarm of ants devouring a larger bug!! Believe it or not, back in 1914, such amazingly UNSUBTLE work was the norm--so you can't fault Griffith too much for telegraphing EVERYTHING! But, as I said, by today's standards it's pretty poor--and ruins the suspense.Here's the story. An uncle really loves having his young nephew (Henry Walthall) working for him. But, when Walthall tells him he's interested in a nice young lady (Blanche Sweet), the old man forbids the union and basically calls her a skank. Walthall is naturally furious, but instead of just defying the uncle and marrying her anyway, he decides to kill him--then he can have the girl AND the fortune. Once the terrible deed is done, the murderer disposes of the body in a way reminiscent of the Poe story "The Black Cat" and things should be just fine....but there are two problems. First, there is a witness. Second, Walthall begins hallucinating--seeing the uncle again and again--like some sort of spirit that haunts him. At first, I was impressed by the photographic tricks...but then it all became frightfully overdone--with LOTS of overacting and Jesus coming for a visit--at which point the man repents! So, while re-imagining Poe might have been a great idea, the results were so heavy-handed it undid the impact--plus Poe never would have gone for the heavy religious elements but would have stuck to madness and evil. Now madness DID appear later in the film--but the idea of redemption just isn't something Poe cared for--his characters were just crazy or evil or both! It is really hard to imagine that only a year later, Griffith came out with a much more ground-breaking production ("A Birth of a Nation"--a very racist but technically brilliant film). So much progress in only one year is astounding. Within a couple years, his "Intolerance" would produce a film that is still astoundingly advanced in many ways even today....but no such brilliance is here in "The Avenging Conscience". Obvious, heavy-handed and dull...this should have been a lot better.

'The Avenging Conscience' isn't the weirdest movie on DW Griffith's CV, but it's well up there. This is a drama of modern 1914, but it's firmly influenced by several stories of Edgar Allan Poe, who is referenced (by name and daguerreotype image) in the film.Henry Walthall plays a young man whose mother died giving birth to him, and who apparently has no father, so he's been raised since birth by his uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken, excellent performance). We see Aitken doting on the nephew as a child, then turning harsher (in convincing old-age makeup) as he tells his grown nephew to help him in his business affairs. Aitken's character wears an eyepatch over his left eye; this seemed entirely pointless, until Walthall as the nephew starts reading Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. In that story, you will recall, the young narrator lives with an older man who has a defective eye ... and eventually murders him. Walthall is in love with the girl semi-next door over, well-played by Blanche Sweet. We're never told her character's real name (nor anybody else's in this movie), but we learn that Walthall makes a point of crying her Annabel. This is clearly from Poe's tragic poem 'Annabel Lee', but that makes little sense. 'Annabel Lee' (inspired by Poe's real-life marriage to his much younger cousin, who died in her teens) is about a child-like woman who dies far too soon. Why would any Poe devotee give this monicker to a more mature woman such as Sweet's character, unless he's hoping she'll die?SPOILERS COMING. Eventually, Walthall quarrels with Aitken, and kills him ... then bricks up the body in the chimney with laughable ease. From this point, the story becomes steadily less logical. For instance, Aitken's disappearance remains unsolved (Walthall claims he's left town), yet Walthall has no difficulty inheriting his absent uncle's estate, without a death certificate. And a detective (the under-rated Ralph Lewis) shows Columbo-like powers, somehow intuiting every detail of the crime ... even to noticing the brickwork in Walthall's inglenook. Walthall's house conveniently has a trapdoor escape hatch, but Lewis has just as conveniently rumbled it and nailed it shut. Then Aitken comes back as a one-eyed ghost to haunt Walthall, only it's clear that he's a manifestation of Walthall's guilty conscience rather than a genuine supernatural spook.There's an attempt to evoke the mood of 'The Tell-Tale Heart' ... in which the nervous murderer, feeling his own heart pounding in his chest, mistakes it for the still-beating heart of his victim. But this is a silent film, so -- instead of the sound of a heartbeat -- we see detective Lewis repeatedly tapping on the tabletop. Unfortunately, the rhythm of his taps doesn't match the steady iambic pulse of a heartbeat. More positively, there's a stand-out performance by George Siegmann as an Italian prole. Siegmann expertly emotes his prole role with just the right amount of Neapolitan gesticulation to make himself convincingly Italian, without indulging in 'mama-mia' exaggerations.Along the way to the ending, we see the ghouls mentioned in Poe's poem 'The Bells' (which had earlier inspired another guilt-stricken mellerdrammer: a stage play by Leopold Lewis, staged by Sir Henry Irving). We also see the pagan god Pan (who has little or nothing to do with Poe) accompanied by some ridiculous nappied acolytes. BIG SPOILER NOW: Oh, it turns out that the whole pesky murder (and everything that came after it) was just a dream, so Walthall is reconciled with the unmurdered Aitken, who accepts Sweet. The set dressing in Sweet's bedroom vaguely resembles a human face, but I think that's unintentional. A weird movie but definitely an interesting one, and its basic implausibility makes this story work better as a silent. My rating: 8 out of 10 just this once, but ... nevermore!

The ending is a bit far-fetched, but this is a wonderful adaptation of Poe - not just "The Tell-Tale Heart", but other writings as well. Henry B. Walthall is perfect as the obedient, loving, and dominated nephew to his kind but overbearing uncle (Spottiswoode Aiken). There is surprising violence for a film made in 1914, and several twists and turns to the plot. Griffith does a remarkable job of showing the love between the nephew and his girlfriend, Annabelle, and the agony they experience when the uncle expects them to end their relationship, as well as the heartrending stress experienced by the nephew, who wants desperately to please his uncle, who is his only living relative. Well worth watching.