Edgar Allan Poe Silent Double Feature: The Raven/The Avenging Conscience

This OUT OF PRINT edition features audio commentary on both films by Mark Redfield. THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE (1914): A young boy, orphaned at an early age and raised by his elderly uncle, grows up obsessed with the work of Edgar Allan Poe. His loneliness is only abated when he meets a beautiful young woman he calls ‘Annabel Lee’. The uncle sees the girl as a commoner unworthy of his nephew, and forbids them to wed. Inspired by Poe, the lad kills the old man and seals his body inside the fireplace. But just like in a Poe story, he is haunted by a guilty conscience, which will spur him onto even greater depths of depravity...   A year before his masterpiece The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith made The Avenging Conscience, his first – and only – horror film. For the film’s scenario, Griffith took inspiration from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, weaving in elements of the stories “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, and the poem “Annabel Lee”. Star Henry B. Walthall played the “Little Co