“THE TELL-TALE HEART”: BACKSTAGE TREATS FOR THE JUDGES OF HORROR

Our casting director ran her legs off trying to find the perfect actors. Only after tons of auditions, one of the candidates for the main part won our team’s heart –not only by his acting skills, but also by his charisma. Looking like a perfectly nice and warm-hearted man, he could evoke madness in his eyes, thus showing the painful duality of his character’s mind.

It was no less challenging to try to find the actor for the role of the old man. It turned out that so many elderly people (even artists!) are very superstitious - they consider playing a dead man bad luck. Nonetheless, out of some not so timid actors, we chose the perfect one with great artistic experience.  

It wasn’t just his brilliant acting, but also his perseverance and devotion that allured us. In one of the scenes, he had to be lying on a freezing cold floor for hours. In another scene, he nearly suffered an accidental bruise when the protagonist tried to rip off his limbs with a saw.

But the hardest scene for him was the one where he had to sit for quite a while in the same position, while a beam of light was streaming directly into his eye. That was really devastating, but he bravely persisted.

The two main actors, despite the quite obvious age difference, really got along behind the scenes. Moreover, they’ve spent their free time between scenes by reciting poems. They literally finished each other’s sentences and shared the common language. This is also true about all the members of our team.  

In the midst of shooting, a beautiful coincidence happened.

One of our locations was the art studio, whose owner creates really beautiful paintings. As we were dragging our cameras, flashes, and equipment inside, we came across a stunning piece of work. It was the painting of the eye of an old man! There was no doubt as to the parallel with Poe’s narration. The man in the painting even looked like the actor in our cine-book. Then we realized we were in the right place at the right time.

Our make-up artist spent tons of time making all the horror details plausible – and succeeded – the cuts turned out to be quite impressive.  

Often, we worked well into the night. Tea and coffee weren’t a lot of help.

The only salvation was the thirst for the beautiful art of horror made by the stunning narrator Edgar Allan Poe. We’ve made a beautiful cine-book for you!