The Telltale Heart

            For this project, I adapted The Telltale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe. The original text is viewable here. My goal with this project was to take the base story, but add several unexpected alternate endings. I was heavily inspired by “To Be Or Not To Be,” a choice based Shakespeare game. I thought it was so interesting how the game added happy alternative endings to the main Hamlet story. I decided that I wanted to take The Telltale Heart—a scary, dark, horror story—and add happy / alternative endings to it as well. I thought, “if the main character’s goal is to stop having to deal with this creepy eye, then what other ways could that goal be reached?” What if they could help the old man heal his eye? What if they found an eye doctor?

            I also drew inspiration from the player’s guilt. I always interpreted the ending of the story as the main character subconsciously feeling anxious and guilty after killing the old man—the sound at the end being their own heartbeat. In the original story, they also hear the heartbeat before the old man dies—right when they are about to go into the room to kill him. I see this earlier sounding of the heartbeat as a warning to not kill the old man. The main character obviously does not heed the warning, but what if they did? What if they decided not to leave the house with blood on their hands? There are so many chances when they could leave—when the old man moves in his sleep, when he wakes up, when he groans, etc. What if the main character took one of these many opportunities?

            While I am very happy with how this project went, I will concede that The Telltale Heart was not my first story choice. I originally wanted to tell the tale of The Golem—a clay monster built by the chief Rabbi of Prague to defend the Jewish community from anti-Semitism. As a Jew, the myth of the Golem really stood out to me as an interesting story to adapt. But the more I thought about it, the more complicated it got. Because the story dealt with anti-Semitism, I had to make sure that my adaptation had a strong, meaningful political message. And the more that I thought about it, the longer the story got, until it was outside the scope of this project. I decided that it would ultimately be better to work on a different story which I could make a fuller adaptation of, instead of creating an incomplete adaptation of a story that I connected to on a deeper level. I may revisit the story of the golem someday, in a future game instead.