utgard14 Neat little silent movie starring Lionel Barrymore as an innkeeper with debts that endanger his political aspirations. So he murders a wealthy traveler to get the money to pay off the debts. At first things are fine but soon his victim's brother shows up and guilt begins to overtake him. Tell-tale heart (or rather, bells), here we come. Barrymore, as always, is great. Any hamminess can be forgiven due to the style of the silent era. Boris Karloff plays a creepy-looking mesmerist (hypnotist) who plays a part in Barrymore's ultimate fate. A good picture that should please most Barrymore fans and give Karloff fans a little something interesting, too. The hallucination sequence is the highlight. My only complaint is that the boisterous music score that accompanies the version I watched doesn't fit the action on screen half the time. But I won't hold that against the film as I'm not sure if this was the original music meant to accompany the film or if it's just one of many and possibly a modern add-on. It might give you a headache, though, so watch out.

jldmp1 My objection to this is not with the story itself, but with the absolute paucity of imagination involved in converting this from play to film.You can easily count the cinematic moments - the bloody hands, the filter color changes to denote Barrymore's state of mind, the ghostly split-screen compositions...they seem to distract from the 'play' more than they amplify any notions that this is supposed to be a movie. The ideas are not worth studying or seeking out.I don't give this my lowest rating, which I reserve for those movies that offend in some way. At worst, this is ineffectual.

funkyfry Fits more properly into the category of gothic melodrama than of horror, but lately it has been distributed as horror (perhaps owing to the presence in the supporting cast of the great horror actor Boris Karloff, and to the film's gothic style). It claims to be from an Edgar Allen Poe story, but this concoction of suspicious wives and somnambulists is really little more than a rip-off of Germany's "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (which was perhaps itself a take-off on the venerable, much-abused Poe). Barrymore serves admirably as the film's central character, though he hasn't really learned good film technique yet, making his performance one in the "high theatrical" mode.

Sic Coyote I'm taking an interest in silent horror films at the moment, so far I have seen this film and Nosferatu. Nosferatu is of cause much better, with a real style and sense of horror. This movie is rather dull and boring in places although it does have points of note. The starting of the film is good introducing all the characters and the setting, but then it takes a little while to get into the plot. The murder and the lead up to it is another high point, with a good use of tinting to show where things are turning bad. The use of the sleigh bells is important to outline the bells the innkeeper is haunted by. The ending is rather short and rather unsatisfying with not enough explanation of what happens at the end. Overall not bad but not really more than average.