Josh Lucas to Rip the Heart Out of Poe Short Story

Josh Lucas (Sweet Home Alabama, Glory Road, Hulk) has signed on to star in Tell-Tale, a supposedly "contemporized adaptation" of Edgar Allen Poe's famous short story, The Tell-Tale Heart. The film will be directed by Michael Cuesta, who has mostly seen work in television with Six Feet Under and Dexter.

Can't picture Lucas as a murderer? Yeah, me neither. Evidently that won't be a problem, as Lucas will be portraying the recipient of a heart transplant, the potential victim of a killer, as well as a single father. Confused as to how any of this relates to Poe's dark story?

Enlightenment awaits you after the jump. While claiming to be inspired by Poe's source material, Tell-Tale is described as a psychological thriller about a single father who has recently received a heart transplant. His new heart "leads him on a frantic search to find the donor's killer before a similar fate befalls him."

Now, while this sounds a little ridiculous for a thriller (how is the heart going to lead him anywhere? Beat in morse code?) I wouldn't have a problem with the movie on its own. But I take exception to it because they're attaching this to one of Poe's classic tales (and a personal childhood favorite – yeah, how weird was I?).

That story is about a man driven to murder his elderly roommate by an irrational fixation on and abhorrence of the old man's one clouded, vulture-like eye. After dismembering the body and hiding it under the floorboards, he receives a visit from the police, and though they suspect nothing, the man begins to hallucinate hearing the dead man's heart beating, distressing him to the point of confessing to the murder.

So what do these two stories have in common? Practically nothing. C'Mon Hollywood, if you're going to look to Poe for movie ideas (and why not? he wrote some pretty good stuff) how about being just a little more faithful to the source material?