Then the merest commonplace of the detective tapping his pencil in the same time—­the boy trying in vain to ignore it—­increases the strain, till the audience has well-nigh the hallucinations of the victim.  Then the bold tapping of the detective’s foot, who would do all his accusing without saying a word, and the startling coincidence of the owl hoot-hooting outside the window to the same measure, bring us close to the final breakdown.  These realistic material actors are as potent as the actual apparitions of the dead man that preceded them.  Those visions prepared the mind to invest trifles with significance.  The pencil and the pendulum conducting themselves in an apparently everyday fashion, satisfy in a far nobler way the thing in the cave-man attending the show that made him take note in other centuries of the rope that began to hang the butcher, the fire that began to burn the stick, and the stick that began to beat the dog.

Now the play takes a higher demoniacal plane reminiscent of Poe’s Bells.  The boy opens the door.  He peers into the darkness.  There he sees them.  They are the nearest to the sinister Poe quality of any illustrations I recall that attempt it.  “They are neither man nor woman, they are neither brute nor human; they are ghouls.”  The scenes are designed with the architectural dignity that the first part of this chapter has insisted wizard trappings should take on.  Now it is that the boy confesses and the Poe story ends.

Then comes what the photoplay people call the punch.  It is discussed at the end of chapter nine.  It is a kind of solar plexus blow to the sensibilities, certainly by this time an unnecessary part of the film.  Usually every soul movement carefully built up to where the punch begins is forgotten in the material smash or rescue.  It is not so bad in this case, but it is a too conventional proceeding for Griffith.

The boy flees interminably to a barn too far away.  There is a siege by a posse, led by the detective.  It is veritable border warfare.  The Italian leads an unsuccessful rescue party.  The unfortunate youth finally hangs himself.  The beautiful Annabel bursts through the siege a moment too late; then, heart broken, kills herself.  These things are carried out by good technicians.  But it would have been better to have had the suicide with but a tiny part of the battle, and the story five reels long instead of six.  This physical turmoil is carried into the spiritual world only by the psychic momentum acquired through the previous confession scene.  The one thing with intrinsic pictorial heart-power is the death of Annabel by jumping off the sea cliff.