Revisiting Surveillance and Exposure through Aging Masculinities: Fede Álvarez’s "Don’t Breathe" as a Contemporary Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’
Abstract
Fede Álvarez’s film Don’t Breathe (2016) and Poe’s classic tale ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843) present a significant number of intertextualities, which pave the way for approaching Álvarez’s film as a contemporary adaptation of Poe’s tale. Both narratives comprise pervasive references to the gaze and the act of looking, methods of invigilation and disclosure, the house as a projection of its dweller, and the relevance that age and gender discourses acquire in them. This article offers a comparative analysis of both narratives with the view to prove that Álvarez’s film reflects and subverts the dynamics of surveillance and exposure displayed in Poe’s original tale.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
Shakespeare
Adaptation
and Literary Criticism
Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature
- Volume
- 50
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 7–19
- Publication date
- 4 March 2026
- Language
- EN