Upside Down Catacomb

LOG · WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT DOES

Two pieces from a high school English class, both drawn from Edgar Allan Poe: a storyboard for "The Tell-Tale Heart", his tale of a murderer undone by the imagined beating of his victim's heart, and an original horror short story in Poe's style.

WHY

The assignment was to write a horror story, and the extra credit was a storyboard for that week's book, "The Tell-Tale Heart".

WHAT I WORKED ON

I did the storyboard first: at the time I could barely speak English, let alone write, and the drawing turned out so good it hung on the class door for a year. Then I wrote the actual story, inspired by Poe's horror, about an archeologist's biggest discovery: "the afterlife". Reading it back, it feels like it was written by someone with a 10-year-old's grammar (I had just moved to the US with no prior English learning).

1. Upside Down Catacomb

   It was about a group of archeologists, with our main character, that venture into a catacomb to study it, but they slowly start disappearing. Throughout the catacomb the people see objects and signs that strangely resemble things from their lives, and one by one the archeologists begin to disappear. The last person, toward the end, sees what looks like upside-down framed pictures, but as he looks deeper he realizes it's upside down because it's a lens, and what he is seeing is him and his companions walking into the catacomb. As he screams, they do not hear him, forever trapped in hell.