Emma Fisher Horror in Film and Literature Dr. Eldred November 13, 2012 Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens “It will cost you a bit of effort...a bit of sweat and perhaps…a bit of blood…” Hutter set out on his journey to Count Orlok’s castle after being told this by his employer. Count Orlok is the film adaptation of Dracula in the 1922 German film Nosferatu. Nosferatu is a silent film loosely based on the novel Dracula. The adaption was unauthorized leading to change in character names. However, the authorization did not contribute to the several other changes.
Explore the ways Shelley uses setting to contribute to the gothic concept of the novel. Shelley uses setting as a vital contribution to the gothic concept of the novel; Mary said “The very room...he glassy lakes and the high Alps beyond”, would be the pivotal settings in her novel. Shelley knew from this stage that exterior and interior settings would be significant; interior “dark room” which refers to Victor’s laboratory of “filthy creation” in Chapter 4, an epitome of the gothic genre revealing a sense of darkness and seclusion mirroring the eponymous character Frankenstein. The idea of the lake and high Alps can be observed as being influenced by the Romantic poets, Percy and Wodsworth on nature being a restorative agent. Hence Shelley’s use of the exterior setting of the Arctic, which unravels the framework of the novel through epistolary form.
The setting of 'The Red Room', 'Lorraine Castle', is extremely typical of the Gothic genre. Castles are generally large, dark place, and the reader knows the Red Room to be situated in a castle like this, as the narrator is given a rather long list of directions before he encounters the Red Room. The passageways almost seem to lead him underground, so far into isolation that even if he were to need help, it would not be available. Used in 'The Red Room', the setting creates a foundation of mystery and the possibility of ghosts, or a supernatural presence. As the initial room the narrator finds himself in is not described in great detail, much emphasis is put on the Room itself.
“Edward Scissorhands” the story of a Frankenstein like creation (Edward) that is taken into a town that is stuck a blatant suburbia and lets it experience his innocence and changes. It starts of well for him but ends in a mob chasing him. This is a Tim Burton film so he brings in all of his flair and over stressed elements that make all of his film very recognizable. The non-diegetic sound in the movie is what first brings us in. It is eerie music effects the mood throughout the movie.
Victor lived in a gothic area, Europe – Switzerland and Germany with old buildings, dungeons, towers, dark laboratories. It sure was an element of mystery and gloom. Shelley had Frankenstein wandering the streets of Ingolstadt and the Orkney Islands looking for body parts. That is awful and revolting. In preparation for his monstrous experiment Victor scours charnel houses, places for vivisection and graveyards, for these parts needed to create his new Adam or modern Prometheus, which is the novels subtitle.
In 1764 Horace Walpole combined horror and romance in his novel The Castle of Ortranto. He effectively created the gothic novel. Tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femme’s fatales, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters demons, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, wandering lew, and the devil are all characters included in Gothic fiction. As I mentioned, Gothic literature contains Byronic heroes. Byronic heroes were used to describe Lord Byron by his jilted lover, Lady Caroline.
Gothic has been described as “excess: excess in moral terms, excess of realism into the supernatural, [and] formal excess” (Becker, 1999:1). Discuss this view of the Gothic mode in specific relation to The Castle of Otranto, and M.R. James’s stories. When Horace Walpole published his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, he became the first author credited with changing the meaning of the Gothic genre forever. With his tale of corrupt patriarchy filled with mystery, romance, and tragedy, Horace Walpole bridged the gap between the wantonly romantic and the excessively realistic (Scott 11); filling the space with dark settings, stark characters and tangled narratives.
The Uses of the Gothic in “The Bloody Chamber” “And, ah! His castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate [...] that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place” (Carter 13) Gothic fiction has begun its battle of finding a place in literature with British writer Horace Walpole, whose remarkable novel, The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, succeeded in establishing of a new genre, of a new literary tradition that involves castles, lofty towers, darkness, fear, torture, women in distress, and everything that causes terror in the eyes of the reader. The new genre was imitated throughout the years and this Gothic stream became so broad that it experienced an abrupt increase in popularity especially at the beginning of the twentieth century. Due to the flourish of the film market and mass media of the time, this admiration for horror texts continued even after World War II.
An appropriation of Bram Stokers “Dracula”, Nosferatu explores the concept of the traditional monster with a hideous physical appearance and a motivation to kill driven by the need for survival, a vampire. Heavily influenced by the German Expressionist movement, much of the film is shot in low-key lighting to create a mysterious and eerie tone throughout. Murnau uses special effects such as stop-motion to give the impression of a supernatural speed of time passing when Hutter is on the carriage ride, this suggests a demonic
In this sense, I would like to contrast and compare the two pieces of writing mentioned above in order to reach an idea of the different elements that compose the Gothic genre characteristic of the Victorian period, such as the setting, the dark atmosphere, and the fear and horror feeling, and the new ones that were added when introduced the ghost stories narratives, such as those of orphan children, the supernatural and the past, among some others. In both, The Turn of the Screw and The Old Nurse’s Story, the past becomes a focus of anxiety and the story itself a way of anchoring the past to an unsettled present in a continuum of life and death, which is a characteristic feature of Ghost Stories. Ghosts in the Victorian period were images of the lost past which threatened us, but which could be used to confront the demons of guilt and fear, as we can see in both of these stories, on the one hand in the case of James’s Governess and in the other hand in the case of Miss Grace Furnival. Comparing these stories, we can observe that both are pretty similar in content, this may be due to the influence that Charlotte Brönte and Elizabeth Gaskell, who was Brönte’s biographer, displayed on Henry James’s writing. In both stories we