In the horror genre, there are many concepts that can contribute to horrifying the audience. A common fear for most is the fear of the unknown or that of which cannot be seen such as what lies beyond the world people cannot see. It can raise question of what may cross the line into ghosts or "supernatural" territory. There could be tons of reasons as to why something could be portrayed as haunted. In the film The Shining by Stephen King, the Overlook Hotel calls to Jack Torrance to come back to the hotel and fulfill his duty as caretaker of that hotel. Jack's son Danny even experiences extrasensory perception within the hotel. There are several tales of angry spirits coming back to reap havoc among those who have crossed it. A tale such as this is “The Queen of Spades” written by Aleksandr Pushkin, Hermann relentlessly searches for a way to make a quick buck, even goes as far as to pull a gun on an old woman ultimately killing her. The old Countess comes forth to wreak her revenge to a greedy person. Supernatural motif is everywhere in these tales because there comes a time where one can no longer just blame the psyche of one's own mind.
In The Shining, the audience sees Jack Torrence's almost instant attraction to the Overlook hotel evidently ignoring the fact that the previous caretaker went crazy and murdered his wife and children. Jack Torrence brushes the warning off because he "believes himself to be immune to such problems" (Russell 45). The Shining has a very House on Haunted Hill feel where the hotel is a place for paranormal energy attracting the residents like a magnet. The Overlook hotel is the brain behinds the operation in attracting the one true caretaker back where belongs. In Stephen King: A Critical Companion, S...
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Rosen, Nathan. "Up the down Staircase in "The Queen of Spades"" The Slavic and East European Journal 46.4 (2002): 711-26. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2013. .
Rosenshield, Gary. "Freud, Lacan, and Romantic Psychoanalysis: Three Psychoanalytic Approaches to Madness in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades." The Slavic and East European Journal 40.1 (1996): 1-23=6. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.
Russell, Sharon A. "The Shining." Stephen King : A Critical Companion. Wesport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. 45-61. Academic Complete. Web. 15 Nov. 2013.
In the novel, The Giver by Lois Lowry, the author makes it clear through the main character Jonas that freedom and safety need to find an equal balance. Lowry shows the importance of deep emotions and family through Jonas. Jonas becomes the new receiver of memory and learns about the past. He also learned about the way it was when people knew what love was. Jonas’ father releases newborn children because they don’t weight the correct amount of weight or they don’t sleep well through the night. Release is a nice way of saying kill; the people of the community don’t know what kill means. They don’t have the freedom to expand their vocabulary. Lois Lowry makes it clear that safety has a negative side and you need that you need freedom to have a high functioning community.
The Shining and Jaws are horror films that affect the viewer on a whole new level. Instead of using clichés similar to many horror films of the era, Kubrick and Spielberg create horror films that attack viewers psychologically. Both of the films use a danger color to foreshadow eminent danger, a bone-rattling film score to induce fear, and discomforting cinematography to cause a sense of despair. Although The Shining and Jaws are already close to 40 years old, the films will continue to be some of the top horror films ever made, and even when 90,000 more horror films are made, people will remember the fear of watching these two films.
The world of The Shining is a supernatural one, a world in which ghosts are real and can directly affect the living world. Yet this Supernatural world is also intended to be rational, one with “verisimilitude”, (“Writing The Shining” pg 60). What makes the ghosts in The Shining feel real? They mimic the less literal ghosts of the real world. As Diane Johnson, screenwriter of The Shining, remarks: “To what extent supernatural forces existed and to what extent these were psychological projections was something [Kubrick and I] discussed at length, finally deciding that the ghosts and magical apparitions at the Overlook Hotel were both” (“Writing The Shining” 58). Ghosts, as the psychological projections of history and our own minds, haunt
Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” presents the audience a twisted tale of a man named Jack Torrance and his wife Wendy and son Danny, who spend a few winter months in isolation as caretakers of the Overlook hotel. This is no typical horror movie. Viewers are slowly lead though a slow film journey following the Torrance family in their moments of horror and insanity with help from bizarre events connected to the haunted Overlook Hotel.
Dystopian literature brings warning to the modern world and allows the audience to experience a new perception of life. The 1993 novel, The Giver, by Lois Lowry, fits into the dystopian genre because it makes judgment about modern society. She inscribed her novel “For all the children to whom we entrust the future”, which serves as a hope for a better future (Franklin). She targets the younger generation because they are the future. In Lowry’s novel, The Giver, Lowry’s perspective on modern society is that it tends to stay within its comfort zone, which creates limitations in life. The dystopian characteristics of the novel, importance of memory, the history surrounding the novel, and Lowry’s personal background all convey the notion that modern society should freedom bestowed it and to fully appreciate life in itself; society tends to take life’s freedoms for granted.
“The Giver” a novel by Lois Lowry (1993), is an, engaging science fiction tale that provides the reader with examples of thought provoking ethical and moral quandaries. It is a novel geared to the young teenage reader but also kept me riveted. Assigning this novel as a class assignment would provide many opportunities for teachers and students to discuss values and morals.
The book uses fictional documents, such as book excerpts, news reports, and hearing transcripts, to frame the story of Carietta "Carrie" White, a 17-year-old girl from Chamberlain, Maine. Carrie's mother, Margaret, a fanatical Christian fundamentalist, has a vindictive and unstable personality, and over the years has ruled Carrie with an iron rod and repeated threats of damnation, as well as occasional physical abuse. Carrie does not fare much better at her school where her frumpy looks, lack of friends and lack of popularity with boys make her the butt of ridicule, embarrassment, and public humiliation by her fellow teenage peers.
Initially tanking at the box office, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining garnered a cult following and high appreciation many years after premiering. The film, differing from Stephen King's original novel, lacked speed and coherence; however, fans accumulated after noticing small details that conveyed entirely different messages. The director dedicated attention to every detail, causing confusion after noticeable inconsistencies and pointless-seeming deviations from the book. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining spawned numerous discussions through multiple enigmatic, open-ended components and deep-reaching symbolism.
During our infancy mostly of us (I hope) heard about the fairy tales that help us to imagine unrealistic ways of actions. Fairy tales also help us to think more broadly to solve a problem. We are used to read, listen, or see those compositions that are always written and censored many traumatic aspects to avoid bad interpretations. The majority of the stories are simplified to target lower ages, however, fairly tales can be scary. Sometimes, we do not notice the horror behind those stories. But to a great extent of stories, the fairy tales can be scary. The Shining is one of those fairly tales, where the father tries to kill his family. It is a fairy tale that is misinterpreted; however, the film itself depicts to be a fairy tale.
For my book I chose to read The Body by Stephen King. This novel is about four young boys taking a journey to find a body somewhere in the woods that is at the county line. This story is about more than just four boys going on an adventure its about them becoming closer to each other and learning real life lessons along the way. The four boys are all going into their first year of middle school so this is a time in their life when they learn things that will help them in life.
Haunting is an adjective that simply means hard to forget or ignore. One of the first sightings of a haunting was in first century A.D. (Television, 2014) not cited correctly. A guy by the name of Pliny the Younger wrote about his early sightings in a letter which later became a part of his life account. There are many different types of hauntings. They include traditional, residual, poltergeist, and inhuman. The traditional haunting is a haunting that deals with one or more ghosts that are interactive. Traditional haunting are usually connected with an area or a person in that area (Danhausen, 2012). Most of the time the ghosts have the same type of personality traits, hobbies, and knowledge the person the used to be. Residual haunting has to deal with a certain energy that is left in a location or area (Danhausen, 2012). Residual haunting occurs when a big event happens in a loca...
Horror films are designed to frighten the audience and engage them in their worst fears, while captivating and entertaining at the same time. Horror films often center on the darker side of life, on what is forbidden and strange. These films play with society’s fears, its nightmare’s and vulnerability, the terror of the unknown, the fear of death, the loss of identity, and the fear of sexuality. Horror films are generally set in spooky old mansions, fog-ridden areas, or dark locales with unknown human, supernatural or grotesque creatures lurking about. These creatures can range from vampires, madmen, devils, unfriendly ghosts, monsters, mad scientists, demons, zombies, evil spirits, satanic villains, the possessed, werewolves and freaks to the unseen and even the mere presence of evil.
The stories setting takes place in Western Colorado. In Western Colorado in a home of a retired nurse named Annie is where the whole story takes place. Annie's home is a two story log cabin out in the middle of nowhere. The closest neighbors are miles away. It takes place in the middle of winter snow storms.
The Shining is about a white middle class dysfunctional family that suffers from natural and supernatural stresses in an isolated Rocky mountain hotel. .The father, a former teacher turned writer, is portrayed as a habitual drinker, wife- and child-abuser, with a kind of evil streak The mother is shown as a battered woman. The film suggests that due to the abuse at the hands of his father and the passivity of his mother, the child of this family developed psychological problems. He had imaginary friends and began to see frightening images.
The novel Good Omens is a satirical rendition of Armageddon in almost all aspects. The story begins with the coming of the Antichrist, brought into the world as a human infant though it is anything but. An angel and a demon, Aziraphale and Crowley respectively, and rather good friends considering their rather checkered past, have teamed up to ensure that The End is, in the very least, late. They take roles in molding the child to see both the sides of good and evil, trying to make it so that the boy will not be able to choose a side wholeheartedly when the time comes. However, when the boy is supposedly meant to start showing his powers, they realize that all their hard work had been wasted, and that this boy was an entirely normal human child. The genuine son of Satan was, in actuality, Adam Young, and was misplaced at birth into the care of two very normal parents in a very normal little hamlet in South East England. Adam grows up “not [as an] Evil Incarnate or Good Incarnate… [but] a human incarnate” (366). He is as human and innocent as an eleven year old can be; still finding himself and his three best friends provoking terror and irritation amongst their more elderly or respectable neighbours, though that is more excused as a preadolescent quirk rather than wicked. Wicked happens to be what Newton Pulsifer, a relatively newly dubbed Witchfinder Detective of Witchfinder Sargent Shadwell’s Witchfinder army, is looking for. He is given the task to search through newspapers and anything of the sort to find evidence of anything remotely witchy, which happens to be precisely what Anathema Device, actual self-proclaimed witch and descendant of the most accurate and useless psychic in history, can be found doing. Admittedly, she is ...