In this post, I decided to try to find and understand
how someone can turn into a human monster. There are two aspects I want to
explore with you, hoping you will enjoy it!
The first aspect that could influence this
transformation is loneliness. I think that when someone is forced to stay on
his own without seeing nor earing others, he or she might develop violent or
thoughts that are disconnected from reality. For example, in the movie I Am Legend, the main character is left
alone in New York City, due to the apocalypse that happened. Since he did not
ear nor see other people for a long time, he became really fearful and
tormented by the evil creatures that were outside his house at night. He was
constantly thinking about how he could kill or fight them, which finally lead
him to a form of madness. The proof is that when someone finally arrived with
him in New York, he rejected her immediately, even if he wished company for so
long.
Another aspect would be duality in personality. I think
that when someone tries to hide a side of his or her personality to other
people, it will surely come out eventually, maybe creating some negative
events. What I want to express with this statement is that people who have two
sides of their personality might, eventually, get tired of playing around with the
perception of others and mix both parts together, sometimes creating a human
monster. A good example of this duality would be Dr. Jekyll in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In this story,, the main character Dr. Jekyll turns into Mr. Hyde at night, who
has an evil and monstrous personality, the complete opposite of his day-time
personality. With time, his personalities come to mix altogether, changing
whenever they want. This causes evil behavior, linking him to a human monster.
I suggest you do not stay alone for too long and hide a
certain part of your personality because you might turn into a human monster! 😉
Recently, I have read several short
stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. One of them really marked me with the exploitation
of the theme of madness, and it is called The
Fall of the House of Usher. Whether you have already read it or not, I think
you will understand the extent of this particular theme.
The most important aspect of the
theme, in my opinion, is the disconnection from reality. In fact, the man,
Roderick Usher, thinks everything in his environment is constantly looking at him.
He thinks the rocks and the windows are always looking and checking out each
and every one of his actions. His fear of ending the family line leads him to
disconnect with the reality, leading him to extreme madness.
Another form of disconnection is when the narrator of the story himself is reading a story to Roderick. While the narrator reads the story, hiding his own fear and madness, Roderick keeps staring at the door, fearing the return of his wife Madeline, talking to himself. If this is not proof of disconnection with reality and madness, I do not know what it is!
I hope my little introduction to the story helps you understand how important this theme is in most of Poe’s story, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher.
I hope you understood the irony in
this statement! Of course, I am talking about the fact that what was supposed
to be cute fairy tales are, in fact, scaring children. One example of this is Rapunzel
from the Grimm brothers. The brothers are renowned for their gothic and gloomy
fairy tales.
First, I will summarize you a little
bit the essence of the brothers’ story. It is the story of a couple who are
going to have a child. To make sure the mother does not die, the husband needs
to pick up fruits that are on the other side of a wall, where an enchantress
lives. In order for them to have access to the fruits, the woman will take
their child as soon as the mom gives birth. When she takes the child away, she
brings her in a tower where no one will be able to see her, ever. One day, the
enchantress realizes that Rapunzel, the child, is helping a young man entering
the tower to spend time with her. As soon as she realizes it, she cuts the hair
of the child and plays a trick on the young man. When the man climbs on the
hair the woman had let down, she pushes him down in the rose bushes, where he
gets his eyes pierced. In the end, we read that the young man finds Rapunzel
back with their two children and live happily ever after. A quite long and
rough journey to be able to live happily ever after!
Some gothic motifs can be analyzed in
this short tale. There is the monster, of course, that is represented by the
enchantress. She is considered as a human monster because she takes the child
away from her parents to only do bad to her, in addition, to almost killing the
young man.
Another motif would be gloom,
especially towards the end of the story. When the young man gets his eyes
pierced, it is quite gloomy and disgusting for the target audience that is
supposed to be children.
I suggest you read the brothers’ tale
and after compare with the newest version by Disney, you will realize how it
was changed and how it is more directed towards the young target audience.
In Edgar Allan Poe repertory, there are a lot of pure masterpieces. One of the most popular ones is called The Raven. In brief, it is the story of an old man who fears not to see his beloved one again. One day, when he hears knocking at his door, he automatically thinks it is his wife, but there is simply nothing at the door. The next time, he hears a noise on his window and expects that there is nothing like the previous time. When he comes to the window, a raven immediately enters his house. At that point, the man only considers it as a thing.
However, a little later in the story, the man now begins to consider it as a stupid bird. This judgment is created by the fact that every time the man asks a question to the raven, it only responds by “nevermore”. This special bird follows him throughout his journey facing his biggest fear of loneliness.
More towards the end of Poe’s story, the man comes to view the raven more as a prophet and a leader instead of as a stupid bird. The man comes to see the bird as a symbol of knowledge, which influences some of his decisions.
Finally, at the end of the man’s journey, he realizes or believes that the raven he had lived with since the beginning, was the embodiment of the devil himself. The man believes that the bad things that happened in his life were entirely due to the presence of the raven, leading to this quite surprising conclusion.
I surely recommend you read Poe’s short story, The Raven, because there are so many subtilities and details, which makes the story even better. Afterward, I invite to share your impressions on the evolution of the symbolism of the bird with us!
When we think about The Jungle Book, we usually think about the animation movie that we all watched when we were younger. This first movie was released in 1967 and was based on a previous novel written by Rudyard Kipling. Last year, in 2018, a new version of this movie was released, called Mowgli.
Briefly, it is the story of a child, Kaa, that was raised in the jungle surrounded by wild animals. We follow him through his journey in adulthood and see him overcome different challenges that living in the jungle can imply. In the new version of the movie, there are different gothic motifs involved, but the most important one throughout the movie is darkness. Darkness is exploited through the use of dark backgrounds and lightings. The majority of the 2018 film is set in dark spaces of the jungle, where there is not much light, nor much life. The use of dark places obviously adds suspense and tension in the movie. Since the individuals who watch the movie do not know what surrounds Mowgli, they feel stressed and it certainly creates tension. The public is hence kept in ignorance and blindness, such that the anticipation of something bad happening builds up, which also is a gothic motif called tension.
There were certainly not that many gothic elements in the first version of the Jungle Book, but I guess we could argue that the new version represents the new generation of kids watching it as well as the older one that used to watch it as a kid in 1967. Did you ever watched the older version of the Jungle Book or you’ve only watched the new one?
In Tom Harris’
novel The Silence of the Lambs, as
well as in the movie adaptation, hubris is one of the most important motifs.
The term hubris is a Greek word referring to the importance of pride,
arrogance, and anger in one’s personality.
First, in this work,
hubris is considered as a monster and as well as an ancestral curse. Since it blinds
the mind of people who have hubris in their blood, it complicates and impairs
the well-being of the society.
For instance, Jame
Gumb is a great example to demonstrate how hubris leads to blindness. When
Clarice enters in his house at the end of the story to catch him, he thinks
that the only way to have control over her is to turn off the lights. Since he
has night-vision goggles, he thinks that he would certainly be able to escape
from Clarice without any consequences. Obviously, as ironic as it sounds, Jame is
totally blinded by his hubris. Indeed, Clarice still has control over him and
over the situation; that is, she is the only one who sees clearly.
This example
accurately shows how hubris can affect someone’s view of a situation compared
to what it really is.
Another example of
a character that has to face his hubris is Hannibal, the main character. Throughout
the entire novel and movie, Hannibal is trying to overcome his own hubris, as
well as his desire to transcend the classification of scientists. All of this
to say that hubris is clearly a gothic motif in Harris’ writings and that it is
mostly defined by blurring certain characters’ vision, making them act without
a proper consideration of the consequences beforehand.
Does every fan of gothic literature, or only of the gothic genre, know Edgar Allan Poe? If not, you should definitely read some of his works. He mostly writes short stories, each more disturbing than the previous one. So, I figured I would do something very different than what I usually do here. I wrote a poem related to The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, written in 1843. If you do not know what it is, briefly, it is the story of a young man, killing a presumably blind old man for he has a pale blue eye that frustrates him. Of course, this is a very brief summary, but you may certainly want to read the short story before the following poem.
Like a Veiled Vulture Eye
Admit it. Too loud it is.
It beats. Again and again, louder and louder.
How could they know? They did.
They felt my agony, fear filled my fearful heart
Did they hear it too? Did EYE even?
Sure like vultures they smelled it, circled it.
They found it, and death it is.
The EYE was damned anyway.
Why keep lying? EYE was dead.
Horror went away with it, him, EYE. Old man kept it.
Brought it with its last breath in the dark depth of
deep death.
Terror never left, how could it? The veil still is.
The I EYE was furious about. Not the old man. EYE
swears. Not mad. EYE swear.
In the night, he went cold, paler and paler.
EYE cannot remember. Blue
Was it how it looked like? Was it?
Pale days and dark nights. Oh yes.
Blue it was.
But he did not know.
What interest was there in it if he knew? None EYE’d
say.
EYE had secret that he ignored.
Ignorance killed him. EYE did not. Swear.
EYE lived for nothing. Out of all things nothing.
I loved the old man. I did and I do. It was only his
EYE.
Hannibal Lecter… For those who
know who this man is, does the only mention of his name give you goosebumps? What
do you feel when hearing about him if not fear? Well, maybe you think he is
somehow nice, and you feel empathy for him, but either way, Lecter is a very
interesting character, and this is why I decided to see what makes him so
frightening for most people. The novel I will take as a reference in this post
is The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas
Harris, originally published in 1988.
The first thing is that he is
in fact a very charismatic man. For example, when Clarice Starling, the
investigator, goes to the psychiatric hospital to meet with Lecter, a patient
called Miggs talks to her in a crude and rude way, which would suggest that
this man may be mentally deranged. On the contrary, during her first visit at
the hospital, Lecter is extremely polite with her, and acts like a gentleman.
Indeed, his gentleman-like behaviors make him even more scary since there is no
way someone can know whether he is “good” or “bad” without previously knowing
from the beginning that he murders people to eat them afterwards.
Lecter needs information to use
his psychological power. Without information, he is lost. This means that
without information, he has nothing. This reminds us slightly of Dracula from
Bram Stoker’s novel, right? Dracula’s power comes from the information he
obtains from the blood he drinks, or from the years he has lived. Hence, to
stay alive in this modern world, he seeks information. It is similar in the
case of Hannibal Lecter. He is indeed a surgeon, but also a psychiatrist. Psychiatry
requires a superior knowledge of how the human brain works, and also of social
behaviors, which can often be associated to different mental illnesses. Therefore,
a psychiatrist must know his or her patients in order to help them properly. The
problem in Lecter’s case is that he may be too good at his job, for he
instantly knows much information even before the person tells anything.
Moreover, once he is told some information, he is able to play with one’s mind
to make him or her do what he wants to a certain extent. An example of his need
of information is when Clarice Starling investigates the case of Fredrica
Bimmel, and for all the information he gives her, he asks for information about
her in return, despite the fact that Crawford clearly told her to avoid revealing
to him any personal information.
Briefly, if you are boring,
according to his standards, you will not last long. The issue is, we do not
know how Lecter defines “boring”. This means that there is no way we can adjust
to him to avoid being killed because we do not have any clues as to what he
considers as boring or not. Therefore, we are kept in obscurity when it comes
to Hannibal’s thoughts while this knowledge is the only thing that could
possibly save us from a horrible death. In other words, Hannibal does not need
to have a motif to kill. It does not matter to him whether we did something
wrong or not. That is, he can decide to kill someone because that person did
something he disliked, or just because a person is not entertaining enough for
him.
Finally, the previous
characteristics make him the “perfect” serial killer, but they also show that
from the outside, he is the most ordinary human being. Hence, from this fact,
another frightful thought arises: there could be a Hannibal Lecter everywhere
we go. We do not know what is going on in other people’s minds, and if Lecter
is able to hide his true nature so well, then, how many people are able to do
it too?
After reading these traits of
character, are you now scared of Hannibal Lecter? I know there are many
opinions about whether he is good or bad, and it is actually quite interesting
to see that a serial killer can make people hesitate in that manner.
Are you one of those who think he is fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad? Or neither?
Do not worry, there will not be any spoilers in this post! There will
only be brief descriptions of the movies, so maybe you can discover some you
never heard about.
I put them in the same
category because both are part of the period during which the horror movie industry
focused on torture. When watching those movies, your feelings may be hurt, but
if you are also an empathetic person, you may also have the impression that you
actually feel what those people are feeling, and this is… well, quite
terrifying.
There are seven Sawmovies, originally titled Saw (2004), Saw 2 (2005) and so on, until the last one Saw 3D: Final Chapter (2010). After seven years of inactivity, another Saw film appeared called Jigsaw (2017). The question is, were Saw movies good enough so their comeback would revive the public’s interest? The answer is that yes, it was, but even though many people went to see it, maybe the producers should have left it with the unforgettable Saw 6 (2009). Anyway, all of these are definitely worth seeing if ever you like this genre, and most interesting is that these movies raise the question: what are we willing to do to save our lives?
As for the Human Centipede, I will not even
describe it, or give the link to a trailer, because these three movies are too
horrible. And I think that the previous sentence says it all, but I could not
omit to mention it in the list, so here it is.
There are two of those, The Descent (2005) and The Descent 2 (2009), and they are both terrifying, even though in my opinion, the first one is better. If you are claustrophobic, avoid watching this movie. At first sight, the first movie does not even look like it is going to be a horror movie as it is actually quite funny. But obviously, everything changes when all six girl friends go down in a dark cave, somewhere in the middle of the Appalachian Massif. No need to say that the movie happens in an extremely confined and dark place. And most evidently, they are not alone in that cave. I would like to tell you a little bit about the second movie, but there is no way I could do this without revealing the end of the first one, so it is for you to see!
So, A Quiet Place is quite recent and very, very good. The title gives a clue about how the movie will take place: mostly in silence. Sure, the characters will talk to each other, but quietly and rarely. Why is that so? The creatures in this movie are blind, but as the movie ad says, “if they hear you, they hunt you”, meaning that their hearing is excessively well developed. So briefly, the world has been taken over by those creatures, and a family of four built their own little life somewhere in an isolated place, but they obviously had to adapt to the new life conditions in order to stay alive. From what I wrote, it seems like we saw this same pattern a million times already, but I swear, this one is really good, and I cannot tell more than that for if I do, I may spoil some important events.
I could not list some great horror movies without mentioning one with ghosts, right? So here it is. Paranormal Activity is once again a series of films with a total of six movies. The first one was released in 2007, and the last one, Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension, in 2015. It is a classic ghost series with possessed people, demons and scary paranormal activity. But who does not appreciate classics once in a while?
Finally, well, the five movies in that series are not really frightening, but still some people die. However, they are parodies of many horror movies; for example, there is always that stereotypical blond-haired and slightly dumb girl, as well as the stupid teen group of friends. Of course, like every other parody, these films are exaggerated; that is what makes them funny. The first one was out in the theatres in 2000 and the last one, Scary Movie 5, in 2013. I think that the two first ones are the best. I hope you will have a great time!
That is it for the best horror movies, but I mean, these are just a few of them. There are so many more out there. I tried to make a list with various genres, so everyone could find one that he or she likes among these. Have fun! 😊
What elements make
a horror movie a “good” horror movie? There are obviously many of them, but an
important one is the monster(s) in it. We must admit that sometimes, a horror
movie is not even that good, but the monster in it is really interesting,
either because it is intellectually superior, or just because it is
unbelievably scary. In both cases, I thought it would be interesting to mention
some of the scariest movie monsters I know about, as well as the movies they
are presented in, so we can all be scared together! There are some of them that
are quite popular; others may be less known…
The first one I will mention is Freddy Krueger. Freddy’s
character is quite complex to explain, mainly because so many movies were made
with him as the principal villain. In fact, there are seven movies, which are A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream
Warriors (1987), A Nightmare On Elm
Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), A
Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989), Freddy’s Dead – The
Final Nightmare (1991), New Nightmare
(1994)and Freddy Vs. Jason (2003). There
is even a remake of A Nightmare on Elm
Street (2010). The story of Freddy, in short, is that he was killed with
exposition to a deleterious gas, which explains why he looks like this. He was
executed because he was a serial killer, with a tendency to prey on children. But
he came back from the dead… unfortunate, isn’t it? So, he went on killing
children, often while they were asleep, which, in my opinion, makes it even
more terrifying.
The second one is Jason Voorhees.
Jason is also a serial killer, but unlike Freddy, he does not kill because he
“enjoys” it. Indeed, his motivations can be considered as more “valuable”. Jason
suffers from severe physical deformities and presumably mental disabilities.
For these reasons, he was persecuted in his childhood, most precisely at a
summer camp called Camp Crystal Lake, where his mother used to work as a cook. Briefly,
Jason killed for revenge, and to respect his dead mother’s wish for the camp to
stay closed. Does it justify his killing people? Probably not. But for a reason
or another, it does seem less troubling than Freddy’s motivations, right? In
case you would want to watch them, here is the series of films in which Jason is:
Friday the 13th (1980), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Friday the 13th Part III (1982), Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
(1984), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
(1985), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason
Lives (1986), Friday the 13th Part
VII: The New Blood (1988), Friday the
13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), Jason X (2001) and Freddy vs.
Jason (2003).
Hannibal Lecter in the movie “The Silence of the Lambs” Image Source
Ok, now let’s talk about Hannibal
Lecter. Yes, there are movies about this monster, but obviously, the books are
better, and there are four of them. Anyway, the point is to talk about the
killer. Hannibal likes to eat humans. Isn’t this a disturbing fact in itself? The
most terrifying thing about Lecter is that he is incredibly intelligent. I
mean, everyone is afraid of a serial killer, but if the serial killer is more
intelligent than the vast majority of the population… It is better not to think
too much about it. Another disturbing thing is that Lecter can actually be a
gentleman, that is, a polite and kind man, as long as you entertain him. Yes,
you read well. As soon as he will be bored with you, you may end up in his
dinner plate. If ever his character would interest you, you may find him in: The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal (2001), Red Dragon (2002) and Hannibal
Rising (2007).
One of the three brothers in the movies “Wrong Turn” Image Source
Finally, the last monsters I want to
talk about are three brothers. Indeed, it is possibly a reference to Hannibal
Lecter, because these three brothers are cannibal. We do not know much about
them, except that they were presumably patients in an asylum which is now
abandoned, and for some reason, they are still in that asylum. Since we do not
know the characters very well, the reason I mention them is because if you like
trashy horror movies, then you will surely like these ones, and once again,
there are many of these: Wrong Turn
(2003), Wrong Turn 2: Dead End
(2007), Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead
(2009), Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings
(2011), Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines (2012)
and Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort (2014).
I personally had my hands covering my eyes for at least half of each movie. 😊
This is not a long list of monsters, but it is certainly a long list of movies involving these terrifying monsters. Have fun! 😊
R&D Gothic Discoveries 