Tag: darkness

Movies

From Joyful Animation to Pure Tension

rovallee
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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.

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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?

Cheers,

Rosalie

Tales and Legends

Let’s Be Horrifyingly Emotional

delphinecote
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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.

Truth is, EYE think, it haunted mEYEself.

Hunted. DAY. MIDNIGHT. SUNRISE.

Time never dies.

Like a vulture’s vexed veiled eye.

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DelphineC