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Analysis Of The Castle Of Otranto By Horace Walpole

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Defining the horror genre’s components down to its most basic mechanisms is key to understanding and exploring the genre as a whole through the lens of Animation. Tales we would usually regard as ‘horror’ were mouth-to-mouth folklore featuring dark undertones meant to teach children morals and discipline them through fear of the unknown and grotesque unfortunate consequence. As such, death and the finite existence has always been a theme of the gothic. Cornwell notes, “…the cultural revival of the term, particularly in a literary sense, is generally viewed as developing in a reverse direction, from west to east…” (Cornwell, 2001, 38). This is true when observing the first recorded ‘gothic’ novel: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole written in 1764, later adapted into animated form by Jan Švankmajer in 1977. …show more content…

What is interesting however is the powerful threads of curiosity which run through even the earliest gothic adaptations and media. The mysterious atmosphere and implications of supernatural entities act alongside our aforementioned ‘morbid curiosity’ to create the intended effect of horror. Our unconscious curiosity then becomes a tool of terror, one that delights in playing with expectations and “…gives shape to concepts of the place of evil in the human mind…” (Mcandrew, 1979). Coupled with Švankmajer’s unique style and Walpole’s pioneering take on the gothic, we are greeted with a much more potent form of horror: one that unabashedly taps into the psyche and concepts of psychological terror which will be later discussed in this

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The well-known director Tim Burton has been appealing audiences all around the world by creating creepy and mysterious feelings while also satisfying his audiences with fun childlike plot lines. Burtons style is shown throughout his many movies such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Edward Scissorhands and Corpse Bride. These movies and many more show the directors style as being creepy and mysterious, but also makes it enjoyable for children and families to watch. With the use of cinematic technique Tim Burton is able to create his spooky and addicting style. In the movies above, cinematic techniques are used through and through to portray that creepy, mysterious and dark style that Burton has conveyed through his many movies and Claymation's.

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“What is the Gothic? Few literary genres have attracted so much critical appetite and opprobrium simultaneously.” (Wright.p.1) is the first line in the Gothic Fiction, Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism by Angela Wright, published in 2007, which opens a lot of questions and doubts about this movement. The literary movement focused on terror, death, decay, chaos, ruin, and passion over rationality and reason grew in response to the sociological, historical, psychological and political context. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the world witnessed the rise of gothic literature, a new movement, also known as an anti-transcendentalist movement.

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Bram Stoker, describes one of the verbal taboos of the Victorian era, violence, through the representation of vampires as “monsters” through the point of view of their victims in his novel Dracula. Stoker portrays violence in three distinct categories- physical, visual and psychological. Each one of these categories is described by one of the antagonists in the Novel, with Count Dracula as the physical aspect of violence, his underlings, the female vampires as the visual and Renfield, the patient at Dr. Seward’s mental asylum, as the psychological aspect of violence. This essay looks at the portrayal of such Categorical violence as different renditions of a “monster” and considers why Stoker would segregate violence in such a manner.

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Have you ever read a story that causes chills or your emotionally invested in a character. The story’s Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The mysteries of udolpho by Ann Radcliffe are literature that are centered in fear. These story’s cause suspense or has ghost or some type of monster. A gothic is a great example of fear in literature. The settings, characters, and story line has a way of making the reader invested by hooking to their emotions.

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Gothic fiction has been around for centuries and many great works were created with gothic fiction being the main role. “The Vampyre” by John William Polidori is amongst one of the most famous works under the gothic fiction genre. In “The Vampyre” reflects several themes which also reflect current real life problems and issues of the 19th century. Those themes that are going to be discussed are time and place, power, sexual power, the uncanny, the sublime, crisis, and the supernatural and the real.

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Zofloya, or The Moor: a novel between the female and male Gothic traditions This thesis centres on Charlotte Dacre's scandalous novel Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) and aims at providing evidence of its embracing both the male/horror and female/terror gothic traditions by discussing the opinions of some of the most influential critics. The thesis begins with a biography of the author and an overview of Gothic literature and its most recurring elements. Furthermore, we will explore the differences and points of convergence between Zofloya, Lewis's The Monk (1796), and Radcliffe's The Italian (1796) in discussing the two main English gothic writers of the nineteenth century, Matthew Gregory Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. Dacre's novel demonstrates, in fact, a perfect harmony between Radcliffe's terror approach and Lewis' horror style.

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Influenced heavily by such texts as The Bible, the works of Shakespeare, sermons and graveyard poetry, the Gothic is a genre that is laced with both horror and history. It is a genre that includes topics on taboo subjects such as gender inequality, ‘lust, murder, incest, and every atrocity that can disgrace human nature’ . Therefore Gothic novels were not typically received well within a religious and patriarchal society; this did not stop Walpole, Lewis, Bronte, Dickens and the many other authors of Gothic texts. Within these texts there is a consistent theme of madness, especially in women, but what does it mean to be mad in Gothic novels and does gender really play a part in madness or is it all just coincidental? The definition of ‘madness’

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“ The Fall of the House of Usher “ by Edgar Allan Poe is a short story about a man named Roderick Usher who initiates some events such as evoking his friend The Narrator as a protagonist to the dreadful mansion. The images such as the house and gothic ambience are used to reinforce the idea of giving the mystery to the reader. Edgar Allan Poe uses gothic elements to show how they affect the atmosphere and the characters. In the beginning , the gothic atmosphere of the house is indicated with terrifying images such as “ dull, dark and soundless ” that the feeling of horror vaccinated into reader by the thoughts of the narrator.

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This unsettling evokes some of the key features of the Gothic, such as the use of phantasmagoria, transgression, and excesses, all of which disturbed the reader by surrounding them with dark reflections of a reality portrayed through fiction. Pacts with the devil to obtain one’s desires, monks and aristocrats who revel in luxury — even if this means they must stain their hands with blood —, vampires and mad scientists: all corrupt one’s morals, all corrupt the false appearance of serenity. Likewise, the female vampires who torment Jonathan Harker disturb the harmony of the domestic sphere and unsettle the delicate balance between the private and the public domain. These vampiric women are marked by heightened sensuality and tacked to other fatal women that permeate art and European literature at the end of the nineteenth century. In this novel, fear and desire are often confused, a clue modern anxieties surrounding desire toward sensuous but degrading bodies.

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Gothic films are at once very easy and very difficult to categorise. Within the wider context of the “horror” genre, gothic films are linked directly to the literary gothic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Horror film fans would counter that the Goth genre bravely faces issues such as death, mortality, mystery, cruelty, violence, insecurity, guilt and loneliness head on. Films from the post punk moment in the 1980s and 1990s include Edward Sissorhands, The Hunger and The Howling. Following a long tradition of Romantic art and literature,melodrama, phantasmagoric theatre and expressionism, gothic films have a recognisable mise-en-scène based around characters, settings, familiar visual signifiers.

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In conclusion, Stephen King has become one of the masters of the horror genre, along with H.P. Lovecraft. King has managed to scare generations of people through the words that he has typed out on paper, and continues to do so since 1974. He is known for creating massive worlds that contain so much detail that it is as if the world is real, along with the horrors in it. These horrors that King creates, along with other horror stories that various authors’ have written, are possibly just a way to make people feel better about the problems in their personal lives; in King’s book, Danse Macabre, King suggests just that by saying, "we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools --to dismantle themselves" (Danse Macabre 13).

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The characters of the vampire and the zombie are considered two figures of disguised human in many popular fictions and both of them are considered big icons of gothic and horror fiction. For a better understanding of these two figures, we shall firstly analyze the prototypical characteristics of the genre where these characters usually appear. The Gothic was a literary and artistic response to modernity that emerged in the late 1700, at a time of political and intellectual ferment and that looked backward to pre-modern, pre-industrialized civilizations; this is a genre that turned principally into today’s horror fiction and possibly into some crime and fantasy literature. Gothic fictions are usually characterized by the presence of a general

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A classic element of gothic fiction typically involves a threatening atmosphere and it is very important that this is not just part of the background, but forms a crucial part

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This affected his composition and actually, the English Gothic novel began with his 'Gothic story '; 'The Castle of Otranto '. Fundamentally, a Gothic novel is said to incorporate sorcery, riddle, heavenly, uncanny and tension. The interpretation of a Gothic novel contrasts from reader to reader. A Gothic work is to have a unquestionable mixing of remote setting, destroyed strongholds, dilapidated houses, mazes, cells, dull halls, cellar, moonlight, candles, winding stairs, fierce interests, inbreeding, odd fixation, and condemnations. This sort makes sentiments of agony, riddle, dread, tension since their point is to investigate humankind 's dull side and question humanity about what is great and underhandedness, address what part the powerful shows, and experience dread or fear.

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