The story that I chose to do is ‘The Chosen Vessel’ by Barbara Baynton. The story, originally regarded as a female gothic genre, is transformed into a psychological horror. The genre of psychological horror is a subgenre of the literary horror. It’s different from that of a horror as it doesn’t rely upon archetypal techniques such as jump scares and the use of ghostly entity to reinforce horror; albeit, it heavily relies upon the character’s fears and emotional instability to establish tension and unsettle. A psychological horror fails to build any empathy within each characters, hence evoking a feeling of distrust among the readers. I was able to construct the story by borrowing certain elements from other literary text such as Carrie by Stephen King (see the characterisation of the mother that embodies the fundamental
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Because my story is set in 1980s Australia, I would still keep the Australian bush setting because the correlation between the mental desolation of the mother and the physical isolation of her house is an ominous presence throughout the story. Finally, due to the change in context, I decided to contemporise the job roles of supporting characters to emulate the context in which it was set in, whilst being faithful to the essence of the original story. Instead of having the husband as a shearer, I decided that he should be a FIFO miner, thus keeping the elements of paternal absence throughout the story, and instead of having a boundary rider discovering the body, I would make sure that a police discovers the body of the mother and child. In essence, I’ve decided to incorporate the researched genre of psychological horror in the story of ‘The Chosen Vessel’, whist keeping the elements if the original story
Because my story is set in 1980s Australia, I would still keep the Australian bush setting because the correlation between the mental desolation of the mother and the physical isolation of her house is an ominous presence throughout the story. Finally, due to the change in context, I decided to contemporise the job roles of supporting characters to emulate the context in which it was set in, whilst being faithful to the essence of the original story. Instead of having the husband as a shearer, I decided that he should be a FIFO miner, thus keeping the elements of paternal absence throughout the story, and instead of having a boundary rider discovering the body, I would make sure that a police discovers the body of the mother and child. In essence, I’ve decided to incorporate the researched genre of psychological horror in the story of ‘The Chosen Vessel’, whist keeping the elements if the original story