Supernatural Horror in Literature

ladies and gentlemen, drumroll please: the Conqueror Worm! Renowned for his might, he stands proud, devouring the wicked and the divine as you, my dear audience, bear witness to this sight. “Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” Ladies, gentlemen, and lovers of poetry; behold the wondrous and darkly disturbing mind of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was a man, born in Boston in 1809, famously known to dance with the mad and peculiar. He was a master of…

Stoker had written different types of short stories and novels, he even wrote short stories for children. “Stoker [started publishing] his stories [in] 1872, including the ‘Crystal Cup’ (1872), his first horror tale ‘The Chain of Destiny’ (1875), a collection of children’s stories Under the Sunset (1881), and his first novel The Snake’s Pass (1890), but he did not realize fame until the overwhelming success of Dracula (1897)” (victorianweb.org). Stoker was…

thinking expressed by the Enlightenment. Artistic works, in various forms, were centralized around particular themes and ideologies unique to the period. For instance, literature of the era applied emphasis to human emotion, a rejection of technological innovation, a fascination with nature, innocence, individualism, and the supernatural, among other…

were human. In this sense, Romero wanted to show his audience that the zombie catastrophe inhabits various degrees of familiarity. Through portraying the everyday as something susceptible to invasion, Romero shows his viewers that zombies are not supernatural and thus terrify us because of their eerie similarity to…

time.The narrator begins to show symptoms similar to Roderick, a flood of “nervousness which [he feels has] dominion over [him],” that he feels was a by product of the rooms gloomy furniture similar to how Roderick feels the house increases his horrors and fears. The narrator feels compelled to pace back and forth a behavior displayed earlier in Roderick. When Roderick appears at the narrator 's door and his slightly erratic behavior correlates with the odd happenings outside the house. An…

The stories of great heroes and leaders have been around for a very long time. One of the oldest works of literature, Beowulf, was recited in the 8th to 11th century in Anglish- also known as ‘old English’. The epic poem was officially written down in 700 BC, providing historical knowledge that reflects the early medieval Anglo-Saxon culture: pride, glory, and self achievement. Approximately 300 years later, Heracles by Euripides was performed. A tragedy telling the aftermath of Heracles twelve…

dichotic relationship between the mind and the body. Roderick, the mind, can not live without Madeline, the body. Once the two become separated, they both begin to disintegrate. The use of doppelgängers and doubling is a common motif within gothic literature and Poe uses it effectively to illustrate the effects of mental illness on the human…

Metamorphosis and Julio Cortazar’s short story Axolotl are not only based off of the writers themselves; they also exhibit a plethora of similar themes and concepts, including absurdism, alienation, Marxism, and magic realism. Oftentimes in fictional literature, traces of emotions exhibited by characters and events that occur within the fictional work are heavily influenced by the writer’s own dilemmas. This parallel between the writer and the fictional work is demonstrated in Franz Kafka’s The…

century English Literature exploits the theme of vampirism in order to explore an alternative concept of female sexuality and gender roles. The symbolic representation of female sexuality associated with the vampire character of Carmilla can be viewed as le fanu’s effort to embody the ideals of his society with regards to female sexuality and female emancipation and its consequences. This exploration of homosexuality was both controversial and unprecedented in English literature. Female…

Myths are written and spoken throughout history as a way for us to view how people of the past experienced the reality they lived in. In film, myths have been extensively adulterated with the use of computer-generated imagery. However, in some cases there are movies that use myths and symbolism to create imagery. The audience becomes actively engaged through a psychological connection with the use of archetypes (Chang et al., 2013). The movie Babadook is an example of an archetypal symbolism.…