Urban legends exist in every society and change with the times adapting to the new innovations that occur. An urban legend is a story that has been passed down through generations with the intention of being informative whether it causes fear or joy. The only problem with urban legends is the fact that they are so hard to be proven true. Sometimes they have actual events attached with them but are obviously false; people try to attach relevant topics to legends to make them more believable. Some examples of these are the tale of the crazed Hook man or death by tanning bed. Each was related to some kind of event that was popular but it made it more believable. The legend that has caught my eye is the tale of the Hook man because it causes fear and creates an atmosphere that is similar to a foggy night: thick and visibility is limited. The legend adds a sense of fear and anxiety, which will discussed in the latter part of the paper. The main focus is to show what causes these two emotions and how they relate to the myth. The Hook man legend is about when a couple at the local Lover’s Lane hears on the radio about an escaped mental patient. This patient has been said to be headed in the direction of their location and one hand has been replaced with a meat hook. After hearing this, the girl becomes frightened and wants to be taken home, but at first her boyfriend doesn’t want to leave. She persisted that she be taken home right away, so the boyfriend, being understanding
One of Washington Irving’s short and most famous stories ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ has become a ghoulish characteristic yet an individual might still be unaccustomed with its idiocy (Hoffman, 425). Based on the real legend of Ichabod Crane, the story reveals how he disappeared. For that reason, the story revolves around the themes of wealth, appearances, truth, warfare, supernatural, gluttony and greed. On the other hand, 'The Tell-Tale Heart ' is a short story that has been written by Edgar Allen Poe. Within the story, Poe reveals two major themes of madness and guilt whereby the narrator unable to deal with his guilt making him confess everything to the police
A short story I have recentrly read which has an incident or moment of great tension is, "the Tell - Tale Heart," written by Edgar Allen Poe. The short story can produce many different "types" of characters. Usually, these characters are faced with situations that give us an insight into their true "character". The main character of the story is faced with a fear. He is afraid of an Old Man's Eye that lives with him. The actions that this charecter or "man" - as he is known in the story - performs in order to stop his fear can lead others to believe that he suffers from some sort of mental illness. The very fact that this man is so repulsed by the old man's eye, which he refers to as "the evil eye", is reason enough to be suspicious of
The two short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” share similar and different characteristics. Both written by Edgar Allen Poe, these stories involve murder, possibly insane narrators, and weak victims. They both also contain the theory of madness and obsession. Although these stories share many similar aspects, they differ in murder justification, murder execution, and final outcome of each situation.
Jack Finney is an American author that has written many books in his lifetime, one being “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket”, a short story about a man who risked his life for his job. In this short story fear takes over this man’s body, he is faced with acrophobia, which is the fear of heights, and many other challenges. There is a lot of suspense created in this story and Jack Finney uses internal and external conflicts and cause and effect to fabricate that suspense.
Edgar Allen Poe, a master of suspense, wrote stories over a hundred and fifty years ago that remain popular today. One of Poe’s suspense techniques in these short stories are unreliable characters. An unreliable character is a character, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The unreliable narrator forces the reader to ask questions like, “Is this true?” rather than “Who did it?” or “What happened?” Poe uses unreliable characters in many of his stories very effectively to keep the reader guessing what is ultimately true. Three of his most famous stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death”. He illustrated how effective such narration is.
Bill Ellis’s, “Death by Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend, and Murder,” speaks to how cultural and societal fear can not only form and inform legend, but can inspire real world, physical consequences. These consequences are material acts known as Ostension. Ostension is the liminal ground where the narrative of legend meets personal experience. Ostension, and particularly legend-tripping, is, by necessity, grown out of the cultural source hypothesis, as both require knowledge of a legend before the experience can occur. The first stage of the legend-trip, according to Michael Kinsella in the chapter,“The Performance of Legend-Tripping,” is the telling or retelling of the narrative(s) of the site or ritual participants are about to embark
Edgar Allan Poe is an American author whose writing style, full of mysteries and macabre, has fascinated generations. However, his works are more than just thrillers and morbidities. The writings of this author often contain other themes such as companionship, family bonds, longing passion, and perhaps the strongest of these is revenge. “The Cask of Amontillado” and “Hop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs” are two short stories that certainly demonstrate a recurring theme of revenge. Poe not only presents his signature pattern of cold fate in both works but also displays the struggle of a lower social class against the higher social class to the extent that it almost hints at a call for revolution.
In the short story, the theme of fantasy versus reality plays a major role in the story, further proving its classification as psychological horror. Before the story
“Hop-Frog,” composed by Edgar Allen Poe, begins as a classic fairy tale that many are familiar with, but “Hop-Frog” takes a dark and brutal turn as the jokes and humiliation reach a certain extent. Poe introduces Hop Frog and Trippetta first as victims of the king and his seven cabinet council men; due to their physical features and status as the king’s slaves for entertainment and humor. As the reader proceeds to read the great detail given by Poe, the reader begins to understand the abnormality in Hop Frog’s thinking and actions when he becomes fed up. Hop-Frog has no intention in causing any harm or brutality, but there needs to be an end to the torture and embarrassment caused to Hop-Frog and Trippetta. Hop-Frog’s act of revenge is the act of a sane man, but this is due to the abuse of power and authority by the king and his seven council men which lead to the devastating end.
In the short story, “The Man in the Black Suit” by Stephan King, an old man named Gary retells a story of himself as a nine-year-old boy meeting the devil on the bank of castle stream. In Gary’s disturbing encounter the man in the black suit delivers some horrifying news of his mother to young Gary in efforts to eat him up. In quick haste, Gary gets away and runs into his father who did not accredit the boy’s story at first but later found himself a believer . King uses setting, point of view and language to convey to the reader his central idea of fear throughout the story.
Richard Matheson’s short horror novel, I am Legend, belongs to the “horror survival” genre, a genre which entails a protagonist’s/hero’s endeavor to outwit and survive dangerous elements that may range from grotesque fictional monsters with harmful intentions to worldwide disease epidemics. I Am Legend encompasses such horrors, told from the tale of lone survivor Robert Neville, and his endeavor to survive a post-apocalyptic world ridden with bloodthirsty vampires. But going against the horror genres usual gradient, the vampires of Matheson’s novel are not Neville’s worst threat. Even more threatening of a monster is the social isolation the vampires corner Robert Neville into. The need for sociality is often overlooked because social contact is embedded in everyday activity. But Matheson shows that, when severed from that privilege, our socially reliant nature draws forth a horror scarier than fictional monsters. Matheson focuses on such implications of isolation in I Am Legend, and subverts the Post-Apocalyptic horror genre’s meaning (or is it
Each event in one's life whether important, meaningless, joyful or sickening has an impact on that person's character. Harrowing & tragic events occur often as it was for Edgar Allen Poe which left a vast impact on his character. This author's stories focus on his wretched life and obstacles placed in the forms of stories. His unfortunate events turned into eerie, emblematic tales such as “The Raven”, “The Black Cat”, “The cask of amontillado” & more which all have twisted plot lines such as horror, sadness, revenge etc.
Nowadays, the development of technology affects the way we search for the information. For instance, stories that have been told only within families or small groups of people can now be exposed to the internet, where these stories are shared amongst hundreds of people. Urban legend, by definition, is a humorous or horrific story that people usually believe, even when there is no proof of where it started from, or of the trustworthiness of that story. Urban legends have appealed to many ranges of audiences since this genre tends to attract many individuals. For instance, college students have taken an interest towards these legends, whether they like the strange stories or the actual messages behind it. Urban legends have taught college students the themes, which are based on the reflection of their conflicts or problems that they have dealt with. The two common themes of urban legends that represent the problem that college students are dealing with are the conflicts between college students and their professors and the paranormal and horror events that occur in their life.
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” is an ingenious tale, that contains terrifyingly evocative details. In the “Tell-Tale Heart” there comes a man that committed an iniquitous crime, who constantly assures the readers that he is sane simultaneously, while proceeding to perpetrate homicide. Edgar Allan Poe applies supernatural that contains a reasonable explanation, dramatic irony, and the dangers that dwell inside a human, to reinforce the horror of the story and to uncover that humans cannot endure guilt and must eventually confess.
Edgar Allan Poe is an American poet well-known for his eerie and gothic based themes. In fact, his tales of mystery and horror were the first to give rise to detective stories. In his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), Poe invites us to experience a sinister and mystifying murder through the mind of the murderer, the narrator himself. This self-narrated tale takes place in a house that the narrator shares with an old man. The story’s focal characters are the narrator and the old man, both of whom are left nameless. It is probable that the narrator is telling the story from either prison or an insane asylum. He tries to justify his sanity; however, his actions prove otherwise. This tale revolves around the narrator 's passion to kill the old man because of his “evil eye” and the obsessed mind of the narrator who hears the beating of the dead man’s heart—solely within his own tortured imagination which causes the reader to question if the narrator is mentally sane or not. By analyzing how Poe’s early life influenced his work, I will demonstrate how Poe’s story engages readers with two widely occurring, but rarely explored elements of human experiences: a guilty conscience and the descent into madness. He takes his inner emotions to the extreme through his work and portrays the message that a guilty conscience will drive you insane. I will be analyzing how Poe’s early influences affect the