![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Silver Screen Shivers
Aug. 24th, 2007 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilenceI know that this community is largely devoted to horror literature, and that's great, but how about discussing some films based on that literature for a change? I recently watched two wonderful adaptations of ghostly tales - The Innocents, based on Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw, and Night Of The Eagle, inspired by Fritz Leiber's novel Conjure Wife. I wrote about them on my lj a while back, but hopefully none of my lj friends on this forum will mind if I re-post my thoughts here!
( The Innocents )
( Night Of The Eagle )
What about you? What are your favourite and/or least favourite film versions of dark fiction? Do you feel that works of fiction can be improved upon by translation to the screen, or that a certain something will always be lost in doing so? Do you find that the medium of film has particular strengths or weaknesses, where this sort of thing is concerned?
I guess it's fairly obvious from my thoughts on The Innocents that I think successful adaptations can be made, in the right hands! However, such beasts do seem rather thin on the ground - though not quite as rare as successful cinematizations of comics, funnily enough. It is often alleged that fiction inspires fear more powerfully than film because it leaves more room for the reader's imagination, but I believe that a good director and script can work wonders when it comes to hinting at horrors and dealing with ambiguity.
I've often heard people also say that the distancing mechanism so vital to Jamesian horror (M.R. this time!) is damaged by transition to film, since it's too immediate and in-yer-face (by distancing mechanism, I mean the action of putting the reader in a sort of paralyzed nightmare state where they can see the danger coming from afar but can't do anything about it. The term also implies an element of confusion and corner-of-the-eye threats.)In answer to that, I would simply point any critic to the screening of the deadly video in the film Ringu, which incidentally is absent from the original novel. If that isn't first class 'hinted horror', I don't know what is!
( The Innocents )
( Night Of The Eagle )
What about you? What are your favourite and/or least favourite film versions of dark fiction? Do you feel that works of fiction can be improved upon by translation to the screen, or that a certain something will always be lost in doing so? Do you find that the medium of film has particular strengths or weaknesses, where this sort of thing is concerned?
I guess it's fairly obvious from my thoughts on The Innocents that I think successful adaptations can be made, in the right hands! However, such beasts do seem rather thin on the ground - though not quite as rare as successful cinematizations of comics, funnily enough. It is often alleged that fiction inspires fear more powerfully than film because it leaves more room for the reader's imagination, but I believe that a good director and script can work wonders when it comes to hinting at horrors and dealing with ambiguity.
I've often heard people also say that the distancing mechanism so vital to Jamesian horror (M.R. this time!) is damaged by transition to film, since it's too immediate and in-yer-face (by distancing mechanism, I mean the action of putting the reader in a sort of paralyzed nightmare state where they can see the danger coming from afar but can't do anything about it. The term also implies an element of confusion and corner-of-the-eye threats.)In answer to that, I would simply point any critic to the screening of the deadly video in the film Ringu, which incidentally is absent from the original novel. If that isn't first class 'hinted horror', I don't know what is!
