Hartman Wendling
Ben DeSantis
Fall Exam
12/20/2013
Edgar Allan Poe: 1
Two elements of horror that Poe uses in his stories are helplessness and release. A story that is Poe wrote that is mainly based off of the element of helplessness is The Cask of Amontillado. In this story, the victim is chained up and can’t move at all while the killer is slowly bricking him into a wall, which greatly demonstrates the element of helplessness and how effective it can be in a horror story. Poe utilizes this element to horrify the audience with the fact that the victim has no means of escape. Humans have a primal fear of not being able to move or do anything to prevent something bad from happening, which is why this is such an effective element of horror and why Poe decided to utilize this element in his story.
The second element of horror that Poe utilizes is the element of release. This is a very common tool used by writers in the horror genre, Poe being one of them. The element of release is where the writer ends the story with a definite ending and the reader can end the story and not think about what will happen to the killer or the victims. For example, in The Tell Tale Heart, the killer is caught by the police when they find the body under the floor boards and the killer is taken to prison, giving the reader a definite ending that the killer has been brought to justice; Poe does the same effect in The Black Cat where police catch the killer. However, in some stories, like The Cask of Amontillado, the victim dies and the killer gets away with his crime; this also gives the audience a definite ending, but not one where the killer loses.
The Thing: 5
In The Thing, the story ends with an ending that leaves the audience wondering if the monster has been defeated or will he come back to do this again. This type of ending is where the writer decides to leave out the element of release from the story; this is something that Lovecraft was very fond of doing. In a majority...