SALUTATIONS! There was absolutely no feelings attached to that title. (I have had this blogpost written for a couple of days and I was just too lazy to press the "Publish" button... that's true procrastination) This week's topic was to read Edgar Allan Poe's story The Fall of the House of Usher and take five techniques that you would copy when writing your own Haunted House story.
The first one, and I think the most important, is to be vague. The human mind is a powerful tool when left to wonder, especially when it is on the topic of horror. Horror happens to be so unnatural in our default way of thinking that everything we ever hear that scares us- even just a little bit- sticks with us forever. Poe is very vague when describing the details. Not the concrete details like color or setting, he makes those VERY clear to make you feel scared or uncomfortable when reading. Instead he is vague in how the characters react. That has to be one of the scariest factors of it. Not knowing everything that surrounds you. The "human" aspect of the story, wait... it is weird to say human, makes it realistic. ALTHOUGH there are many things that are not mentioned about them. Are they ghosts? Alive people? Zombies? You don't know. That's because Poe makes those details so vague that you can believe WHATEVER you want to believe and it still fits within the story. (because the rest tends to be vague too)
Another technique Poe uses that correlates wit the vagueness is a limited amount of characters. He has 3.. 3! This leaves you with no sort of comparison on behavior. They are whatever you make of their actions and they may behave awkwardly or they may not. Again, it leave your mind in this void of "normal-abnormal" that you NEED to fill because we are human (as long as we aren't in a Poe story).
Poe's setting has a very prominent influence on the effectiveness of the story. He doesn't make it scary at the beginning, he doesn't make it sad when Madeline dies. Instead he keeps it gloomy throughout the whole story. But what is gloom?! It is darkness, mysterious, unknown. But gloom is what makes us feel creeped out when watching a scary movie or reading stupid chain letters at 3 in the morning. To be able to play with gloom can be tricky. Fright can both be evoked by gloom or create a gloomy atmosphere. Poe does a PERFECT job of being consistent and making the audience feel as if they were right there sitting in the Usher's living room.
The literary device that he used all over the story and really impacted me/the reader is symbolism. But not just with anything, with doors. The house has heavy doors, the family tomb has heavy doors, Madeline bangs on a heavy door. Okay, he doesn't use the word heavy every single time but you get the idea. Why, do you think, does Poe describe the doors constantly? TO KEEP THE DEAD IN! It doesn't have to be the dead, whatever you filled the details in with, I believe that they're all dead. Doors definitely add to the gloominess, mystery and vagueness of Poe's story.
Lastly, my favorite technique. LITTLE SENSE OF TIME! I LOVE this one! Mostly because I have horrible time perception but also because it makes everything fit together. The only instances that Poe mentions time elapse are when he says that days have passed since they buried Madeleine, and the amount of time before she "dies". This is definitely factor number 1 in the scare techniques. While you are reading you have NO IDEA how long its taking or how long they have been sitting there. And the fact that whenever he mentions time going by, he just says "several days have passed" and not, "five days later". again, its very vague and time is crazy. It subconsciously draws you in because we value time to much that thinking a lot of time went by scares us jus the same as thinking that it all happened in a short amount of time.
To retaliate, Poe is a wonderful genius that makes everyone else seem irrelevant and whatever he did was utter perfection.
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