— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 27, 2019
In the middle of the Pacific on a dark and starless night, George and his mate encounter an old man who tells them the frightening tale of what happened to him and his lovely fiancée.
The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson#free scary #storieshttps://t.co/hU1l74S8rXpic.twitter.com/Nx26nh796o
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 28, 2019
Something strange is going on in Bellingham’s room, and rumors abound that he has brought back something from Egypt, something in a sarcophagus, something supposedly dead yet not quite dead…
Lot No. 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle#free scary #Storieshttps://t.co/nxbr4pAXqnpic.twitter.com/ZCrSBhmcQj
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 29, 2019
Lord Manfred is determined to subvert the prophecy that claims his family will not inherit the Castle of Otranto by marrying the lovely Isabella: will she escape the destiny he plans for her?
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole#free scary #storieshttps://t.co/rXFOTJQs4wpic.twitter.com/h2wG3JLqft
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 30, 2019
All these classic stories, novellas, and novels are in the public domain,
legally available free in their entirety online or as free ebooks
(1-31 October 2019)
A young woman is hired to be governess to two orphans at an isolated English country house. When she sees ghosts, she’s determined to protect her charges. Can she save them? Or has she gone mad?
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James #free#storieshttps://t.co/g4V39AgGJbpic.twitter.com/RIwd6fh9ZW
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 1, 2019
One evening during Carnivale, Montresor decides he must take a revenge against Fortunato for the thousand injuries borne him. But can Montresor carry out his heinous plan?
The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe #Free Scary #Stories@Poestorieshttps://t.co/Om0jsdKbp7pic.twitter.com/b7MCKvLmA4
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 2, 2019
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 3, 2019
Late at night in a deserted wood, schoolmaster Ichabod Crane unexpectedly confronts the Headless Horseman. Surely, someone is playing a joke on him.
by Washington Irving#Free Scary #Stories@everywriter
(Headless Horseman & Ichabod Crane, by John Quidor)https://t.co/JuBh6bLpRNpic.twitter.com/OERA7x4f1g
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 4, 2019
Peyton Farquhar is about to be hanged after soldiers discover him tampering with a bridge. As the rope drops, he falls into the river below: can Farquhar escape his fate?
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce#Free Scary #Stories@everywriterhttps://t.co/zD5k7z8K8cpic.twitter.com/8QduILtbFJ
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 5, 2019
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 6, 2019
Dr. Jekyll works all night in his laboratory, and the servants hear such strange cries, but after the cruel Mr. Hyde keeps showing up, they get truly scared.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson#Free Scary #Storieshttps://t.co/TUKPQTS7uDpic.twitter.com/dQV7WzGr07
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 7, 2019
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 10, 2019
When a Transylvanian Count settles in Victorian England, the lives of Jonathan Harker & his fiancée Mina are turned upside down by the (totally non-sparkly) undead nobleman who wants Mina for himself.
Dracula by Bram Stoker#Free Scary #Storieshttps://t.co/ap4UznnEW2pic.twitter.com/qVfrs0x2TL
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 11, 2019
In the midst of Plague, Prospero throws a masked ball for the followers who have walled themselves in his great palace, but what stranger dares dress himself all in red?
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe#Free Scary #Stories@everywriter https://t.co/aBTAFIAFLfpic.twitter.com/VVR0l7abfM
— Dr. Alexandria Szeman Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 12, 2019
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 17, 2019
When Laura meets the beautiful Carmilla, they immediately have romantic feelings for each other, but what’s causing Laura’s mysterious blood loss?
Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu#Free Scary #Storieshttps://t.co/DcaSIDBm9p@UniofAdelaide
Art: Simeon Solomon’s Sappho & Erinna pic.twitter.com/i4qA17DdqF
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 18, 2019
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 19, 2019
When the Minister comes to church wearing a black veil, his congregation is upset: what secret forces him to hide his face, & why does his veil clutch at their own hearts?
The Minister’s Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne#free scary #stories@everywriterhttps://t.co/gM5WXq91E5pic.twitter.com/8h2IsCBuN7
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 20, 2019
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 27, 2019
In the middle of the Pacific on a dark and starless night, George and his mate encounter an old man who tells them the frightening tale of what happened to him and his lovely fiancée.
The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson#free scary #storieshttps://t.co/hU1l74S8rXpic.twitter.com/Nx26nh796o
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 28, 2019
Something strange is going on in Bellingham’s room, and rumors abound that he has brought back something from Egypt, something in a sarcophagus, something supposedly dead yet not quite dead…
Lot No. 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle#free scary #Storieshttps://t.co/nxbr4pAXqnpic.twitter.com/ZCrSBhmcQj
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 29, 2019
Lord Manfred is determined to subvert the prophecy that claims his family will not inherit the Castle of Otranto by marrying the lovely Isabella: will she escape the destiny he plans for her?
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole#free scary #storieshttps://t.co/rXFOTJQs4wpic.twitter.com/h2wG3JLqft
— Dr Alexandria Szeman: Award-Winning #Author 📚🖋🎃 (@Alexandria_SZ) October 30, 2019
Usually considered to have originated with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was subtitled “A Gothic Story,” Gothic fiction is literature that attempts to combine elements of romance, mystery, and horror — without becoming either too fantastic or too realistic. Initially featuring decaying castles, curses, ghosts or other supernatural creatures and events, madness, murder, and “oft-fainting heroines,” Gothic fiction was hugely popular entertainment.
About a generation after Walpole, Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding Gothic villain in her novel A Sicilian Romance: a tempestuous, moody, sometimes secretive, and extremely passionate male who usually encounters a heroine that completely upsets his life. Later this type of “villain” would be called the Romantic era’s “Byronic hero.” Radcliffe also introduced more independent heroines to Gothic fiction with her bestselling The Mysteries of Udolpho. Though Radcliffe’s heroines are still pretty helpless and faint far more than anyone I’ve ever encountered, they inspired “gothic feminism” which critics claim the author herself expressed as “female power through pretended and staged weakness.” Further, Radcliffe changed the infant genre of Gothic fiction by introducing the “explained supernatural,” where all the apparently supernatural events, from ghosts and moving furniture to strange knocks and cries in the dark, turn out, eventually, to have perfectly reasonable, natural explanations.
Gothic fiction and its various, evolving components spread into the literature of the Romantic era, appearing in the poetry of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, and Poe. In the Victorian era, Gothic elements were more prominent in fiction, and are found in the work Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Bram Stoker (Dracula), Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), and Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre).
Many of these Victorian authors added strong moral elements to their Gothic fiction, producing novels that questioned everything from man’s relationship with newly developing technologies and medical advances to man’s responsibility for feeding and educating the poor. Gothic literature became more than entertainment to pass the long hours of a dark and rainy night: it explored the meaning of life, morality, social responsibility, and man’s relationship to the Divine.
As Gothic fiction spread to authors in America, especially in the South, it became a sub-genre called Southern Gothic. Authors like Faulkner, Caldwell, McCullers, O’Connor, Capote, and Percy examined family relationships, sexuality, poverty, race, and the Southern myths of an idyllic antebellum past. Southern Gothic is filled with
deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters… ambivalent gender roles, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence.
With its particular focus on the South’s history of slavery, Southern Gothic became a vehicle for fierce social critique.
Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic of both American fiction and Southern Gothic. A coming-of-age story set in the fictional “tired old town” of Maycomb, Alabama from 1933-1936, during the Great Depression, the novel examines everything from family relationships and mental health to societal responsibilities, poverty, violence, and crime. The 1962 film version, adapted from the novel by Horton Foote, eliminated some of the novel’s childhood adventures to concentrate on the aspects of its storyline that make To Kill a Mockingbird so important to American literature and film: the ugly and intractable racism between whites and blacks, a bigotry and intolerance that still exists over most of the country.
The film’s (unseen) narrator looks back on her six-year-old self and on the events that changed her from an innocent to a more mature child. In 1933, Scout (Mary Badham) and her brother Jem (Phillip Alford) live in Maycomb, Alabama with their widowed father Atticus (Gregory Peck).
Together with a visiting neighbor, Dill (John Megna, modeled after Harper Lee’s lifelong friend Truman Capote, who spent summers next door to the Lees with his aunts), Scout and Jem roam around the neighborhood and create their own adventures.
Atticus agrees, but despite his attempts to shield his children from the consequences of his decision to represent a black man in a racially charged crime, Scout and Jem soon become involved in the racial “war” brewing around them.
In particular, the father of the ostensible rape victim, Bob Ewell (James Anderson) tries several times to intimidate Atticus into quitting the case. When that doesn’t work, Ewell threatens violence against Atticus and his children.
Though the children continue to find “gifts” in the hollow of a nearby tree, these gifts and their former adventures pale in significance to the events surrounding the crime concerning Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell.
By the time the trial starts, most of the town is divided and angry. Though Atticus warns his children to stay away from the courthouse completely, Jem refuses to be barred from the biggest event in the county, and Scout refuses to be left behind at home if Jem and Dill are going to the courthouse.
Judge Taylor presides as the District Attorney (William Windom, in his film debut) badgers witnesses and makes his opinions about Tom Robinson’s guilt clear. Despite the fact that viewers can have no doubt whatsoever about the jury’s eventual verdict, the courtroom scenes are intensely riveting, especially when Atticus cross-examines Mayella herself.
Though the verdict is not in question, Mayella’s father, angry at the Atticus’ not-so-subtle accusations of incest and child abuse, provokes Atticus repeatedly in an attempt to draw him into a physical confrontation. Then, he decides to provoke Atticus by going after his children.
Nominated for 8 Academy Awards, To Kill a Mockingbird won three Oscars:
Best Actor for Gregory Peck, Best Adapted Screenplay for Horton Foote, and Best Art Direction (set design, Black-and-White).
Everyone should see this film, though children under 12 may need to be cautioned about the subject matter and the language as this film deals openly with rape, clearly suggests incest, and uses language appropriate to the time and place of its story.
Be sure to watch the black-and-white version of To Kill a Mockingbird, not the colorized one: those who colorized it obviously completely missed the symbolism behind the story’s being filmed in black-and-white instead of in color. Available for rent ($2.99-3.99 SD/HD) from Amazon,iTunes,YouTube,GooglePlay, and Vudu.
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Copyright 2012-2022 by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman, Ph.D. All rights reserved. No content may be copied, excerpted, or distributed without express written consent of the author and publisher, with full copyright credit to the author. Please, don’t support the piracy of Intellectual Property.
