Samantha Kelly Horror and Sci-Fi Analysis

This week I read  A Wrinkle in Time . I watched the first Disney adaption once when I was very young and have little memory of it. The new adaption is coming out this summer and it has caused a resurgence of interest in the book. Since I have been wanting to read the book, when I saw it on the list I took this opportunity. I do not regret it! I love this story. To be honest, I did not know what to expect. My brain was filled with flashes of images from my childhood of the original adaption and from the trailer for the new adaptation. They seemed to be completely different. I was going in, not blind, but for better or worse, confused. The story took me by surprise! First of all, I did not know the story was written so long ago. That was a big surprise. The story really has held up over the years. The second surprise was at how spiritual the story was. It was riddled with allegories and metaphors for the Christian faith. The story was almost like a more modern version of Pilgrim...

JRR Tolkien’s T he Hobbit is a story I really love. While growing up, I watched  The Lord of the Rings  movies. That was my only experience with the stories until we read  The Hobbit  in my rhetoric class in junior year of high school. I do not read well aloud and I quite hated that class. But, despite having to stand up in front of the whole class and read with conviction while the teacher recorded me, which is not my cup of tea, I found myself really in love with the story. It’s the classic hero’s journey. This story arc is one that is used a lot, but it’s one that we as humans relate to and find inspiring, which is why you see it so often. We are fallible and imperfect humans longing to be something bigger than we are. This is something I think that college students relate to the most. College students, especial at Ringling, strive to be something. They are looking for their heroic journey to begin or have an epic ending.

Aunt Maria was a fun and interesting read. It was very mature for being a book written for the younger audience. Books can be written for the younger audience with the intention of trying to interest a grownup but keep important issues relatable to the younger generation in order to try and give them understating. You see this often with racial issues in kid’s movies and books. For example, I just watch the new Disney Channel movie called  Zombies . The zombies were segregated from the humans and treated poorly. As an adult, I recognized instantly what the movie was about, but to a kid it brings a complex and mature topic down to their level. This can be done very well or very poorly. I personally don’t think  Zombies  did a good job at all. But I feel that Aunt Maria did it very well. In this book, they took on the topic of divorce and sexism issues just to name a few. These are things that kids must deal with, but I think we can all agree are very complex in natu...

This week I read  A Good Man Is Hard to Find . I was listening to the audio version while working, the story was progressing and then all of the sudden it was the end. It caught me off guard! I thought “Really? That was the end?” It felt so sudden, almost like when you read an obscure Grimm’s Fairytale, and the whole story just felt so random that the ending just seemed to come out of nowhere. Confused, I did some research. I knew this story was highly respected; I must be missing something. I read a synopsis and everything seemed to click. This story is about morals. It is called  A Good Man I Hard To Find , after all.             The misfits talk about Jesus for a little bit at the end, which sums up the point of the story quite well. The whole story was building to have this conversation about right and wrong. He says that if what Jesus did was true, then everyone should follow Him and live their lives in a ...

Reading the short stories of Kwaidan was not the experience I was expecting. As an American, when someone says horror, some of the first things that come to mind are, Jason Voorhees, Insidious, and Saw. All gory and or demonic; purely created to disturb its viewers. These do not even belong in the same category as Kwaidan . Looking back, my views on what “horror” is were closed minded. Kwaidan was not gory, demonic and dark, but more like classic fairytales, similar to Grimm’s fairytales in which the stories had some sort of a moral at the end and that was the point. Classic fairytales were made to teach lessons and scare kids into doing what was right. The story, the journey, did not have to make complete sense as long as it was interesting, memorable, and had that lesson. That was the important part. That is exactly what Kwaidan is and even though that surprised me, I really enjoyed the read. I would much rather experience something that makes me think and see the ...

For this week’s reading, I decided to read Twilight . I was a huge fan of the movies when I was in middle and high school, but it has been a long time since I read the first book of the saga. It was interesting returning to a book after so many years. I had to have been in 7 th  grade the last time I read this particular book. It was not my favorite of the series, so I only read it the once.               Reading Twilight as a kid and an adult is a completely different experience. As a kid, like I said, I was a huge fan. I accepted it all, holding onto every word, like Bella’s love life was as important as the book made it out to be. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge sentimentalist and still adore these movies, although now acknowledging and even sharing the opinions of the critics. But, when reading the book last week, I was able, as an adult, to really separate myself from the book and try to analyze it for what i...

We are all familiar with Frankenstein’s monster. He is a big disfigured soul, usually green, that is so repulsive, no one would give him the time of day. I have never read Frankenstein before this point and I was surprised it was nothing like the idea of Frankenstein that I came across growing up. The Frankenstein of my childhood was always presented as the misunderstood tortured soul that the village, even with pitchforks and torches at first in hand, eventually learn to accept. But this monster I read about in the book was truly rotten to the core. Yes, he went through hardships that he did not deserve and he did not ask for the life he was given. But he surely made the decision, out of pure vengeance, to kill the people that Frankenstein held dear. I am not saying that Frankenstein did the right thing by creating the Monster and that he does not hold some sort of responsibility to his creation, but rather that both Frankenstein and the Monster are both truly monsters in their own r...