The Gothic in Film
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The setting of the forest plays a key role in creating the Gothic quality in the film "The Blair Witch Project" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown." In the forest, the characters in both works confront nocturnal landscapes and hallucinations, eerie voices, fires and haunted housesùconventional features of a Gothic work (Sedgwick). Far away from the familiar environment and civilization, these characters are plunged into a netherworld of existence. According to Walpole, in Gothic texts, "a god, or at least a ghost, [is] absolutely necessary to frighten us out of too much sense" (in Morris). In these two works, fear serves to be a powerful force that unleashes the suppressed and hidden emotions of the characters. Heather, Josh and Michael, the protagonists of the film, erupt in anger towards one another as they discover that they are lost in the forest. Disoriented in a world where the virtuous people he knows are engaged in evil deeds, Young Goodman Brown is seized with demoniac rage. In spite of the basic similarities between these two works, they also differ in their utilization of the forest as a Gothic space and the depiction of the characters. In "The Blair Witch Project," the reason why the protagonists enter the forest seems to be an innocuous one. Heather is filming a documentary based on a legend about witches killing people in the woods. Although they do not intentionally wander into the forest in search of evil, they lack an inner awarenes
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c when he senses that Heather does not seem to know her way. As they descend into their fear of being lost in the forest of the witches, these protagonists show that they have no moral compasses to guide them out of their dilemma.
Unlike the three protagonists in the film, Young Goodman Brown goes purposefully into the forest in search of evil. The text does not reveal the precise reason for his strange decision. However, he seeks to undermine the significance of his participation of the "evil purpose" by claiming that "after this night," he will return to his wife (Hawthorne 298). In addition, Young Goodman Brown is very familiar with the forest and his being does not disintegrate because of his physical disorientation. The foreignness of the environment does not contribute to his downfall. In the case of Young Goodman Brown, he is undone by seeing the fatade of his familiar life shattered in this nocturnal world of the forest. Apart from the unusual noises, he confronts familiar people from his life, such as Goody Cloyse who was his catechism teacher in his youth, the minister and Deacon Gookin. The fact that these people who represent the epitome of morality and spiritual have succumbed to the devil shakes Young Goodman Brow
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Approximate Word count = 2418
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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