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How The Addams Family Changed the Roles of Light and Darkness
"They're creepy and they're kooky Mysterious and spooky They're altogether ooky The Addams Family!" Figure 1 - an Addams Family comic No one, I argue, has had a greater impact on the tropes of light and dark in media than The Addams Family: the resident ghouls of Central Park. First the subject of many New Yorker cartoons, then the cast of many tv shows and movie remakes, The Addams family has become a household name for generations. They are known for their love of the macabre and all things weird, and have left a significant mark on American pop culture. I believe that the reason The Addams Family was so successful is because there had never been anything quite like it before. A wealthy goth family that delights in the unusual and doesn't care what anybody else thinks? Count me in! Seriously though, this family was the first to challenge the roles of light and dark in media (more specifically the concepts of light and dark), and t...
How Midsommar Lures Audiences into a False Sense of Security with Lighting and Color
Warning: spoilers Other warning: this movie is really graphic Video: 'Midsommar' | Anatomy of a Scene Articles: 'Midsommar:' How Ari Aster and Pawel Pogorzelski Created a Technicolor Fairy Tale Nightmare The Architecture of Horror: Space, Light, and Atmosphere in Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar Midsommar and the blinding terror of ‘daylight horror’ The Unsettling Glow of Daylight: DP Pawel Pogorzelski on Shooting the Folk Horror of Midsommar Midsommar and the Terrifying Complex of Daylight Midsommar: Horror in the Light of Day These links are just a few of the articles I found when googling "lighting in Midsommar ." Other than the last one, where the analysis of the plot, I feel, is just not correct, all of them agree on one idea: that horror is significantly more horrifying when it's set in the daylight. It's been a little while since I watched this movie, but the feelings of discomfort and unsettledness have staye...
How Shading in Maus Blurs the Line Between Past and Present
Maus , for those who don't know, is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman depicting a set of interviews with his father about his experiences during the Holocaust. It is titled "Maus" because this is the German word for "mouse." In this book, the Jewish people are depicted as mice, and the Nazis are depicted as cats, as an indicator of the oppressive power dynamics that were present during the Holocaust. The whole novel is hand drawn, and is in black and white. The shading, and the lightness and darkness of the panels is able to convey the emotion that Spiegelman is trying to represent. As I was looking online for panels to analyze, I found a blog post called " An Analysis of Pastiche in Art Spiegelman's [Maus: My Father Bleeds History] ," and there were two passages in this analysis that I found particularly interesting in regards to the following panel: Figure 1 - a panel from Maus "When watching a film or viewing an image, the past is...