Hey Team, It's Me

Hey,
I'm Joe. I am from Birmingham and my major focuses on film. I only repeat that after having said it in class because that is pretty much the source of my encounters with fantasy/horror. I watch a lot of movies so that is where most of my exposure comes from. And since I am from Birmingham, there are really very few local legends/ghost stories that are in any way original.

My great grandmother's house was rumored to have been haunted by Confederate soldiers (like I said, not original). Upon learning this I became scared to go over there and was creeped out the whole time I was there. I later found out that she had moved out of said haunted house before I was born which I think probably says more about me than it does the paranormal.

I have visited "Old Bryce" but the only figures I saw there were the police officers who kicked me out and called me a trespasser. They did tell me that they keep the light on in the crematory out back (which I did see) but that really seems more like an unnecessary waste of public energy than a creepy occurrence. I feel like my stories aren't very scary...

My mom also used to own the book 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey but I was just a small child when we had it so I couldn't read it and I just remember that all the pictures were conveniently blurry. It is supposed to be true, but since a lot of the class is native to Alabama, that is not really specific to me.

As I said, I am a big movie person so that is where I get most of my horror/fantasy. I like the common ones listed by other people (though I greatly prefer Star Wars to The Lord of The Rings). My favorite horror filmmaker is Hitchcock but mostly I like it when a director who is known for other genres tries their hand at horror (e.g. Coppola with Bram Stoker's Dracula, Spielberg with Jaws, and Scorsese with Shutter Island).

I thought the Clute article was interesting. I agree with the idea that these genres came about as a cultural response (Hawthorne makes this abundantly clear) but I fail to see how his four parts apply specifically to horror. As was discussed in class, they are common to all stories as they seem to be a different way of labeling the traditional model of storytelling (exposition to rising action to climax to falling action to resolution).

So far I think the short stories are cool, hopefully they stay that way.