To Kill A Mockingbird Book And Movie Comparison Essay

Stephen King, the master of horror in literature, once said “Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different”.This brings to question how horror differs in novels and films.
For a long time, reading books and watching movies has been a common interest of both teenagers and adults. We not only watch movies and read books about comedy, romance, adventure, and drama; we also crave horror. We can trace the literary genre of literature all the way back to the 1200s. At the time, horror was considered witchcraft. Although the practice was feared, it also created a great deal of intrigue and thrill amongst audiences. Horror at the time was usually linked to religion, especially in regards Satanism
and it gained popularity on stage. Fast-forwarding to the 1700s, gothic novels typically involved vampires, skeletons, ghosts, and other non-human beings. Around the late 1800s gothic novels evolved into horror, psychological thrillers, and gore. Then, in the late 1800s - practically as early as film gained popularity - filmmakers started showing interest in the macabre. However, it was only until the 1930s that the term horror came into film.
As one of my film production teachers once taught me, horror is amongst the most lucrative and best-selling genres in the entertainment industry. For these reasons, both filmmakers and authors find techniques to improve this genre. All horror films and novels try to accomplish the same goals: tease the audience with suspense, and scare them. However, despite the fact that horror novels and horror films are similar in many ways, they are also surprisingly dissimilar. Let’s compare a few differences between the novel Carrie by Stephen King and the film Carrie directed by Kimberly Peirce (based off of the Stephen King novel). Peirce’s motion picture is told in a clean, linear way; it starts with Carrie's birth, then jumping forward to the traumatic day of her first period, prom. This establishes a clear storyline, with a beginning, middle, and end. Stephen King’s novel is non-linear, switching between the past and the present. The director of the film likely chose to make the story linear given that the original organization would have been difficult to adapt, as it is arranged into omniscient narrator sections, newspaper excerpts that report deaths, a witness testimony, and two books; one written by an advocate of telekinesis and a memoir written by one of the survivors, Sue Snell. In the film, Carrie does not have the capacity to communicate telepathically. In King's story, Carrie's capacity to get into individuals' heads appears in a few ways. For example, when Tommy asks her to prom, he is overcome by an unusual sensation in which he can feel Carrie's excitement and uneasiness. Unless there were some kind of voiceover that narrated the character’s thoughts, it would have been extremely difficult to illustrate the fact that she has telepathic abilities.
In the film, Carrie's dress is made of pink silk which contrasts strongly with the pig’s blood that gets poured on her at prom.
In the book, she wears a red velvet dress. It is a symbol of foreshadowing rather than a perfect canvas for blood. Peirce likely chose to change the color of the dress given that visuals are most important in film. It is rather uncommon for a film to use foreshadowing through visual details, as they would usually go unnoticed by the audience. For instance, in the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the flowers and birds hold no significance whereas in the novel they give away a lot of information regarding important ideas and
themes. One of the most obvious differences between horror told through movies as opposed to novels is that in novels the plot is told through words, while in film it is seen on the screen. This very much influences how the story is told, as the different form of communicating influences how ideas are portrayed. In novels, authors emphasize imagery and descriptions in order to successfully make the reader get into the protagonist’s shoes. In horror movies, filmmakers make use of their resourcefulness to effectively show the audience the real gist of the movie. In order to catch the audience’s attention and successfully communicate the storyline, film producers and directors use their different resources to create quality films. Asides from using the most novel sound systems and high quality graphics, they also cast professional actors and actresses to play the roles and shoot the scenes in meticulously selected locations. Additionally, the film’s budget has a huge impact on the overall quality of the film. Nowadays with massive budgets and demand, film directors cannot hold themselves back from casting only the best and most talented actors available to play important roles, with the use of superior quality devices, sound systems, and graphics.
An accomplished horror movie has an underlying atmosphere; an unstable visual feeling that crafts a sense of terror, wonder and mysteriousness and leaves us with glimpses of haunting imagery. Though atmosphere has a tone and mood, suspense is also necessary as is the unsettling feeling that something bad will happen. Obscurity and intense shadows are commonly used to produce suspense. This applies for instance when we hear something that we cannot spot, or catch sight of something moving in the distance but can’t decipher it. This makes the viewer feel tense. It’s hair-raising to hear something and have no idea where the sound is coming from.
Meanwhile, what do people look for most in horror novels? A good shock, while arousing, isn’t very satisfactory and surely doesn’t create lasting fear. For instance, think about the film adaptation of ‘The Shining’ when the axe comes out from nowhere, impales Dick Halloran and he falls down dead. The audience is shocked, but that effect ends by the time the next scene begins. Shock is like a shooting star. One glimpse and it’s gone. It’s how the shock is introduced, not the shock itself. There has to be some sort of suspense that leads up to it in order to keep the audience on their toes. If shock is a butter knife, suspense is a surgical scalpel. Suspense is that hunch that something is going to happen… still going to happen. Nothing has happened yet but the audience can feel it, knows it’s coming, and tension gradually builds up. Stephen King is the master of suspense. While most authors keep the shock factor from the audience and tease them with the promise of something mysterious to come, King takes an extra step. He knows how to create suspense even when the reader can predict exactly what is going to happen and he manages to stretch it out for pages without boring the audience. We can see the axe and we know that it is going to fall. Yet, he continues to push the climactic moment further away but the readers can’t bring themselves to skip forward to the axe impaling Halloran. King is able to extend the suspense because every word contains a message. There is no insignificant detail. The audience can’t skip ahead because they know that they will miss some small yet substantial detail.
Clearly, horror films and horror novels have many similarities when it comes to suspense and plot, but they do have their differences.
The key elements in a good horror film include good actors, marking visuals, and a large budget. On the other hand, intense, descriptive imagery and longer lasting suspense is crucial in successful horror novels. A novel cannot be directly and exactly translated into film given limitations motion pictures have. Most of the time, other elements such as visual effects have to be added in order to scare the audience through the visual medium. Therefore, a terrifying novel may very well turn into a rather bland film if not properly executed in the same way that a bland novel can be turned into a chilling film through strong additions, direction, and
adaptation.