Analysing 4 Short Horror Story Openings.

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Analysing 4 Short Horror Story Openings

In this piece of coursework, I am going to analyse 4 Horror Story openings. The first is 'The Signalman' by Charles Dickens. It tells the story of a man who comes across a seemingly normal railway cutting with a mysterious story to tell. The second is 'The Tell-Tale Heart' by Edgar Allen Poe. The main character, who is seemingly mad, has a grudge against an old man because of his 'vulture eye' and this drives him to take drastic action. For the third story, there is 'The Landlady' by Roald Dahl in which the main character is taken victim by a seemingly harmless Landlady of a small guesthouse. Lastly, there is 'All But Empty' by Graham Greene. In this story the writer finds a man in a cinema with a puzzling and inexplicable tale.

The settings for all of the stories openings have something in common to link them together.

'The Signalman' uses very atmospheric words to describe the cutting, its surroundings and the time of day.

The actual cutting is described as "extremely deep and unusually precipitate". These words give the reader the feeling that the