I think it is more frightening for a murderer to behave carefully because he has thought about, how he’s going to do it, where he’s going to do it, what he’ll do with the body afterwards and other details along these lines. The murderer in this story is behaving carefully by planning it, but the murder is a ‘spur of the moment’ thing because he does it to make the old man’s heart be silent.
Dracula.
Arthur takes a stake and plunges it into Lucy’s heart. There are a few other people in the vault while Arthur is doing the deed.
The deed takes place in a small vault. The small vault adds a sense of horror to the story in a way that is fairly clever, it is used as a place where only the dead should be to rest in peace, not a place where the living should be.
I think it makes it more horrifying that it is Lucy’s husband that is driving the stake into her heart, because if it were a stranger they wouldn’t show any emotion over it.
“The Thing in the coffin writhed;” sounds more powerful than ‘Lucy writhed’ because when it says ‘The Thing’ your not sure whether its human or not, but if it said ‘Lucy’ you would automatically think she was a normal human being.
“The sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth formed a crimson foam.” All of the words in the sentence make you realise how disgusting Lucy has become but there are a few words that make it more powerful than others and these are: white teeth champed and crimson foam.
“…the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it.” The writer wants the readers to see things with this much detail so that they can visualise in much detail what it would have been like to be there while it was happening.
I think the most disturbing thing about the story is that it’s her husband that is driving the stake into her heart to kill her.
The Woman In Black.
In the story there is a lot of confusion between life and death. The narrator does not know whether the woman he can see is living or whether she is a ghost. He says that she has a look of extreme illness, no expression on her face and the look of bone rather than skin. “…her face the sheen and pallor not of flesh so much as of bone itself…I had not noticed any particular expression on her ravaged face, but then I had, after all, been entirely taken with the look of extreme illness.”
The setting of the story adds to the disturbing atmosphere. “In the greyness of the fading light…For the combination of the peculiar, isolated place.”
The experience the narrator has with the woman is extremely chilling. He explains to you every detail of what he sees of the woman, he also explains how the woman makes him feel. He fears the woman, “…her expression began to fill me with fear”. He feels possessed by the woman, “…I had never in my life been so possessed by it”. He then goes on to explain how his knees tremble, how his flesh creeps, how he turns as cold as stone, how he has never known his heart to jump and how he has never known himself “gripped and held by such dread and horror and apprehension of evil”.
The way the woman is described in the story makes you think is she really alive or dead. She is described as something that is not natural as though she is super natural, all the details about her make you realise that she cannot be human. The narrator describes her in a way that is strange, at first it sounds as if she is just sad and lonely but nearer the end she sounds as if she is a danger to people. “…she directed the purest evil and hatred and loathing, with all the force that was available to her”.
Conclusion.
I think that all three of the stories are frightening in their own way. I like the way that the Tell Tale Heart is about a mad man who denies he is mad. I like the way the woman in black has a lot of detail in it even though it’s only very short. I like the way Dracula is about a husband and wife even though the husband kills his wife.
I think that a modern reader would find Dracula most disturbing because there aren’t that many books that include in it a husband killing his wife or vice versa. The other two stories were not as disturbing as Dracula but the Tell Tale Heart is quite creepy.
