The Optic Horror : The Intricate Pattern of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and its Depiction in Film
Abstrakt
The paper focuses on the topic of the intricate pattern in the gothic horror genre. The core is CH.
P. Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and its film adaptations.
Even though Gilman's book has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention, there have been only a few attempts at the visual analysis of the infamous wallpaper. The cinematic depictions of this wallpaper have been neglected so far.
The intention is to analyze different ways in which the films try to approximate their designs of the wallpaper to the literary description (including the "hallucination" of the protagonist). While the text leaves certain aspects of the wallpaper to the imagination, the films cannot avoid the depiction of the "optic horror".
With the aid of E. H.
Gombrich's theory of the "elusive face" in decorative art, I am describing certain conditions that should be fulfilled to create a pattern that is not only (aesthetically) horrifying, but also lures our gaze into an unresting hunt for meaningful images. The employment of this kind of design is illustrated by the example of the films The Haunting (1963, R.
Wise) and Through a Glass Darkly (1961, I. Bergman).