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- Psychological Horror. Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror that plays a cunning game of chess with your mind. Rather than relying on gore and jump-scares, these films generate fear by exploring the characters’ minds.
- Slasher Horror. Slasher Horror is a subgenre that’s all about the adrenaline rush. These films usually include a masked villain who dispatches victims, often teenagers, one by one in increasingly creative and gruesome ways.
- Gothic Horror. Gothic horror, a timeless subgenre, is all about atmosphere. It’s got elements of fear and horror, often in conjunction with romance and doomed love.
- Supernatural Horror. Supernatural horror is a subgenre that delves into our fear of the unknown. It centers around paranormal and otherworldly entities, often dealing with themes of death, the afterlife, and demonic possession.
Aug 23, 2024 · After their father arrives, he chases Gregor back into his bedroom—once the two women escape—by throwing apples at his zoomorphic son. One lodges painfully in Gregor’s back, crippling him. “One morning, as Gregor Samsa woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep, he found that he had changed into an enormous bedbug.”.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Feb 2, 2024 · Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is a profound exploration of alienation and personal isolation. The protagonist, Gregor Samsa, awakens one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a gigantic insect. This grotesque metamorphosis is a stark symbol of Gregor’s deep sense of estrangement. Prior to his transformation, Gregor ...
- A Tortured, Long-Distance Relationship Inspired The Metamorphosis.
- Franz Kafka Wrote The Metamorphosis While Working on Another Novel.
- It Took Three Years For The Metamorphosis to Be published.
- There Are Numerous Translations of The Metamorphosis's Famous Opening Line.
- The Metamorphosis Is A Pretty Funny Story When You Think About it.
- The Language in The Metamorphosis Is Full of Double Meanings and Contradictions.
- The Metamorphosis's Many Interpretations Include A Freudian one.
- Vladimir Nabokov Was A Big Fan—And Critic—Of The Metamorphosis.
- Stage Productions of The Metamorphosis Have Gotten Pretty Creative.
- The Metamorphosis Was on David Cronenberg's Mind When He Filmed The Fly.
In 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer, an acquaintance of his friend Max Brod, at a dinner party in Prague. He began writing to Bauer, who lived in Berlin, shortly after, eventually penning two and three letters per day. The correspondence was desperate—and pretty much one-sided. Kafka demandeddetailed accounts of Bauer’s days, expressed his love for her...
Kafka was having a hard time turning out his first novel (which he never finished, and which was published after his death under the title Amerika). Once the inspiration for The Metamorphosiscame, he seized on it and resolved to write it quickly, in two or three sittings. There were delays—Kafka was, after all, working full time at an insurance com...
Kafka read a section from his "bug piece," as he called it, aloud to friends on November 24, 1912. They began talking about the work, and soon publishers were expressing interest. Due to his preoccupations with writing Bauer and with Amerika, though, it took Kafka months to write a new manuscript. Then World War I broke out, causing further delays....
Over the years, translators have had Gregor Samsa transform into "a monstrous cockroach," "an enormous bedbug," and "a large verminous insect," among other things. While scholars agree Gregor changes into a bug of some sort, the exact entomology remains a mystery. And that seems to be Kafka's intention, as the German word he uses for Gregor’s new f...
Viewed one way, a story about a man who wakes up to find he’s a bug is horrifying. Viewed another way, it’s hilarious [PDF]. Indeed, scholars and readers alike have delighted in Kafka’s gallows humor and matter-of-fact handling of the absurd and the terrifying. The first pages of The Metamorphosis, where Gregor tries to communicate through the bedr...
Dream logic and contradictions abound in Kafka’s work. A man is summoned to a trial for an unnamed offense; a country doctor is instantly transported to the home of a sick patient, who tells him he only wants to be left to die. These contortions happen even at the language level, leaving translators to puzzle over the double meanings in Kafka’s Ger...
It’s an interpretation of the human condition, an allegory for aging, and a cry of desperation in a rapidly industrializing society. There are many interpretations of The Metamorphosis, from the oddly specific (it’s all about the dangers of insomnia) to something resembling Lost (it was all just a dream!). There’s also a Freudian theorythat states,...
The Lolita author, in a famous lecture he gave about The Metamorphosis, called Kafka "the greatest German writer of our time." Nabokov was also a first-rate scientist and lepidopterist, and he concluded that Gregor Samsa had been transformed into a winged beetle. Despite his reverence, Nabokov the wordsmith couldn’t resist line editingKafka’s story...
How do you portray a man who turns into a giant insect on stage? Plays, operas, and even ballet productions have done it using everything from distorted sets to animation to buckets and buckets of brown slime. A Japanese theater company did away with the bug motif altogether and made Gregor a robot.
When writing his script for the 1986 sci-fi/horror classic, Cronenberg couldn’t help but see the parallels between his story, in which a brilliant scientist accidentally transforms himself into a grotesque human/fly hybrid, and Kafka’s. In an introduction to a recent translation of The Metamorphosis, Cronenberg wrote that he thought of Kafka specif...
The transformation into a grotesque human-fly hybrid serves as a terrifying reminder of the dangers of tampering with nature. Mimic. In the 1997 horror film Mimic, genetically engineered insects evolve rapidly, developing the ability to mimic their human prey. The movie taps into the primal fear of being hunted, with the insects serving as ...
Analysis. The one thing people know about ‘The Metamorphosis’ is that it begins with Gregor Samsa waking up to find himself transformed into an insect. Many English translations use the word in the book’s famous opening line (and we follow convention by using the even more specific word ‘beetle’ in our summary of the story above).
Jul 31, 2024 · David Cronenberg’s remake of the 1958 classic stars Jeff Goldblum as a scientist who gradually transforms into a grotesque human-fly hybrid following a teleportation experiment gone wrong. The film is both a tragic love story and a body-horror masterpiece. 15. Near Dark (1987)
