A 9-year-old child of my friend decided he wanted to tell a story. All, at some level, too, have as their goal safety, security, completion, and the importance of home.īut these tenets don’t just appear in films, novels, or indeed TV series like Homeland or The Killing. Though they are superficially different, they all share the same framework and the same story engine: All plunge their characters into a strange new world all involve a quest to find a way out of it and in whatever form they choose to take, in every story “monsters” are vanquished. Even “Brave New World” stories such as Gulliver’s Travels, Witness, and Legally Blonde fit all three definitions: The characters all have some kind of quest, and all have their own monsters to vanquish too. In classic “quest” stories like Apocalypse Now or Finding Nemo the protagonists encounter both monsters and strange new worlds. Beowulf, Alien, and Jaws are ‘monster’ stories-but they’re also about individuals plunged into a new and terrifying world. Does that mean that when you boil it down there are only three different types of story? No. So three different tales turn out to have multiple derivatives. The Lost Origins of Playing-Card Symbols Adrienne Bernhard Though superficially dissimilar, the skeletons of each are identical. The monster can be fire in The Towering Inferno, an upturned boat in The Poseidon Adventure, or a boy’s mother in Ordinary People. The monster may change from a literal one in Nightmare on Elm Street to a corporation in Erin Brockovich, but the underlying architecture-in which a foe is vanquished and order restored to a community-stays the same. You can see the same shape in The Exorcist, The Shining, Fatal Attraction, Scream, Psycho, and Saw. If you recast the monsters in human form, it’s also every James Bond film, every episode of MI5, House, or CSI. But it’s also the story of Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem published some time between the eighth and 11th centuries.Īnd it’s more familiar than that: It’s The Thing, it’s Jurassic Park, it’s Godzilla, it’s The Blob-all films with real tangible monsters. It’s the story of Jaws, released in 1976. One man takes it on himself to kill the beast and restore happiness to the kingdom. A dangerous monster threatens a community.
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