I recently began watching a series on Netflix called "R.L. Stine's Haunting Hour."
This TV series features creepy stories that remind me of Night Gallery or the old Twilight Zone series.
In Haunting Hour, every episode features a different cast in a scary situation that would involve ghosts, aliens, witches, zombies and monsters. The story lines are dark and some serve as morality tales.
My 12-year-old granddaughter is the one who led me to the stories. She was impressed by an episode called "Really You" about a life-sized doll who wants to possess the little girl who owns it. Yes, total creep-fest!
These are the kinds of stories you might tell at night around a camp fire.
As for structure, the stories are beautifully paced and suspense is high. I like that you can't predict the outcome. Not every story has a happy ending.
Then, too, Imagination is a strong, restless faculty which claims to be heard and exercised, are we to be quite deaf to her cry and insensate to her struggles? When she shews us bright pictures are we never to look at them and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear are we not to write to her dictation? - Charlotte Bronte, 1847
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
On a Jane Eyre kick right now. Watched Jane Eyre (2011) with Mia Wasikowska. Stunning cinematography and captures the tone of this poignant love story. Oh, the misty moors and forbidding castles!
Interested to see Jamie Bell as Saint John Rivers. The last time I saw him was in Billy Elliot as the thwarted teen dancer of Manchester.
My plan now is to read the novel by Charlotte Bronte. Of course, one should always read the novel BEFORE watching the film...it just makes sense.
Favorite quotes:
ROCHESTER: What is your tale of woe? All governesses have a tale of woe. What is yours?
JANE: I have no tale of woe, sir.
...
JOHN RIVERS: What will you do with all your fine accomplishments?
JANE: I will save them until they're wanted. They will keep.
...
ROCHESTER: I can see in you the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage, a vivid, restless, captive. Were it but free, it would soar, cloud high.
...
Jane: Am I a machine with out feelings? Do you think that because I am poor, plain, obscure, and little that I am soulless and heartless? I have as much soul as you and full as much heart. And if God had possessed me with beauty and wealth, I could make it as hard for you to leave me as I to leave you... I'm not speaking to you through mortal flesh. It is my spirit that addresses your spirit, as it passes through the grave and stood at God's feet equal. As we are.
My theme for the 2017 A to Z Blogging Challenge is The Chronicles of Narnia. These are my favorite stories and they continue to inspire me.
Puzzle is a donkey tricked into becoming the false Aslan by Shift the ape. He eventually joins Jill, Eustace and King Tirian, and redeems himself to Aslan.
"Look!" said Jill suddenly. Someone was coming, rather timidly, to meet them; a graceful creature on four feet, all silvery-grey. And they stared at him for a whole ten seconds before five or six voices said all at once, "Why, it's old Puzzle!" They had never seen him by day light, with the lionskin off, and it made an extraordinary difference. He was himself now: a beautiful donkey with such a soft, grey coat and such a gentle, honest face that if you had seen him you would have done just what Jill and Lucy did - rushed forward and put your arms around his neck and kissed his nose and stroked his ears.
- The Last Battle
My theme for the 2017 A to Z Blogging Challenge is The Chronicles of Narnia. These are my favorite stories and they continue to inspire me.
When you go to Narnia you may spend many years there, but as soon as you return to our world, it is like you'd never left. You are exactly where you were and no time has passed at all. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy went to Narnia as children, grew up into adults as Kings and Queens of Narnia. One day they were out riding horses looking for the White Stag. In the forest, they got off their horses and walked through the woods. The next thing they knew, the trees had turned into coats and they were children again, tumbling out of the wardrobe back in the Professor's house at exactly the moment they had left.
"But how could it be true, sir?" said Peter.
"Why do you say that?" asked the Professor.
"Well, for one thing," said Peter, "if it was real why doesn't everyone find this country every time they go to the wardrobe? I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn't pretend there was."
"What has that to do with it?" said the Professor.
"Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time."
"Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.
"But there was no time," said Susan. "Lucy had had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place. She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room. It was less than a minute, and she pretended to be away for hours."
"The is the very thing that makes her story so likely to be true," said the Professor. "If there really is a door in this house that leads to some other world (and I should warn you that this is a very strange house, and even I know very little about it) - if, I say, she had got into another world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time."
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
