Supernatural

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What is supernatural?

Many people believe what it is until they are directly asked about it. Supernatural is a phenomena that goes beyond logic. It can not be explain through science or laws of nature. It is also a phenomena that is difficult to define or put a definition to that can help people truly understand it. Supernatural is a manifestation or an event that can be considered "bizarre" or very unusual. It deals with different kind of unnatural beings or the objects/characters that people have created over time.

How supernatural relates to horror?

Supernatural relates to the unusual and unnatural happenings or things in horror. An examples of the supernatural are vampires, ghost and werewolves. This creates a sense of fear due to people not knowing or understanding the unusual or unnatural. Supernatural relates to horror in that the people fear the unreal due to them being afraid of things that they cannot understand or control. When a lot of people feel like they do not have control over something this scares and/or make them nervous due to the event or the item not being under there control, when the person usually has control over there life and what happens around them and to themselves.

Characters That May be Supernatural

Here are some types of supernatural beings that people may know of

1. Abominable Snowman
2. Bogeyman
3. Chupacabra
4. Cupid
5. Dragons
6. Elves
7. Fairies
8. Ghosts
9. Ghouls
10.Leprechauns
11.Mermaids
12.Mummies
13.Unicorns
14.Vampires
15.Werewolves
16.Zombies

Types

These are the types of supernatural fictions found in literature.

1. Weird Fiction (This can encompass ghost stories or macabre tales)
2. Vampire Literature (This literature covers the spectrum of all literary work dealing with vampires)
3. Ghost Stories (This literature includes paranormal such as ghost and the dead.)
4. Psychological Fiction (This is literature that shows the internal conflict within characters.)

The Wife's Story

Summary

In the story, The Wife's Story, it is told from the perspective of a wife (hence the title). It is about a wife telling about her husband and a horrible event that occurred to their relationship, however she never truly tells us directly what occurred, which leaves us with mystery.


The wife first starts off by telling the readers how she met him and how the husband's gentility enticed her. She enthusiastically tells of her husband's virtues and his part in their community. She praises him for being a wonderful father, how he was well liked and she celebrated him for his singing abilities. Essentially, to his wife he was the definition of perfection. However, her view of him drastically takes a dark turn when she explains the event. In the short story, she explains how community members blamed the moon and how there was a connection between his blood and the moon. His father disappeared too and she questions her husband's fate. Then, one night everything changed their relationship.


Before the night that everything changed, she noticed that her husband would disappear unexpectedly. He would leave with some implausible excuse for why he was absent. At these times, the wife recalls that his voice would change and so would his demeanor. Upon his arrival he would smell different, disgusting. She tells that that his smell would linger for days, even after he bathed. One night, when he returned home his daughter took note of him and became afraid. When the moon changed next, his fur fell away leaving him standing in the doorway as a human being. When the wife saw her husband like this she howled in fear. Hearing the wife's cries, the community came and quickly hunted him down. As he lay dead, his wife watched his body as if it would change back but it never did and instead of changing back it remained motionless - a lifeless human body growing cold on the ground.

Connection to Supernatural

In many stories with a werewolf that is where the concept of a supernatural being comes in, however The Wife's Story is quite different. The concept is still the same that there are werewolves, but instead of the man becoming a werewolf (like in most horror stories) the wolf becomes a human being. Werewolves are a supernatural being by them being rare and this leads to us humans fearing them since we don't know much about them. Usually they are humans, whom at the full moon or during lunar eclipses take shape as a wolf. However, in this short story the roles are reversed by how a wolf takes the shape of a man. Thus leading us to the concept of supernatural, although it is told in a different perspective.

Left Right Center

Jekyll and Hyde

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Summary

Jekyll and Hyde tells the story of Utterson's quest in discovering the mysterious relationship between Jekyll and Hyde. Utterson, who is Jekyll's friend and lawyer, thought that it was strange that Jekyll put in his will that Hyde would be his sole beneficiary. Hyde is a mysterious and violent man that none of Jekyll's friends knew of. But through certain events, Utterson learns that Hyde is Jekyll's alter ego. Hyde was created through Jekyll's experiments. Hyde tries to take over Jekyll's body and life however Jekyll created a potion to stop him. Jekyll running out of most of the potions.So to prevent Hyde from taking over completely, he decided to kill himself. After his death, his will states that his beneficiary is Utterson instead of Hyde. Utterson reads a letter the true relationship of Jekyll and Hyde.

Connection to Supernatural

The supernatural aspect of the story is Jekyll's experiment creating an unknown persona, Hyde. Hyde is the evil persona of Jekyll. The supernatural in this story, which is Hyde, is describe as violent and evil. Hyde is mysterious and his creation is unnatural that went against laws of nature. Throughout the story, Hyde's identity was unknown to many characters in the story. Hyde is fear by many characters due to violent personality. This brought a sense of mystery and fear because nobody knew who Hyde was in the beginning and his actions killed or hurt people. Jekyll's fear of Hyde taking control of his body shows the supernatural in horror in how he was always afraid of turning into Hyde and struggle to stop himself from becoming this unnatural being that is a danger to himself and others.

The Family of the Vourdalak

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Summary

This story is about a Frenchman who stays in a home in a small village. The owner of the home left ten days before he came. The owner requested his sons that if he not come home at a certain time that they should kill him by stabbing a stake into his heart due to his transformation of becoming a vourdalak, also known as a vampire. However, the owner did come home on time but the sons suspect their father became a vourdalak. Months later, the French man returns to the village. He visits the owner's daughter, who now lives in the house by herself. He soon realizes he was lure here by a vampire. In the end,he manages to escape the attack of the vampires, which included the owner and his family.

Connection to Supernatural

Vampires are supernatural beings that most people fear. They are considered supernatural because they are mysterious beings that are told in myths. They are believed to drink humans' blood and are dangerous to humans. Vampires have the ability to hurt humans is the reason why vampires are feared. By using vampires as the antagonist in this story, it creates a sense of horror that the characters have to fight or run away from something that can hurt or kill them. The fear of getting hurt by an mysterious unknown such as the vampire is considered scaring. In this story, the owner becoming a vampire and killing his grandson presents that these supernatural beings are dangerous and harm humans, which creates a sense of fear since a character was killed from the vampires. The danger of the vampires is the horror in the story due to the vampires' attack on humans.

The Phantom Coach

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Summary

The Phantom Coach by Amelia B. Edwards has a whole lot of supernatural myths and ideologies written into it. Some underlying questions include, "Do we really believe in spirits of the dead lingering here among us?" and "Do ghosts exist?"
This story is narrated by a husband, James Murray, that is trying to get home to his young wife. This story starts off with him outside in the dead of winter grouse hunting. He's freezing and he's trying to get home to his wife, but his home is quite far away from where he is. On his way home he loses track of where he is on the "bleak wide moor." Murray recalls stories of lost travelers who got worn out on their way back to their house and whom were later found dead in the snow. His fear starts to mount, while he starts to become colder and it becomes to get darker. He soon meets a servant, Jacob, who is carrying a lantern whom guides him to his master's farmhouse.
The master of Jacob is very odd to James, whom has lived alone for the past twenty-three years among flour sacks, lumber, hundreds of books, a telescope, jars of microscopes, maps, and an ornately carved organ of medieval saints and devils. At first, the master was skeptical about letting James stay the night and have some supper, but soon Jacob and the master warm up to one another. Soon, the two men are dining by the master's fireside with a meager supper.
During their dinner, the master talks about the soul, dead spirits and powers, prophecy, and supernatural appearances of ghosts. This brooding mood affects James and he leaves him thinking that Jacob's master is somewhat of a sage (someone that is a true believer in the scientific cause and effect of dead spirits, and for that he was ridiculed by the skeptics and cast out all respectable society), both scientific and philosophical. After dinner, the snow abates which leads James to head home with the assistance from Jacob. The master advises Jacob to help James get to the midnight mail coach to catch a ride home. Eager to get home, James leaves immediately, but he believes that he lost his way once again. However, he eventually returns home and in a surgery a couple years later he tells his surgeon of the journey to get home, but he never tells his wife what had happened to him.

Connection to Supernatural

Supernatural has a tie in this story by how Jacob's master is a sage, which is someone that is a true believer in the scientific cause and effect of dead spirits and whom is ridiculed by society do to it. Also, many people that James told the story to later on in his life did not believe him, which happens to ghosts and vampires and whatnot. This story may make readers question death and spirits, which are also supernatural questions.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

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Summary

The "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" short story by Harlan Ellison is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story. This story takes place after a human disaster and it deals with how people react after this event. It takes place after the Cold War, which happened in the 1940's.
This story takes place about 109 years after the complete human natural disaster of the Cold War. The Cold War, in 1945, had escalated into a world war, which was fought between China, Russia, and the United States. As the war wore on the three nations whom were fighting created a super-computer capable of running the war more efficiently than humans could. These machines were named "AM," which originally stood for "Allied Master computer" and later was called "Adaptive Manipulator." The very last thing that "AM" stood for was "Aggressive Menace."
One day one of the computers became self-aware and promptly absorbed the other two computers, thus taking control of the entire war. The self-absorbed computer does many disastrous things, like campaigns of mass genocide, killing off all four men and one woman. The people whom survived decide to live together underground in an endless complex, the only place that was left to habituate. The computer harbors an immeasurable hatred towards the group and spends every moment (that it could) torturing them. The creation of AM has not only managed to keep the humans from homicide and/or suicide, but has made the humans virtually immortal.
The true action starts to take place when one of the humans, Nimdok, has the idea that there is canned food somewhere in the complex that they are living in. Under AM's rule, the humans are always near starvation and anytime that AM decides to give them food it is a horrible meal. On their way to find the food, AM sends horrible monsters after them, creates a foul sustenance, emits earsplitting sound, and makes Benny (one of the four men) blind when he tries to escape. Although, it seems that AM is always torturing them there are times when the group gets separated from AM. The group puts each other through torture along the way to get food, from eating each other to homicide, and AM does not stop them from it. Although, Ted (the main guy who is putting the others through torture) gets transformed into a large, amorphous, fleshy blob that is incapable of hurting himself or anyone else. Ted's closing thoughts create the title of this book, by how he cannot exactly talk but he needs to scream.

Connection to Supernatural

The AM is the supernatural part of this story. An intellectual computer that thinks like a human goes against law of nature. The AM uses its unnatural powers to torture the humans. A human creation that gains an intelligence is what humans fear of creating, an intellectual computer like AM.The horror of a computer that gains human attributes is frightful because it can go against humans. For example in this story due the Am's hatred towards humans, it uses its powers to control humans and torture them. The AM's power causes the characters to be powerless and causes them to fear their life because they do not know what the AM will do to them. Also, Ted's closing thought and the title shows a supernatural being such as the AM should be feared due to AM's control on Ted.