Hunger
Ghost stories have been told and enjoyed for many years. It’s
always a thrill to find yourself frightened by a story despite having the
knowledge that it is fake. There is even a popular genre within film that
displays such stories in a format to elicit fears. What makes these stories so
intriguing? I decided to explore this topic by making my Medium Specificity about
the art of telling scary stories.
Creating this piece, I wanted to use more than just the
words. The story can only go so far on its own, and part of storytelling is
actually telling the story to an audience. To tell the story effectively the
correct ambience must be established. The audio recorded is manipulated to make
a darker sounding voice, and manipulating some of the other audio effects to
make it sound creepier. In the past, stories were only told out loud to those
listening. As creepy as this was back then, today’s technology allows us to
manipulate the stories in a way to make them scarier. Similar to how McCloud explained
the history and evolution of comics. They started out more rudimentary, but
effective for the time, and ended up how we have them today, which are enjoyed
by the present society. Technology allows us to create more interesting and
terrifying pieces. The resulting audio emphasizes these dark tones and gives
more character to the story without even showing anything.
The picture included represents how the storyteller might
look while telling the story. The main part of the picture is the lighting,
which represents how dark and moody the atmosphere would be when one is telling
a scary story. Specific lighting is used often while someone is telling a scary
story. As children, we would hold up a flashlight to our face in a tent. In the
television series, Are You Afraid of the
Dark?, a campfire was used to light up the kids’ faces while they told the
story. The lighting does an effective job at emphasizing how mysterious and
dark the story is, making the story much more frightening than it really is.
The story itself is not scary. However, these elements
implemented in with the actual words gives it more of an edge as a scary story.
What also adds to the fear of it is the context of the story. For anyone who
has been in the same situation as the man, the story would have an element of
horror. This is true for any story, it becomes more frightening when the
listener can personally connect to it.
All of these elements add to the overall scary story that is
presented. It is not so much the story itself that is intriguing to the
audience, it is the way that it is executed that draws people in. The scarier
the story is told, the better.
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