The Others: Proposal

I choose to do my blog over The Others because it was one of the first horror movies I ever saw and to this day it is one of my favorite movies. I can watch this movie time and again and it still catches and holds all my attention. I love the twist ending and re-watching the film you can catch clues and subtleties you did not pick up the first time.

The Others: Work Cited

The Others. By Alejandro Amenábar and Alejandro Amenábar. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan. Cruise/Wagner Productions, 2001. DVD.

"The Others." The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 07 May 2011. <http://www.imdb.com/>.

"Story Arts | Aesop's ABC | The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Story Arts | Story Arts Online! 2000. Web. 07 May 2011. <http://www.storyarts.org/library/aesops/stories/boy.html>.

The Others: Comparitive Analysis

The Others can be compared to the folk tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf". Throughout the movie Anne is trying to scare her little brother. She is always talking about the boy Victor she sees and teasing him about the other intruders in the house. When Anne and Nicholas leave the house in search for their father, Anne discovers their servants tombstones, and when they seem to be actually in danger, Anne tells Nicholas that they are dead, and Nicholas like the villagers in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" did not believe Anne because she always seemed to make things up to scare him. Nicholas realizes though that they are in danger and are able to escape.

The Others: Character Analysis - Anne

In the film The Others, Anne is one of the most crucial characters to the story. Anne has a very bold personality, she is outspoken, imaginative and brave. She is the first character to mention that they are not alone in the house. She claims to see another family, a mom, dad, little boy and an old lady. She is the only character that interacts with the others in the house and comes in contact with them the most. I believe her personality has a lot to do with her capability in her communication with "the others". 

The Others: Symbol Analysis

In The Others there are many things viewed as symbolic.

• Doors and Locks: In the film Grace is persistent that all doors must remain shut and locked; that no door shall open without the previous one being shut. She does this in order to shut out light from flooding throughout the manor and harming her photosensitive children. The shut and locked doors symbolizes something being hidden and enclosed. In this case both the view and the protagonists are not aware of the secret that known at the conclusion of the film. Doors also have a figuration of being entryways to other worlds and realms. The continuous sounds of doors being shut, slammed, and locked adds to the ominous essence of the film.

•  Mirrors: Throughout the film, mirrors are presently shown. Mirrors have many religious people have different connotations about mirrors. It is believed that someone who is gazing into the mirror at their own reflection could loose their soul in the process. Also, mirrors reconfirm the existence of something, and people would cover their mirrors to keep the dead from coming to earth. Mirrors that do not give off a reflection represents nothingness but could be a portal into different worlds. Religion plays an important role in this movie and so mirrors are a very important representation of all these things.

• Curtains: Curtains as well as doors and locks keep things hidden and brings a sense of forbiddingness to the film. All the curtains in the house are extremely crucial  to the family because it is a barrier to keep out the light. It symbolizes a veil of disguise for the family, although they are not aware what they are hiding. The family can hide behind the curtains in their own little world, closed off from the outside.

•  The Childrens' Illness:  The illness that the children bare foreshadows the truth that they are the ghosts in the house. The illness gives an excuse for their way of living, having all the doors shut and locked at all times, not having light brighter than that of a candle, and keeping outside light out with drawn curtains. The viewer believes the family is limited to just their house because of their sickness but in actuality they are stuck in the house in "limbo".

The Others: Theme Analysis

In the film, The Others, there is a very predominate theme of religion. Throughout the entire movie Grace is extremely strict and persistent about her children reading, learning and acting according to the Bible. This theme is greatly significant to the story because of the ironic twist at the ending. Grace is constantly preaching to her children that bad misbehaved and sinful children go to the children's limbo. At the end of the movie when Grace and the children realize that they are dead all that they had learned and known of from the Bible was not all it had perceived to be.   

The Others: Setting Analysis

The film, The Others, takes place in Jersey immediately upon the end of World War II. Grace and her two children live in a remote beautiful house. The house is a stereotypical "haunted house"; it is in the county and has a Victorian style, there a many vastly open rooms that are grimly light and seem to be forbidden. The whole house has a bad omen sensation to it. The atmosphere of the film is eminently creepy and foreboding. The fog that surrounds the house just lingers there throughout the film gives a ghoulish essence to the setting. The fog is literally impervious to get through in a way creating its own realm of existence. Overall it is a wearisome setting for a ghost story.

The Others: Plot Summary

A mother, Grace, lives in an old decrepit mansion with her two children, Anne and Nicholas, awaiting for her husband to return from the Second World War. The families servants "vanished" without any word so Grace hires three new ones to look after the children and the house. The children have a health condition, Photosensitivity, which is a disease that makes them allergic to light. In order to protect the children, Grace has specific rules including keeping all doors locked at all times and keeping the windows covered and having no light stronger than candle light in a room. It becomes evident that the family is not alone in the house. Anne sees the other people in the house. Grace is skeptical and believes Anne is making things up, until she starts to notice another presence in the house as well. When all the curtains are missing one day Grace snaps, and has the servants leave, in a desperate search through the house Grace finds a funeral photograph of the three servants. The children are found by the others and Grace has to "go talk to them", where we find out that Grace and the children are dead also. The intruders happen to be family that was moving into the house. Grace had killed her children and herself and are stuck in a kind of limbo.

The Others Director: Alejandro Amenabar Biography

Alejandro Amenabar was born on March 31, 1972 in Santiago de Chile, Chile. He grew up mainly in Madrid where he studied cinema at the Sciences Information Faculty at Madrid's Complutense University, he was not the best student and later dropped out to start making his own cinemas. In his best known early film Himenóptero from 1992, he directed, produced, acted, and wrote the script and the music for. Amenbar's first commercial success was, Thesis, this film was his career breakthrough and displayed that he was a major director. His later movies Abre Los Ojos and The Others confirmed his place in cinematography. In all his films he writes the script and the music as well as composing for other films. He was awarded the Grand Prix of the Jury at the International Venice Film Festival in 2004 for Mar adentro ("The Sea Inside"), and in February 2005 the same film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.