The grotesque appeal of carnivals, their inherent and attractive darkness, are long-established motifs of horror. Sideshow acts are full of the lurid and uncanny—humans whose appearances or movements aren’t “normal,” showcased behind heavy curtains or glass as objects of hideous wonder. Few can capture this fascination better than Ray Bradbury, who, along with Tod Browning and Diane Arbus, has solidified these images into our public consciousness. His fiction is shadowy, nebulous and exploitative, like these carnivals, and he evokes their qualities with the highest art.
Many of his plots center around an uncanny or supernatural force wreaking havoc in a mundane environment—an everyman who realizes his skeleton is trying to kill him, the arrival of a strange and deadly circus in Something Wicked This Way Comes, or a fantastic environment that is explored through recognizable, everyday emotions. The Martian Chronicles is otherworldly in setting, but its characters are preoccupied with grief,...
Many of his plots center around an uncanny or supernatural force wreaking havoc in a mundane environment—an everyman who realizes his skeleton is trying to kill him, the arrival of a strange and deadly circus in Something Wicked This Way Comes, or a fantastic environment that is explored through recognizable, everyday emotions. The Martian Chronicles is otherworldly in setting, but its characters are preoccupied with grief,...
- 3/3/2017
- by Ben Larned
- DailyDead
Before he was making Batman and Beetlejuice, director Tim Burton did some work in the field of episodic television. One of those credits came during the mid-1980s revival of anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where Burton was tasked with adapting Ray Bradbury’s story The Jar. If you ever wondered what a Tim Burton television episode on a major network would look like, well, wonder no more… Burton takes Bradbury’s 1944 story and gives it his own unique spin while staying relatively true to the source material. The television take makes things more modernized (its set in the ‘80s, complete with all the hilarious fashions and hairdos of the era, and it makes the main character an artist instead of a farmer), and injects some of...
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- 11/29/2014
- by Mike Bracken
- Movies.com
Science-fiction icon Ray Bradbury, whose visionary works include "The Martian Chronicles" and the novel "Fahrenheit 451," died on Tuesday at the age of 91. In his lifetime, more than eight million copies of his books were sold in 36 languages. Like contemporaries Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, many of his short stories and novels were made into memorable films, including the chilling "The Illustrated Man," and the dark fantasy "Something Wicked This Way Comes." His works were also adapted for TV, on programs like "The Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (the latter of which won an Emmy for the Bradbury-influenced "The Jar"). In honor of Bradbury, here is our list of the best adaptations of his writings.
- 6/6/2012
- by Sharon Knolle
- Moviefone
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