Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse Essays

The first chapter of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness depicts the journey that Charles Marlow, the protagonist of the story, makes into the heart of Africa in order to become a captain of a steamboat. The novel begins with an introduction of various characters, including Marlow by an unnamed narrator. Marlow and the unnamed narrator are aboard the Nellie and the boat has been temporarily docked in order to wait for a change in tide. During that short break Marlow begins to talk about one of his

The story of The Haunting of Hill House is a horror classic. The book and movie depict this terrifying story in vastly different ways. The movie uses cinematic techniques that a book can not portray: music, acting, and props. The book uses imagery, internal monologue, and suspense to peak fear in the readers. Movies are a different way of portraying a story, but movies aren’t always able to depict everything in the book. The movie depiction is able to elicit fear through cinematic techniques, and

While many differences and modifications exist between Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, and Heart of Darkness, the 19th century Joseph Conrad novella from which the film is loosely adapted, the novella contributes significantly to the overall structure and narrative strategy of the film, as well as to its many themes and storylines. Similar to Conrad, Coppola subverts the conventional “quest-up-the-river” narrative structure, replicating some of the techniques used by Conrad to bring