(Turned in by originally by email, posted late in case anyone wants to read it)

            Any halfway-decent horror story, be it print or film, makes use of foreshadowing to build up the tension. I’ve found, though, that the most chilling tales often use implication and ambiguity rather than explicit details to convey the fear, even during the story’s climax. This makes the terror deeply psychological, rather than hitting the audience over the head with it. The mind is almost always capable of imagining more disturbing possibilities than any physical danger a writer could describe. Edgar Allen Poe uses this idea masterfully in The Tell-Tale Heart, among other stories, and H.P. Lovecraft also does so in many of his best works, The Colour Out of Space being one of the best examples. In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James also uses subtle suggestion to instill the majority of the sense of horror and dread present throughout the story. Even in the scenes where the apparitions that haunt Bly appear, they are described minimally and take part in barely any of the action. They are not even described as specters at first, and the reader only realizes the truth of their ghostliness when Mrs. Grose tells the governess that the man she described who was watching her from the tower had died months ago. Even the climax is crafted perfectly to horrify without the typical level of action which often ends a horror story. It reveals the mysteries that unfold throughout the novella with a moderate amount of dialogue, and ends abruptly but conclusively when Miles dies, apparently of fright, in the arms of the governess.