Adaptation and Transformation of the Victorian Ghost Story: Traces of Intertextuality in Alejandro Amenábar's «The Others» and Juan Antonio Bayona's «The Orphanage»
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A series of films by Spanish directors from the beginning of the 21st century, such as Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) and Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage (2007), evoke as well as recreate the Victorian ghost story. Both cinematic works present intertextual links between them, since they are grounded in the nineteenth-century gothic tradition, particularly insofar as these two films portray dysfunctionalities within the family and anxieties arising from motherhood. Despite their parallelisms, each film illustrates different varieties in their approach to the contemporary fantastic genre, like the neofantastic, by means of which the real world is perceived as a mask which conceals an alternative reality, and the postfantastic, in which the will of calling into question narratological codes leads to the disruption of differences between both realities. This article approaches these two contemporary horror films in order to analyse their contribution to adapting and transforming the Victorian ghost story, the intertextual links between them on the basis of the nineteenth-century gothic tradition, and the different trends within the fantastic genre that each film represents.
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