Garden of Shadows

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only light comes from the vibrant swan room that belonged to Malcom’s mother, Olivia’s husband. Malcom keeps the swan room as a shrine to his mother and no one is allowed to go inside. The swan room and the walls of this home hold many secrets. Rape, incest, pain, and other horrors haunt the halls of the Manor.

V.C Andrews novels have strong incestuous themes. There are also rape themes as well. These two topics are sensitive subject matter, however they can easily be translated to film. For a film adaptation of Garden of Shadows the incest and rape are necessary elements to telling the story effectively, however I would touch on it in a more subtle manner than the novels. In the novel Garden of Shadows, Malcom Foxworth rapes both his wife Olivia and young step mother Alicia. The scene where Olivia is raped by her husband Malcom takes place inside the swan room. She wonders into the room to look around and is startled by him as he enters the room. He would then grab her roughly by the shoulders and pushes her against the wall she looks terrified. Then the cameras cut away from the two and the sound of something crashing to the floor is heard. It is implied that she was raped but is not seen on camera. Alicia’s rapes are not seen on camera either, when know she is raped by Malcom her step son by the way she acts when he is near her. She is seen to be quite fearful and also by the fact that she becomes pregnant and her husband is dead.

There are many things that go into the adaptation of films. When adapting a book into a film the writer has to choose what point of view the story is to be told from. Movies can be told chronologically or nonlinearly. Garden of Shadows is a gothic horror nonlinear piece told through flashbacks of the protagonist Olivia Foxworth. Garden of Shadows tells the story rape, incest, and other secrets within a family. Filmmakers are faced with various challenges and obstacles when it comes to adapting a film. A major concern of filmmakers when adapting a novel to a movie is whether it is ideal to be faithful to the original work. Filmmakers are also faced with the challenge of legal ownership of the story. The filmmaker must have the rights to the story in order to get it made. Many techniques are used by filmmakers in developing characters when adapting a film. Techniques such as voiceover can be used to set up the background and allow the character to speak to the audience. The use of lighting and sound can be used to set mood and tone for a movie. Costumes, settings, lighting and sounds create the backdrop for an adaptation. The ability to translate a story from a novel into a movie is a great task. It takes a lot of time and creativity to convey what happened in a book in a movie.

Works Cited

8 May 2012. www.scriptmag.com. 22 July 2017.

23 November 2012. www.filmmakermagazine.com. 22 July 2017.

John M. Desmond, Peter Hawkes. Adaptation: Studying Film & Literature. Boston,MA: Mcgraw-Hill, 2014.

"www.tasteofcinema.com." n.d. 22 July 2017.

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