Using Classic Texts and Their Film Adaptations to Teach Writing Craft

Every October, as autumn settles in and students’ minds turn toward the spooky season, English teachers have a golden opportunity to teach sophisticated writing techniques through texts that naturally engage teenage interest. Two pairings have proven invaluable in my classroom for teaching both literary analysis and practical writing craft: Tolkien’s Moria sequence from The Fellowship of the Ring paired with Peter Jackson’s film adaptation, and Mary Shelley’s creature awakening scene from Frankenstein paired with James Whale’s 1931 film starring Boris Karloff.

These pairings work because they teach students to read as writers, understanding the deliberate choices authors and screenwriters make to create atmosphere, build tension, and deliver emotional impact. More importantly, they reveal how different media accomplish similar narrative goals through medium-specific techniques—lessons that transfer directly to students’ own writing.

The Mines of Moria: Epic Fantasy Suspense

The Moria sequence represents some of Tolkien’s finest suspenseful writing, and Jackson’s adaptation demonstrates masterful visual storytelling. By examining both together, students learn how descriptive prose translates into cinematic language.

Reading the Text: Tolkien’s Technique

When we read the Moria chapters in class, I ask students to track specific craft elements:

Foreshadowing and Dread: Tolkien builds unease long before the Fellowship enters Moria. Gandalf’s reluctance, the Watcher in the Water, and the ominous door that only opens from outside all signal danger. Students identify how Tolkien layers small details to create cumulative dread without obvious exposition.

Sensory Limitation: Once inside, Tolkien brilliantly restricts the reader’s senses. The darkness is profound—”Gandalf’s light grew small and wan”—forcing readers to experience the mines primarily through sound and touch rather than sight. The tap of Gandalf’s staff, the splash of water, distant drums. Students note how limiting sensory information paradoxically increases tension because readers, like characters, cannot see threats coming.

Pacing Through Sentence Structure: Tolkien varies his sentence length and complexity to control pacing. During quiet moments exploring the empty halls, sentences lengthen with description and reflection. As danger approaches, sentences shorten and sharpen: “Doom, doom. The drums rolled faster. Doom, doom.”

The Unknown Enemy: For much of the sequence, the threat remains unnamed and partially obscured. “Something” follows them. Drums echo from unknown sources. Even Gandalf doesn’t fully understand what hunts them until the Balrog appears. This unknown enemy technique teaches students that mystery often frightens more than revelation.

Watching the Film: Jackson’s Adaptation

After reading, we watch the corresponding scenes from Jackson’s film, and students immediately notice how cinematic techniques create parallel effects through different means:

Visual Foreshadowing: Where Tolkien uses words to build dread, Jackson uses visual composition. The camera lingers on ominous spaces, tracks across skeletal remains, and frames characters as small figures in vast, hostile architecture. The color palette shifts darker as they descend.

Light and Shadow: Jackson translates Tolkien’s sensory limitation into visual language. Gandalf’s staff provides the only light source, creating pools of illumination surrounded by impenetrable darkness. The camera often places threats at the edge of visibility or in complete shadow, forcing viewers to strain to see—the visual equivalent of straining to hear in the text.

Sound Design: Howard Shore’s score and the sound design team amplify the drums, splashes, and echoes that Tolkien describes. But film adds dimensional sound—drums that seem to surround the theater, whispers from multiple directions, the bone-deep rumble of the Balrog’s approach. Students recognize how film can assault multiple senses simultaneously in ways prose cannot.

The Balrog Revelation: The creature’s appearance demonstrates “show, don’t tell” at its most literal. Rather than describing the Balrog’s horror through language, Jackson reveals it gradually—first as fire and shadow, then through reaction shots of the Fellowship’s terror, finally in full monstrous glory. Students discuss how this visual revelation differs from Tolkien’s more abstract description: “a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater.”

Comparative Analysis: Writing Exercise

After experiencing both versions, students complete a comparative writing exercise where they must create two versions of an original suspenseful scene: one as prose fiction, one as a screenplay excerpt with shot descriptions and sound cues.

This exercise reveals the unique affordances of each medium. In prose, students learn they can:
– Enter characters’ internal thoughts and fears
– Control exactly what readers “see” through selective description
– Use sentence rhythm and structure to pace revelation
– Deploy language’s full arsenal: metaphor, alliteration, symbolic description

In screenplay format, students discover they must:
– Think visually—what can the camera show?
– Consider sound as a separate narrative element
– Use white space and formatting to suggest pacing
– Trust actors and directors to convey internal states through external performance

Many students find the screenplay format liberating because it removes the pressure of “beautiful” writing and focuses instead on concrete, sensory storytelling. Others prefer prose because it allows more control over reader experience. Both groups gain insight into their craft.

Frankenstein’s Monster: Birth of Horror

The second pairing teaches similar lessons through a different genre lens: Gothic techno-horror rather than epic fantasy.

Reading Shelley: The Original Scene

Mary Shelley’s creature awakening scene is remarkably brief—barely two pages—yet establishes tropes that would define horror for two centuries. When we read it, students analyze:

Scientific vs. Supernatural Dread: Unlike traditional Gothic novels that rely on ghosts and curses, Shelley grounds her horror in science gone wrong. Victor’s methodical preparation—”I collected the instruments of life around me”—creates unease through clinical detail rather than supernatural atmosphere. Students recognize this as the birth of science fiction horror.

Delayed Description: Shelley withholds the creature’s full appearance initially. Victor notices individual features—”dull yellow eye,” “shriveled complexion,” “straight black lips”—before the horror coalesces into recognition. This teaches the power of revealing threats incrementally.

Protagonist Horror: The scene’s power comes not from the creature’s actions (it does nothing threatening) but from Victor’s reaction—his disgust, terror, and immediate abandonment of his creation. Students discuss how horror often resides in perspective and response rather than inherent monstrosity.

Immediate Consequences: Shelley moves swiftly from triumph to horror to flight. The compressed timeline—months of obsessive work, one moment of success, immediate revulsion—teaches dramatic irony and the danger of unchecked ambition.

Watching Whale: Creating Cinema Horror

James Whale’s 1931 film takes astonishing liberties with Shelley’s text, yet captures something essential about the story’s horror. Students compare:

The Storm: Whale adds the iconic thunderstorm, creating a visual spectacle Shelley’s novel lacks. Lightning becomes both life-giver and Gothic atmosphere. Students discuss why filmmakers often externalize internal states—Victor’s turbulent emotions become literal weather.

The Birth Sequence: Where Shelley describes the awakening in a few sentences, Whale extends it into a set-piece. The rising platform, crackling electricity, and famous “It’s alive!” scene create spectacle from what was originally intimate horror. This teaches students about medium expectations—1931 audiences paid to see something, and Whale delivers visual wonder.

The Creature’s Appearance: Boris Karloff’s makeup and performance create an immediately iconic image—flat head, neck bolts, hulking frame. This concrete visualization differs dramatically from Shelley’s more ambiguous description of an eight-foot creature with “yellow skin” that “scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath.” Students debate whether this specificity helps or hurts the story.

Sympathy vs. Horror: Karloff’s performance—the confused gestures, the childlike wonder at sunlight, the tragic isolation—immediately humanizes the creature in ways Shelley reveals more gradually. This prompts discussion about how visual media accelerates emotional connection and whether that serves the story.

Tropes and Legacy

The real pedagogical value comes in examining how Whale’s film established visual and narrative tropes that persist in horror cinema today:

– The laboratory full of bubbling equipment and electrical apparatus
– The “mad scientist” shouting triumph at the moment of creation
– Thunder and lightning accompanying unholy births
– The “monster” revealed through shadow before showing full form
– The tragic creature who frightens despite not intending harm

Students trace these tropes through modern films, recognizing how a 1931 adaptation of an 1818 novel continues to influence contemporary horror. This historical awareness helps them understand genre as conversation across time, with each work responding to and building upon predecessors.

Writing Exercise: The Transformation Scene

For their comparative writing exercise with this pairing, students create both prose and screenplay versions of a “transformation” or “creation” scene—something comes to life, changes form, or crosses a threshold from one state to another. This might be:

– A magical creature hatching
– A character gaining superpowers
– An AI becoming self-aware
– A zombie rising from death
– A spell transformation

The exercise requires them to:
1. Build suspense before the transformation
2. Control pacing during the revelation
3. Focus on sensory details appropriate to their medium
4. Show character reaction to establish emotional stakes
5. Consider how much to show vs. suggest

Students discover that prose allows them to intersperse action with reflection and internal monologue—Victor can simultaneously describe events and his horror. Screenplay format demands externalization—horror must be visible in expression, movement, sound.

Why October? Why These Texts?

Beyond the seasonal appropriateness of darker material, these pairings serve specific pedagogical purposes:

Engagement: Students genuinely want to analyze these scenes. The suspense, action, and horror elements capture attention in ways that some literary fiction doesn’t, creating teachable moments with a captive audience.

Accessible Complexity: Both passages work on multiple levels. Struggling readers can follow the basic action—entering mines, monster appears, fight happens—while advanced readers appreciate Tolkien’s linguistic craft or Shelley’s philosophical subtexts. Film adds another access point for visual learners.

Genre Awareness: Teaching epic fantasy and Gothic horror side-by-side reveals how different genres create suspense through different techniques. Fantasy builds through accumulation and scale; horror through violation and dread. Students learn that genre conventions aren’t restrictions but toolkits.

Craft Transfer: The specific techniques—foreshadowing, sensory detail, pacing, revelation timing—transfer directly to any suspenseful writing students might attempt, regardless of genre. A student writing contemporary realism can use the same delayed revelation technique Shelley employs.

Media Literacy: In an age when students consume more visual narrative than text, teaching them to “read” film with the same analytical rigor they apply to prose builds crucial media literacy. They learn that films aren’t just entertainment but crafted texts with deliberate rhetorical choices.

Implementation Tips

For teachers wanting to try these pairings:

Time Management: Each pairing requires roughly 3-4 class periods: one for reading and initial discussion, one for viewing and note-taking, one for comparative analysis, and one for the writing exercise. Budget accordingly.

Reading Strategies: Both passages contain challenging vocabulary and complex syntax. Pre-reading vocabulary work helps, as does reading aloud in class with strategic pauses for clarification and prediction.

Viewing Guides: Don’t just passively watch. Give students specific elements to track—lighting choices, camera angles, sound design, pacing. This transforms watching into active analysis.

Differentiation: Some students will gravitate toward prose writing, others toward screenplay format. That’s fine—the goal is understanding how narrative choices serve story purposes, not mastering both forms equally.

Extension Options: Advanced students might script and film their own brief versions of their transformation scenes, adding practical filmmaking to the theoretical understanding. Others might write analytical essays comparing the adaptations.

Conclusion

Teaching writing craft through these classic page-to-screen comparisons gives students concrete examples of narrative techniques in action. They see how Tolkien builds dread through limited sensory information and how Jackson translates that into shadow and light. They recognize how Shelley’s clinical language creates science-horror and how Whale transforms intimate horror into visual spectacle.

Most importantly, students learn that good writing—whether prose or screenplay, fantasy or horror—comes from deliberate choices about what to reveal, when to reveal it, and how to make audiences feel. These aren’t mysterious artistic gifts but craft elements that can be studied, practiced, and improved.

When students leave class able to articulate why the Balrog scene terrifies or how Karloff’s performance generates sympathy, they’re not just better readers and viewers—they’re better writers, equipped with techniques they can deploy in their own creative work. And they’ve learned it all through stories that genuinely excite them, during a month when suspense and horror feel seasonally appropriate.

That’s teaching writing craft without it feeling like work—which might be the best trick of all.