![]() Like possessed dolls or killer clowns, the dissonance of seeing something innocuous turned evil heightened the uncanny feeling. Throughout the rest of The Lord of the Rings, horses were kind, faithful companions, so these dark horses were a corruption of something innocent. Tolkien described the Nazgûl's steeds as ordinary black horses, but the cinematic versions had glowing red eyes and bloody, nail-ridden hooves. The films psychologically manipulated the audience in some ways that the novel did not. If the set and CGI model could frighten Jackson behind the scenes, it would certainly frighten audiences caught up in the movie's magic. The great spider's lair was filled with thick webs and the remains of her previous victims, spine-chilling imagery that contributed to her creepiness. ![]() Similarly, Jackson suffered from arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, and he wove this fear into Shelob's scenes. ![]() The knowledge that something could skulk unseen beneath the surface built up a sense of unease before the Watcher appeared. The Watcher in the Water that attacked the Fellowship outside the Mines of Moria lurked at the bottom of a deep, dark lake, tapping into thalassophobia, the fear of large bodies of water. As well as making the monsters themselves visually scary, Jackson and Wētā Workshop ensured that the films scarily presented them. The monsters of The Lord of the Rings were horrifying because they preyed on the audience's psychology. Since readers - and later, viewers of the film adaptations - were already familiar with these tropes to an extent, the narrative did not need to do as much to convince them that the monsters should be feared. For example, Orcs and Uruk-hai behaved similarly to zombies, being cannibalistic, humanoid monsters who moved in droves. Some of Tolkien's monsters even paralleled tropes that would not become popular until long after The Lord of the Rings' publication. Shelob and the Oliphaunts, meanwhile, embodied the similarly popular trope of giant versions of ordinary beasts. Ghosts and similar creatures have persisted in pop culture and mythology throughout history because humans have always been haunted by the question of what happens after death. In Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo also struggled against the ghoulish Barrow-wights, a scene Jackson did not include. In the chapter "The Forbidden Pool" from The Two Towers, Faramir even described them as "living ghosts." Nazgûl were far from the only undead creatures who roamed Middle-earth, as the Dead Men of Dunharrow were cursed by Isildur to linger as phantoms in the White Mountains. The first servants of Sauron that Frodo encountered, the Nazgûl, were essentially ghosts they were invisible wraiths who rode under the cover of night and struck those around them with intangible fear. Despite the term's negative connotation, tropes came into existence for a reason: they have been proven to work. Tolkien was a pioneer of the fantasy genre, but he also drew from long-standing tropes.
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