Rather than portraying the figure as an antagonist or hero like modern paranormal stories tend to do, the knight embodies a more ambivalent worldly force: he's there to preserve the sanctity of the castle and uphold the prophecy. The inhumanely giant supernatural knight is one of its main gothic elements it follows the classic trail of clues from a giant helmet to rumors of giant limbs, until its climatic revelation of its role in the prophecy. The story is littered with gothic tropes from hidden identities, damsels in distress, a dark menacing castle, supernatural forces, and secret passageways.Īs the first established gothic horror story, Castle of Otranto contains some horror tropes and many precursors to the more common tropes we see today. When she refuses and escapes, there are a number of supernatural events involving a giant knight, multiple marriage proposals and multiple deaths, eventually concluding with Manfred's abdication and Isabella's marriage to her savior. The story follows the prince of Otranto, Manfred, who is trying to avoid an ancient prophecy pervading his castle: the leadership "should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it." It opens with his son's death in which he is crushed by a giant helmet, leading to Manfred's decision to wed Isabella, who was going to be his future daughter-in-law. This framed narration is similar to the novel itself, which presents the story as an analysis of a cryptic manuscript from the time of the Crusades (1095-1291) that is in the process of translation.
The grainy black and white frames of the archeological discovery starkly contrasts the vibrant cut-out, stop-motion animation of the abridged story-telling.
Švankmajer's 1977 pseudo-documentary follows an amateur archaeologist and his exploration of the setting of Otranto Castle, which he claims is actually based on a castle in Czechoslovakia and not Italy like the novel suggests.
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