Lastly, the short story has influenced one the horror’s genres most unique minds, writer/director Ari Aster and his 2019 film Midsommar. Her main idea in writing the story was to show that real terror could be found inside humanity, and when a system is put in place to keep order but take away the personal freedoms of the individual, nothing good can happen. By the time the reader reaches the story’s dramatic conclusion, that lottery winner, Tessie Hutchinson, is not a winner at all, the ideal countryside and lovely weather become ironic details in a brutal exercise of the human condition. It is here where Jackson excels in her storytelling. We meet some families of the town and everything seems completely normal. The locals are going through their day with anticipation of the yearly lottery ritual little girls are picking flowers and little boys are playing with rocks. The story takes place in a quaint small town on a beautiful summer’s day. RELATED: 10 Horror Movies That Changed The Genre Forever The idea here is that the scariest monster is not some beast lurking in the woods, but your next-door neighbor or the person you pass by in the milk aisle of the grocery store. This is not a story that is outwardly trying to shock you, it is instead trying to show you how easily something like the actual lottery could take place.

The key to understanding the significance of “The Lottery” is to recognize the slow burning fear that Jackson develops in the story. In many ways, Jackson’s writing can be seen a reaction to the world she lived in, a staple of horror authors to this day. And while “The Lottery” made Jackson a household name and earned a significant amount of money for her family, she was still expected to prioritize her household duties. Jackson was a prolific writer at a time when women were not expected to be anything besides a mother and homemaker. In many ways the story is a tale of Jackson’s troubled life. The effect of Jackson’s gruesome story can be seen in a wide range of horror films, from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 genre classic Psycho to Jordan Peele’s 2017 revolutionary film Get Out.įirst published in 1948 in the New Yorker, “The Lottery” is Shirley Jackson’s dark look at what happens when ordinary life is injected by the macabre. That is the impact Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” has had on horror films. The idea that a short story is powerful enough to influence an entire genre of film is something else. The idea of a short story being adapted to film is nothing new.

Jackson the lottery summary