Genre
As a period piece, Shutter Island is laced with nods to different films in the film noir and horror genre, and could generally be viewed as paying homage to Alfred Hitchcock's works. Scorsese stated in an interview that while the main reference to Teddy Daniels was Dana Andrews' character in Laura, he was also influenced by several very low-budget 1940s zombie movies made by Val Lewton. The main frame of the plot bears strong resemblance to William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration, a film also known as Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane.
La Croix noted that Shutter Island was a "complex and puzzling" work which borrowed from genres as diverse as detective and fantasy, and notably the psychological thriller.
There have been differing opinions over the ending of the film in which Laeddis tells Dr. Sheehan that one can "live as a monster, or die as a good man"—a line that does not appear in the book. According to Scorsese's psychiatric adviser, Professor James Gilligan of New York University, Laeddis' last words mean: "I feel too guilty to go on living. I'm not going to actually commit suicide, but I'm going to vicariously commit suicide by handing myself over to these people who're going to lobotomise me." Dennis Lehane, however, was quoted as saying, "Personally, I think he has a momentary flash.... It's just one moment of sanity mixed in the midst of all the other delusions."
Read more about this topic: Shutter Island (film)
Famous quotes containing the word genre:
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)