The Lottery and stylized rituals of violence

Director Larry Yust’s The Lottery is a short film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s ironic, horrifying short story ‘The Lottery’. Jackson’s print text and Yust’s film serve as an entry point for discussion in my undergraduate literature and film course unit focused on intertextual analysis. Close comparisons of Jackson’s and Yust’s text lead to examinations of comparative shot sequences in dystopian films such as Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale and Gary Ross’s The Hunger Games , among others. My study examines Yust’s complex short film as an intertextual nexus to cinemas past and present, as well as anthropological, psychological and literary studies of rituals, violence and society’s fascination with their ongoing representation.