the two work's narrative. While Walker's tale is also full of oppression and misery, it does have many uplifting moments. At the beginning of the story, Celie's father has impregnated her for the second time. Both children are taken away from the girl. The movie version, largely faithful to the book, shows a shy, retiring pregnant girl in its first images, who too afraid to look anyone in the eye. One of the most poignant scenes in both the film and the book is when Celie goes to a general store, and sees another woman with the illegitimate, incestuous baby her father gave away. Celie can no longer have children, because she has been made barren by her father's abuse.
             This realistic horror, however awful, can be exhibited within the conventional narrative devices of realistic film. In contrast, Morrison when tells the tale of Beloved, she begins with the conceit that the ghost of a dead baby has grown up while her mother has attempted to make peace with the demons of being forcibly returned to the plantation where she gave birth to the child. While a powerful, strange concept in prose, the idea of taking a ghost seriously becomes difficult and undercuts the power of the movie's message and rendering of the historical injustice of slavery. The actress playing the ghost seems, "as Beloved...like an alien," wrote Roger Ebert, of the difficult task set forth for Thandie Newton. (Ebert, 1998) "The flashbacks to the atrocities Sethe witnessed and endured at Sweet Home are presented to us in the manner of horror-movie shock cuts," and other ghost tales, rather than a historical drama. (Taylor, 1998)
             Part of this may be due to the lack of imagination on the director's part since he often resorts to horror movie cliches rather than the kind of creative innovation Morrison brought to fiction. The haunted house where Sethe and her lover Paul D live in Cincinnati, after being freed, se...