Thursday, August 23, 2018

Horror Fiction: The Appeal to the Need for Attention

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Animal predators are attracted by sights, sounds, and scents.


Predators' eyes face forward, providing them with binocular vision. The view of one eye overlaps with that of the other eye, allowing a predator to judge the distance to prey and “how fast its prey is moving.” In predators equipped with more than one set of eyes—spiders, for example, which have “clusters of six to eight eyes”—use some of its eyes to “form the image” of its prey, other eyes to “estimate distance, and still others [of its eyes] to detect motion.” Nocturnal predators, both terrestrial and marine, are equipped with 'special mirror-like structures in the back[s] of their eyes,” which provide them with night vision.


Not only do predators have excellent sight, but they also possess superb hearing: “In mammals, external ear flaps can be swiveled forward or backward in order to pinpoint the direction of a sound. The ears of bats are often highly specialized, with strange shapes that help catch the echoes of the calls they make as they fly.” However, some predators don't have to have ears to hear their prey; they perceive vibrations by feeling them in their bodies.


Some predators can smell prey from a mile off, while others can sniff out buried food. Such predators may use their amazing sense of smell to track the prey they hunt.

Their extremely sharp senses of sight, hearing, and smell make predators formidable adversaries, but prey animals have evolved defenses against these hunters, including camouflage, toxic chemicals, and mimicry.


Animals that use chemical toxins are often brightly colored. Their brilliant hues warn other animals, including predators, that seeking to eat them could be a dangerous, perhaps fatal, mistake.


The “coloration, marking patterns,” or general appearance of a prey animal or insect can make them resemble something else, such camouflage lending them the appearance of a leaf or twig or another animal or insect, including toxic plants or animals. 


Mimicry “is similar to camouflage, but in mimicry.” except that the model is generally a similar organism rather than a static part of the background environment.” The common types of mimicry are Batesian mimicry and Mullerian mimicry. In the former, “an edible mimic resembles” one that tastes foul or is poisonous.” in Mullerian mimicry, by contrast, “two (or more) distasteful or poisonous organisms resemble each other.” While only the mimic benefits from Batesian mimicry, “both species benefit” from the latter type of mimicry, “because a predator who learns to avoid one species will most likely avoid the other, too.”

Often, horror fiction appeals to the need for attention by either affirming this need (that is, by showing it as being satisfied) or (far more often) in a negative manner, by denying its satisfaction or by showing that its fulfillment leads to disastrous consequences.

In horror fiction, the need for attention takes many forms, but, no matter which form it takes, it typically leads to misfortune or death.


In many horror movies, the need for attention is exhibited (literally) in characters' shedding their clothes. Nudity certainly attracts attention, quickly and easily, especially if men are present. (Research shows that men tend to respond more strongly to visual, women to tactile, cues.)

Fowles distinguishes between nudity as an appeal to the need for sex and nudity as an appeal to the need for attention. Partly, the nature of the appeal is a matter of context. Who is naked, a man or a woman, and at whom is his or her nakedness directed, at the same or the opposite sex? In general, if a nude woman's image is directed at women, it is probably designed to appeal to the need for attention. However, if a nude female model appears in a sexual context, with a nude male model, the appeal is apt to be to the audience's need for sex. The same is true in reverse: if a nude man's image is directed at men, it is probably designed to appeal to the need for attention. However, if a nude male model appears in a sexual context, with a nude female model, the appeal is apt to be to the audience's need for sex: 



. . . the Jordache ads with the lithe, blouse-less female astride a similarly clad male is clearly an appeal to the audience's sexual drives, but the same cannot be said about Brooke Shields in the Calvin Klein commercials. Directed at young women and their credit-card carrying mothers, the image of Miss Shields instead invokes the need to be looked at. Buy Calvins and you'll be the center of much attention, just as Brooke is, the ads imply; they do not primarily inveigle their target audience's need for sexual intercourse.

In horror movies, nudity is sometimes a prelude to sex, but whether it is or not, disrobing (like sex) is likely to lead to something much less pleasant than romance—namely violence or death at the hands of the villain, who's frequently a psychopathic murderer (Psycho), a supernatural serial killer (Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street), or a monster or an alien (Species). In horror movies, a few moments of nudity also provide a distraction that, contrasting with the gore to come, makes violent death seem all the more horrific. (It's also apt to sell more movie tickets.) 

Although nudity is frequently featured in horror movies and is definitely related to the predator's sense of sight, it's not the only way characters seek attention, and, as in regard to the predator's sense of sight, some of the ways characters want to become the center of things align, ironically, with the predator's sense of smell or hearing.


According to vampire lore, the undead are able to smell blood even when it is inside a stopped bottle. In fact, vampire hunters sometimes turned this ability against the predators using a process known as “bottling.” According to
Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, blood was poured into a bottle, which was stopped with a cork, sealing wax, and a saint's picture. “Left where the vampire will be able to smell the blood,” the bottle lured the vampire into taking “its invisible form” and entering the bottle, whereupon it was corked and sealed with wax and a saint's image and flung into a fire. The bottle would shatter, releasing the vampire into the fire, which would destroy the vampire. In Anne Rice's novel, Interview with the Vampire, as in other works of such fiction, the undead likewise can smell blood. 


A Quiet Place is a contemporary horror movie that exposes the dangers posed by an extraterrestrial alien with phenomenally good hearing. When we are frightened by a predator, it's natural to scream so as to alert others of the presence of danger, either so that they can assist us or so that they can avoid the menace. However, this need for attention—or, more precisely, this need to draw attention—becomes, ironically, itself a danger. By sounding an alarm, we could attract the attention of the alien, which has hypersensitive hearing and respond to any sound or noise by attacking its source. Thus, to express, or to give voice to, the need for attention in this way is to invite violence, pain, and probable death. 


The movie poster for Alien also suggests that a need that usually facilitates survival can also endanger it. The poster's caption reads: “In space no one can hear you scream.” The unspoken subtext seems to be “scream all you want.” In space, one is not only isolated, cut off from the organizations and institutions that could aid one's survival—police, medical experts and practitioners, military personnel, fire and rescue teams—but one is also in a vacuum, through which sound waves cannot travel. As Jonathan Strickland explains:

Sound waves can travel only through matter. Since there's almost no matter in interstellar space, sound can't travel through it. The distance between particles is so great that they would never collide with each other. Even if you could get a front seat for the explosion of the [Star Wars] Death Star, you wouldn't hear anything at all.
 
As Fowles points out, advertisers appeal to the fifteen basic needs universal to all humankind in two ways, either positively, addressing or depicting their satisfaction, or negatively, by denying the satisfaction of such needs. In either case, an appeal is made to the need. Horror novels and movies do the same, evoking the need for attention either by showing it's satisfaction (by allowing villains [and audiences] a glimpse of bare flesh, for example), or by frustrating this need (by requiring its repression or by preventing it altogether, both on the penalty of death).


However the need for attention is addressed, this need is often one to which horror novels and movies, like other genres of popular fiction, appeals, and this appeal is another reason for its box office success.
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Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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