Monday, September 3, 2018

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Satisfy Curiosity

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


“Human beings,” communications professor Jib Fowles note, “are curious by nature, interested in the world around them, and intrigued by tidbits of knowledge and new developments.” In adverting, such appeals are often satisfied by the information that advertisements deliver. Unless a product is new to the market, the item advertised is usually already familiar to the advertisement's audience. In this case, the information such advertisements convey is likely to be about some “improvement” to the product, an increase in its size, or the addition of a new ingredient.


In horror fiction, the person, place, or thing about which curiosity is excited is apt to be unfamiliar to readers or moviegoers. In horror fiction, the anomalous makes us curious. We want to know about someone, someplace, or something because it is abnormal, aberrant, deviant, atypical, bizarre, singular, strange, or weird. Human cognition and experience is reducible to six categories, each of which relates to a specific question or set of questions: who?, what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, and how much? or how many? (quantity in number or volume). 

Each of these categories and related questions is further associated with a real-world, or existential, referent: why?, with an agent or an agency; what?, with an action or an object; when?, with time or duration; where?, with location; how?, with method, process, or technique; why?, with cause, motive, purpose, or meaning; how many? with quantity in number; and how much?, with quantity in volume. All six categories relate to cognitive element, identity.

A table neatly summarizes these relationships:

Question
Existential Referent
Cognitive Element
Who?
Agent or agency
Identity
What?
Action or object
Identity
When?
Time or duration
Identity
Where?
Location
Identity
How?
Method, process, or technique
Identity
Why?
Cause, motive, purpose, or meaning
Identity
How many? How much?
Quantity (in number or volume)
Identity


It is with regard to these categories that curiosity is aroused, either by ignorance or by the appearance of the anomalous or the extraordinary (or, most often, by the combination of the two). In other words, in horror fiction (as in life), questions about the identities of agents or agencies, actions or objects, times or duration, locations, methods, processes, techniques, causes, motives, purposes, meanings, and quantities make us curious.

As we discovered in a previous post, the suppression of knowledge about the origin or nature of an entity, a force, or another kind of phenomenon maintains mystery and suspense. It also maintains curiosity, of course. Since we've already covered this ground, let's focus on the other major cause of curiosity, the appearance itself of the anomalous or the extraordinary.


We're familiar with this figure of ancient Greek mythology, although it was doubtlessly astonishing enough to us the first time we made her acquaintance, which brings up a point: all things are extraordinary the first time that we encounter them. Often, they can be made extraordinary again, by transforming them in some way:


Unless we're experts in a particular field of inquiry, many of the phenomena that are familiar to the experts will be new—and, therefore, unfamiliar—to us, as laypersons. I'd never seen this creature before (or so I'd thought), but zoologists have, and when they identified it as a turtle without a shell, I realized I have seen the animal before, just not without its shell. The mystery was solved, but, in the process, the extraordinary became ordinary (sort of).



As Edgar Allan Poe said (and showed, many times in his own work), by combining old forms in new ways, an author creates new visions of reality and suggests fresh perspectives on our lives. In the process, writers (and other artists) also evoke readers' or audiences' curiosity and appeal to their need to satisfy this curiosity.

Plenty of horror stories and movies appeal to reader's or viewers' need to satisfy their curiosity. We'll limit our discussion to just three of them: H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room,” the film adaptation of Stephen King's short story “1408,” and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 movie Psycho (1960).


Having absconded with her boss's money instead of depositing it in the bank, Marion Crane is forced by a storm to stop at an out-of-the-way motel. She waits in her car, but no one in the office comes outside to assist her, so she dashes inside, only to find the office empty. Going outside again, she notices a light on in a second-story window of a Victorian house on a hill overlooking the motel. Seeing a woman walk past the window, she returns to her car and honks her horn. A young man hastens from the house, down three flights of stairs, and crosses the parking lot, inviting Marion into the motel's office, where she registers while he makes small talk about the decline in the motel's business after the new highway bypassed the motor lodge.


The sight of the house, large and imposing, that looks down on the motel, emphasizes the Victorian residence as a presence. Overseeing all that takes place within its purview, it sees all, knows all, at least in relation to its manager, Norman Bates. Literally looking down on him, the house also represents the judgment of his mother, the dominant personality he has created within his disordered mind. His every action, thought, and emotion is controlled by Mother, who makes her disdain for Marion and women in general known and soon puts an end to any possibility that Norman will be able to develop a romantic relationship with Marion (not that this seems at all likely).

By showing the audience not just a house, but this house—large, imposing, dark, and located on a hill high above the motel Norman manages—Hitchcock excites his viewers' curiosity. As the movie progresses and the audience learns more about this abode, their curiosity, although partly satisfied, is further aroused, as new mysteries are revealed. Why, for example, is there an outline of a body in the mattress of the bed in Norman's mother's bedroom? What other dark secrets does the house hold?


In dreams, some believe, houses symbolize the human personality. The attic is the intellect, the basement the unconscious. The bedroom represents sexuality; the kitchen, domesticity and nourishment; the dining room, appetites; the living room, personal interests. If one follows adopts such suggestions, applying them to the characters in Hitchcock's film and the incidents that transpire because of their actions, the film may take a new level of psychological complexity, although many would reject such an interpretation as unscientific and speculative. In any case, the house is certainly a symbolic presence that exerts a malevolent influence on the thoughts, emotions, and actions of its residents, Norman, and his “Mother”—and it certainly evokes and sustains the audiences need to satisfy their curiosity.


Stephen King's 1999 short story “1408,” and the 2007 motion picture of the same title based on it, are, in effect, reversals of H. G. Wells's 1894 short story, “The Red Room.” In all three stories, the protagonist (Mike Enslin in King's story and the movie adaptation of it and an unnamed young man in Wells's story) are warned multiple times in the strongest terms not to go through with their intention of investigating the supernatural events that have allegedly occurred in a hotel (King) and a castle (Wells). In each story, the protagonist is skeptical of the existence of supernatural entities. Disregarding the warnings not to investigate, both Enslin and Wells's protagonist stay overnight, putting the reports of supernatural activity to the test.

The multiple, fervent warnings arouse readers' and viewers' curiosity, as does the question of whether the protagonists' respective investigations will prove or disprove the allegations that the places they investigate are haunted.


In King's story and the film adaptation of it, Enslin discovers that a supernatural presence, ghostly or demonic, haunts the hotel room in which he stayed, barely surviving the experience, whereas Wells's protagonist finds that only his own fear, which has caused his imagination to run away with him, haunts the castle chamber in which he'd spent the night.


According to literary critic Tzevetan Todorov, fantastic literature tends to resolve the issue of whether narrative events are supernatural by either affirming or denying this proposition. If science can explain the events, they are no longer fantastic, but uncanny; otherwise, the events are marvelous. Whereas Wells's story suggests that the events his protagonist experienced are uncanny (the are explainable as the results of an imagination overly excited by fear), King's story and the film based on it both suggest that science cannot explain the incidents that Enslin experienced, so they are no longer fantastic, but marvelous. Thus, in this sense, King's story is a reversal of Wells's tale.

One more point needs to be highlighted. Fowles does not say that most advertisements appeal to people's curiosity. He says that they appeal to people's need to satisfy their curiosity, mostly by becoming informed, i. e., by being educated, about an advertised product or a service. The appeal to the need to satisfy curiosity is a means of generating suspense, which will keep readers reading or viewers viewing as they anticipate the moment at which all shall be made known and the mystery of the nature or the origin of the phenomenon the story's characters have encountered is resolved.
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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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