"The Cone": Style, Sentence by Sentence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” Wells is a master of style. He makes every word count toward the creation of the final effect he designs his stories to create. Style, as Jonathan Swift defines it, is “proper words in their proper places.” Mark Twain, like other writers, agrees that “the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” AlfredHitchcock says something similar concerning images, the lexicon of film. It is not any single image that matters, he says, but the way in which they are assembled to evoke thought and feeling. On the importance of style, a science fiction writer, a satirist, a humorist, and a master of suspense agree, as does any serious writer or producer. Style is not a small thing; it is everything, for it shapes and invigorates everything: character, including dialogue, action, plot, setting, theme.

With a single phrase or sentence, Wells often accomplishes several narrative or rhetorical purposes at once in his exemplary short story, “The Cone,” as he does in his other tales. The story is a true tour de force, the literary equivalent of expressionistic and surreal paintings, but, as I discuss this aspect of the story in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” there's no need to repeat it here. Instead, I will concentrate on the effects, literary and rhetorical, he achieves by several phrases and sentences in “The Cone.”

At the outset of the story, his omniscient narrator comments, “They [Mrs Horrocks and the artist Raut] sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there.” This sentence accomplishes three things:

1. It suggests that the air is not “fresher” near the open window, because it is not “fresh” anywhere.
2. The fact that they are “trying to fancy” fresh air near the window means that they are not succeeding. The open window admits no fresh air; like their attempt to imagine fresher air, the open window is a mere prop and, therefore, a failure.
3. The illicit couple's attempt to “fancy the air was fresher” characterizes them. In the face of a reality they find unpleasant, they imagine their circumstances are different. They seek to impose their own preferences upon the world, adjusting what is to what is suitable to them. In this, the sentence's use of “attempt” suggests, they also fail.

Wells gets much out of other phrases, too. In the story's fifth paragraph, his narrator describes an approaching train: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed” not only shows the passing of the cars, but also makes readers count them as they go past: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks.” The counting helps to make the paragraph active, but it also reinforces the number of cars in the train. The ironworks, we think, is a busy, productive place. In the same sentence, the narrator adds that the cars “were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel,” causing readers to imagine each car being “extinguished” as it enters the tunnel's “throat.” This description includes one of the many personifications Wells uses to bring his ironworks to life as an active, vengeful, and menacing entity.

For Raut, the ironworks represents “Gehenna,” meaning “a place of burning, torment, or misery,” or, “(in Judaism and the New Testament, Hell).” The ironworks is impertinent, daring to belch “fire and dust into the face of heaven.” Raut's words suggest that the ironworks is an affront to God Himself, an impious, wicked hell the very existence of which is an insult to heaven. “Fire and dust,” the insults, as it were, which the hellish ironworks belch “into the face of heaven,” are later juxtaposed to the Biblical phrase “pillars of cloud” and “pillars of fire” in which God appears to Moses and the Israelites as He guides them across the desert after their escape from pharaoh: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” (Exodus 13:21). The substitution of “fire” for the more eloquent phrase “pillars of fire” and of sullying “dust” for the more elegant expression “a pillar of a cloud” degrades the poetic language of the Bible, substituting crass terminology for its elevated diction. While Raut accuses the ironworks of insulting God, it is he, through his paraphrases of scripture, who actually does so.

In two clever sentences, Wells creates a sort of reverse-personification. His omniscient narrator describes blast furnaces, which stand “heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron,” as if they are hearts full of passion and rage; Horrocks himself, as their manager, is the mind, or soul, that controls these savage breasts. His “seething” passions and the “incessant turmoil of [the] flames” of his rage are the vengeful hearts that will burn Raut alive. 

 

Throughout descriptions of the ironworks, Wells's omniscent narrator uses phrases suggestive of violence, blood, death, and hell to depict the ironworks, the scene of Raut's eventual demise: “ghostly stunted beehive shapes,” “a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts,” “fitful flames,” “hammer beat heavily,” “palpating red stuff,” “blood-red reflections,” “succession of ghosts,” “blood-red vapour as red and hot as sun,” “white as death,” “fire writhing in the pit,” “sulphurous vapor,” “boil the blood,” and “hot suffocating flame.”

References to Gehenna, “the pit,” “pillars of cloud by day,” “pillars of fire by night,” “sin,” “sulphorous vapor” and “God” give the story a Biblical, if not an expressly Christian, context, as does Horrocks's horror at what he has done when “his sanity returned to him,” following his apparent crime of passion and he observes the effect of his vengeance, the sobbing, “inhuman, monstrous creature” that had been Raut. However, this context is undercut by Raut's reference to Jove and the omniscient narrator's allusion to “half-naked Titans.” Not only does the adulterous behavior of Raut and Mrs. Horrocks and Horrocks's seeking of vengeance against Raut suggest that religion is, for them, merely conventional, rather than sincere and devout, but Raut's use of the expression “by Jove,” like the omniscient narrator's employment of the phrase “half-naked Titans,” also implies that none of the characters is religious. Whether Horrocks' own plea to God at the end of the story is genuine or merely an expression of his horror at the sight of what he has done is open to question.

Through his conscious and deliberate selections of words and constructions of phrases throughout “The Cone,” Wells creates and maintains a style that is not only appropriate to his tale, but one which complements it at every turn, creating ironic contradictions; movement and pace; a religious context; complex characterization through allusions and personification; a sense of violence, blood, death, and hell; doubt concerning the characters' true devotion to the religious faith that is implied by the story's allusions to religious themes and theological concepts; and, overall, the unity of effect that produces a seemingly inevitable resolution of the story's central conflict. Wells' style delivers a great deal, largely thanks to his deliberate use of language—“proper words in their proper places”—a and to his own inimitable artistic genius.

Alfred Hitchcock on the Importance of Style in Cinematic Storytelling

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, horror Movies don't expect much from their audiences. Typically, there's nothing philosophical or theological about them. As a rule, they don't offer social criticism. If they mix science with their horror, the science is likely to be dubious. Psychology, when it's included, as an explanation for a character's bizarre behavior, is apt to be simplistic or patently absurd. History is usually general and vague or wrong altogether.

Audiences don't mind. They're happy to overlook such discrepancies. They're not interested in factual or political correctness. They want to see death and destruction, blood and guts, and a naked scream queen or two. Give them that, and they'll consider their $10 well spent.

Nevertheless, some horror movie directors want to give audiences more bang for their buck. They have something to say, and they want to say it. In addition to merely entertaining viewers, they want to share their visions, their understandings, their insights with audiences concerning evil, society, heroism, the human psyche, art, filmmaking, or what-have-you. Alfred Hitchcock is one such director. Stanley Kubrick is another. Both Scott Derrickson and William Friedkin are other horror movie directors whose films deliver more than fear, as is David Rosenberg.

Some of the points Hitchcock makes is about filming per se. In an interview with Cinema magazine, the director defines cinema as “pieces of film assembled.” The individual pieces of film, he adds, mean “nothing”; it is their combination, in such a way as to form a “mosaic” of them, whereby their “combination creates an idea” (or, he adds, later, “an emotion”), that they become meaningful. Part of the forming of the mosaic is the selection of the images; another part, in Psycho, in particular, is the “juxtaposition of angles” and the rapidity with which each piece of film appears, for only a fraction of a second, on the screen, resulting in the assembly of a “montage” suggestive of the stabbing of Marion Crane (Jennifer Leigh), while, in fact, “no knife ever touched any woman's body in that scene.”

In the same interview, Hitchcock also speaks of how he maintained and intensified suspense while avoiding a cliche in North by Northwest. The cliche was “a place of assignation [taking] the form of a figure under a street lamp at the corner of the street,” which is often used to “put [a] man on the spot.” Besides the boredom that results from the use of a cliche, another problem is that cliches set up predictable situations. The audience has seen them so many times before that they know what will follow.

To avoid this hackneyed device, Hitchcock “take[s] the loneliest, emptiest spot I can so that there is no place to run for cover, no place to hide, and no place for the enemy to hide, if we can call him that,” having the protagonist disembark from “the bus . . . , a little tiny figure,” standing in the middle of a “complete wasteland.”

Then Hitchcock seems to threaten the man. Just as he intends, the audience thinks, “Well. This is a strange place to put a man.” As cars pass, the audience begins to suppose, “"Ah, he's going to be shot at from a car,'” but Hitchcock frustrates this expectation by showing “a black limousine go by.”

Next, a car approaches from a different direction, stops, and “deposits a man,” before returning from the direction it came. Just as the director intends, the audience imagines the man may be the protagonist's assassin. When the main character approaches him, engaging the stranger in conversation, it's clear to the audience that the new arrival is not a killer. For a second time, Hitchcock has raised the audience's expectation as to what will occur, only to frustrate their prediction.

Now, as “the local bus” approaches, the stranger to whom the protagonist is speaking says, “That's funny.” He points out that a crop-dusting plane is “dusting a place where there's no crops.” The stranger gets onto the bus and leaves. Hitchcock says, “The audience says . . . 'Ah, the airplane.' Now, what's gonna be strange about the airplane, and you soon know. And from that point on you have a man trying to find cover. There is no cover until he gets into the cornfield. Now, you do in the design a very important thing.”

By avoiding a give-away cliche, and repeatedly arousing and frustrating his audience's expectations about what will happen, Hitchcock creates and maintains suspense. Then, when the threat they suspect is coming finally arrives, Hitchcock makes sure the action continues, as the protagonist scrambles “to find cover,” as he is chased by the menacing airplane. The entire scene, from beginning to end, is carefully designed before it is ever filmed. As Hitchcock explains, “This sequence is very carefully designed step by step both visually and to some extent in its menace . . . . So that's production design, exemplified in terms of its function.”

Any author of horror fiction should take the same pains as Hitchcock did in planning the action of his movie's scenes, remembering that the images created on the page, like those filmed on the sound stage or on location, are, when properly combined, in such a way as to form a “mosaic,” the means by which the writer “creates an idea”—and the way that he or she manipulates readers by causing them to draw inferences as to what will come next—inferences which the writer must then frustrate as he or she introduces new possibilities or plot twists.

Now that he has explained how to design combinations of images to create ideas, Hitchcock explains how to use the same process to create an emotion in his audience.

Hitchcock offers two examples. The first, from Psycho, involves Detective Milton Arbogas entering the Victorian house occupied by Norman Bates and his “mother.” As Arbogas steps onto the upper-story hallway floor, after having ascended the staircase, “Mother” rushes from her bedroom, knife in hand, and stabs him across the face. A close-up shot shows the bloody gash in his forehead and cheek and registers his shock as he begins to fall backward, down the stairs, pursued by his killer. Hitchcock explains how he captured this horrific sequence:

. . . When he got to the top of the stairs, I took the camera very high, extremely high. So that he was a small figure. And the figure of the woman came out, very small, dashed at him with a knife. And the knife went out, and we're still very high, and as the knife started to come down, I cut to a big head of the man. And the knife went right across the face, and he fell back from that point on. Now the reason for going high—and here we're talking about the juxtaposition of size of image. So the big head came as a shock to the audience, and to the man himself. His surprise was expressed by the size of the image. But you couldn't get the emphasis of that size unless you had prepared for it by going high.

As an example of how an effect can be varied, he refers to Rear Window, whose main character is L. B. “Jeff” Jeffrey, a photojournalist convalescing after having broken his leg. A voyeur, he spends much of his time peering at his neighbors across the way.

Mr. Stewart is sitting looking out of the window. He observes. We register his observations on his face. We are using the visual image now. We are using the mobility of the face, the expression, as our content of the piece of film. Let's give an example of how this can vary, this technique, with whatever he is looking at: Mr. Stewart looks out. Close-up. Cut to what he sees. Let's assume it's a woman holding a baby in her arms. Cut back to him. He smiles. Mr. Stewart likes babies. He's a nice gentleman. Take out only the middle piece of film, the viewpoint. Leave the close-ups in—the look and the smile. Put a nude girl in the middle instead of the baby. Now he's a dirty old man. By the changing of one piece of film only, you change the whole idea. It's a different idea.

When Jeffrey smiled at the baby, the audience thought him a “nice gentleman,” but were a nude woman substituted for the baby, the audience would have imagined Jeffrey is a pervert, and their emotional response to him would have been quite different.

Every piece of film that you put in the picture should have a purpose,” Hitchcock says, which means each sequence of images should be planned in detail and be combined so as to encourage the audience's ideas and emotions while depicting whatever action is called for by the scene. Style is the means by which Hitchcock says he accomplishes these goals, insisting, “I put first and foremost cinematic style before content . . . . Content is quite secondary to me.”

Alexander Pope defined style, with regard to writing, as “proper words in their proper places.” If “images” were substituted for words, so that, so amended, Pope's definition reads that style, with regard to film making, is proper images in their proper places, Hitchcock, no doubt, would agree. By substituting one image for another, Hitchcock can change the context of a scene and, as a result, the audience's reaction, or feelings, about Jeffrey.

Note: In future posts, we will consider the messages Stanley Kubrick, Scott Derrickson, William Friedkin, and David Rosenberg express through their films:

Visual Metaphors?

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Of the five senses, the primary one has always been sight, but until the advent of audio-visual technology, humanity has been able to use sight (and sound) as a communication tool only in rudimentary ways, one of which has been to agree with others that certain letters should represent particular sounds and that these sounds, voiced or unvoiced (that is, written), should signify the things that the sounds were intended to represent. Such communication is not only imperfect, but also indirect and abstract, rather than immediate and concrete.

However, with the advent of audio-visual technology, especially motion pictures, some of these limitations have faded and, today, audio-visual media, especially motion pictures, have become the main way by which humans communicate ideas. Progress marches apace, leaving the poor storyteller who is dependent upon the mere use of words behind. The best he or she can hope to do is to create word-pictures, or images, through descriptions.

However, if one cannot “beat them,” he or she may “join them,” and authors of fiction can learn, from their brothers and sisters in the film business, how to use images more effectively than, perhaps, they have done in the past, when readers were not as inundated by filmmakers’ sophisticated and subtle dramatization, rather than narration, of stories.

Trevor Whittock’s Metaphor and Film is a study in this and other aspects of the use of language, both linguistically and cinematographically. His book opens with three examples that indicate the nature of his text’s concern, one from “a director,” Alfred Hitchcock, another from “a scriptwriter,” Paul Schrader, and a third from “a film critic,” James F. Scott, before inviting his own readers to consider whether it makes sense to speak of “visual metaphors” at all and, if so, in what way and to what extent. The examples, like Whittock’s book in its entirety, are both interesting and enlightening.

Hitchcock declares:

“At the beginning of the film [The Birds] we show Rod Taylor in the bird shop. He catches the canary that has escaped from its cage, and after putting it back, he says to Tippi Hedren, “I’m putting you back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels.” I added that sentence during the shooting because I felt it added to her characterisation as a wealthy, shallow playgirl. And later on, when the gulls attack the village, Melanie Daniels takes refuge in a glass telephone booth and I show her as a bird in a cage. This time it isn’t a gilded cage, but a cage of misery . . . . It’s a reversal of the age-old conflict between men and birds. Here the human beings are in cages and the birds are on the outside. . . (1).

Schrader points out:

In the case of Taxi Driver, the theme was loneliness. Then you find a metaphor for the theme, one that expresses it. In Taxi Driver, that was the cabbie, the perfect expression of urban loneliness . . . (1).

James F. Scott observes:

White-light fog is used in the underwater sequence of The Graduate in which Benjamin, donning flippers and goggles, flees to the bottom of the family swimming pool, presumably to escape the overbearing camaraderie of his parents and their circle of friends. As the camera assumes his point of view, the world becomes a gloomy blur, shimmering but indistinct, agitated by the motion of the water and toned in a bilious, washed-out green. While the metaphor of diving reflects Benjamin’s introversion and retreat, the color quality of the image indicates the psychic cost of his escapism. He has ducked away from the plastic gewgaws of suburbia but only to set himself adrift in a turbid world of ghastly color and uncertain shapes (1).

Are the examples of visual metaphors or are these devices more akin, as W. B. Stanford believes, to “symbolism, parallelism, analogy, anything but metaphor”? (2). It is precisely this question, and others associated with it, that Whittock takes up in his fine study of Metaphor and Film, to which I will return in future posts.

Whittock, Trevor. Metaphor and film. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Beyond Blood, Guts, and Gore

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, we think of horror fiction as a visceral genre, focusing, as it frequently does, on blood and guts and gore. However, the best horror fiction transcends the merely physical and addresses, albeit usually symbolically, those dimensions of our existence that are peculiarly human: the theological, the philosophical, the social, the psychological, and the technological. We are more than bodies. We are ghosts. We are spirits. We are souls. We believe in God, we think about the implications of our perceptions and beliefs, we organize as societies and nations, we emote, and we use tools of spectacular complexity and variety. The best horror fiction addresses these aspects of our existence.

One reason that William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) is a great novel (and a movie, released in 1973) is that it explores the problem of evil and the meaning of true faith, showing that, more than being mere belief, such faith involves trust in God; love for God, for oneself, and for others; and the needs to forgive and to be forgiven. The novel also suggests that evil is not only real but that it is also of a spiritual, rather than of a psychological or a social, nature (although evil may be expressed psychologically or socially--or in other ways).

Part of the reason that The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) is a good, if not great, film, is that it is both theological, questioning whether God and the devil actually exist or are merely metaphors for experience that is not fully understood, and philosophical, asking whether human beings should consider themselves to be nothing more than one of the many products of evolution. There are consequences for both world views, the movie suggests, and it is the filmmaker's intent to force a decision for or against one worldview and its consequences or the other Weltanschauung and its consequences. According to the film's director, Scott Derrickson:

What I wanted to do was write something that wasn’t propaganda, wasn’t about trying to persuade people to think the way that I do, but recognize the fundamental importance of that question, the central question — does the spiritual realm exist? Is there a devil, and more importantly, is there a God? And if so, what are the implications of that? I don’t care what you believe — those are questions to be reckoned with… Everyone has to answer that question. And in some ways everyone lives their life based on what they believe about that question.

Many of Stephen King’s novels examine the effects of community life upon the residents of small towns, focusing upon the pressures upon, and the consequences to, individuality and personality that social mores, traditions, and expectations tend to exert and have; among the best of these novels, perhaps (but by no means the best of King‘s work to date), are Carrie (1974), Needful Things (1991), and Under the Dome (2009).

Perhaps the best-know and certainly one of the artistically finest horror films that delves into the mysteries of the human personality is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which is based upon Robert Bloch’s novel of the same title (1959). How much of our behavior as adults is shaped by our childhood experiences, and, in particular, by the hand that rocks the cradle? If the challenges of childhood and adolescence take different avenues than is typical or normal, might a boy grow up to be a monster rather than a man? “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” Norman Bates declares, but, clearly, in his case, this was not true. Why? The film perhaps leaves more questions unanswered than answered, despite the psychiatrist’s explanation of the protagonist’s behavior at the end of the film, but it brings to the attention of its millions of viewers the importance of seeking answers to questions of nature and nurture, of learning and genetics. In the process, the film makes it quite clear that people are more than merely food for worms, for machines, whether of flesh or of steel, operate according to their design, without being affected by the attitudinal, emotional, or other cognitive functions that are peculiar to creatures that have been created in the image and likeness of God.

Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed (1977), in which a computer impregnates a woman who gives birth to a cyborg infant, explores the implications of the human-technology dynamic, admittedly taken to rather absurd extremes. It’s a reworking, of sorts, of the Frankenstein motif, wherein the monster is, quite literally, a ghost in a machine, but one of technological, rather than of divine, conception and origin. A 1977 movie, of the same title, directed by Donald Cammell, is based upon Koontz’s book.

It is interesting (and, one might add, significant) that several of these novels and movies are based, allegedly, at least, upon actual events. The Exorcist is based upon a titanic spiritual battle that Blatty heard about during his college days. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is based upon the horrific experiences of  Anneliese Michel. Although Carrie is an entirely fictional work, the protagonist, Carietta (Carrie) White, is “based on a combination of two girls in King's past; one of them went to school with him, the other was a student of his,” Timeline’s Internet article “Carrie becomes King‘s debut novel,” points out:

The young girl King went to school with lived down the street from him when he lived in Durham, Maine. King recalls, in an interview with Charles L. Grant for Twilight Zone Magazine (Apr 1981), “She was a very peculiar girl who came from a very peculiar family. Her mother wasn’t a religious nut like the mother in Carrie; she was a game nut, a sweepstakes nut who subscribed to magazines for people who entered contests . . . The girl had one change of clothes for the entire school year, and all the other kids made fun of her. I have a very clear memory of the day she came to school with a new outfit she'd bought herself. She was a plain-looking country girl, but she'd changed the black skirt and white blouse--which was all anybody had every seen her in--for a bright-colored checkered blouse with puffed sleeves and a skirt that was fashionable at the time. And everybody made worse fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mold.”

Needful Things, King says, was inspired by the excesses of televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Under the Dome’s villain is based upon Vice-President Dick Cheney--as King sees him, of course. Psycho is based upon the murderous Ed Gein.

(It is also interesting and probably significant that several of these writers and filmmakers are Christian: Blatty is a Catholic, Derrickson is a Protestant, King is a believer but differs in his belief from traditional Protestants, and Koontz is a Catholic.)

Basing one’s fiction, entirely or in part, upon real-world people, situations, or events is one way to ensure that one has realistic, believable fodder upon which to base one’s theological, philosophical, social, psychological, and technological explorations, examinations, insights, and criticisms. That it is possible to do so underscores one of the points of horror fiction in general--and perhaps the biggest point of them all--which is that human beings, both actual and fictional, are more than blood, guts, and gore. There is a spiritual as well as a physical dimension to human existence; if there were not, horror itself would be impossible and there would be neither novels nor movies based upon this emotional reaction to external and internal evil that, like goodness, is both transcendent and immanent to human beings themselves.

Renewal

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Like any other artist, the writer faces the challenge of keeping his or her writing fresh. How to make the tenth or the twentieth or the fiftieth novel, short story, or screenplay interesting to increasingly jaded readers or moviegoers, especially when faced with a myriad media, thousands of narratives and dramas, and a handful of plot possibilities, that is the question.

And it is this question that I will explore in this post.

Adopt a fresh perspective. Look at your art through the eyes of another artist. That’s what the makers of Alien did, inviting a painter and sculptor, H. R. Giger, to create the images upon which the film’s extraterrestrial predator is based. The result? Giger’s contribution pumped new life into the then-faltering science fiction-horror genre, making it exciting again. (And don’t some of George Lucas’ Star Wars aliens look a bit like the demons in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights?)

Offer something for everyone. This is the Dean Koontz approach to writing. His novels contain not only horror or science fiction, but also adventure, romance, mystery, and fantasy--something for everyone.

Get inside the characters’ heads. It’s not all about blood and guts and things that go bump in the night--or, at least, it shouldn’t be. Let your readers or audience know your characters--enough to love, hate, or sympathize with them--and the thrills and chills will skyrocket when danger threatens. (A good time to get inside their heads is when they’re alone or performing mundane tasks. In fact, a character should never be alone--even when he or she is alone--because he or she should be thinking and remembering and anticipating things that have happened and things that are likely to come, placing him- or herself, of course, in the center of these things.) Stephen King is especially adept at characterization, as his sales suggest.

Add a symbolic level of meaning. A story that is exhausted at one reading is usually one that doesn’t delve below the surface; in other words, it’s literal throughout, with nary the suggestion of meaning beyond the here and the now, which is universal, lasting, and, well, poetic. My post concerning The Descent offers a good example of a symbolic film.

Mix it up. Alfred Hitchcock said that a story is 85 percent chase, but the object of the chase changes. Sometimes, the good guys chase the bad guys (or the monsters) or vice-versa, but the guy (or the gal) can chase the gal (or the guy); a quest for a rare or precious artifact or relic can occur; a detective can seek clues among red herrings as he or she seeks to solve a mystery; a husband (or wife) can pursue a villain who’s kidnapped a wife (or husband)--or a child. There is only one limit to the types of chase a story can feature--the writer’s own imagination.

Introduce the unfamiliar. Maybe it’s the dreamscape inside a sleeper’s mind, or a virtual reality world, or a lost world, or a land that time forgot, or the hallucinatory consciousness of a psychotic patient, or the aesthetic theory of a sociopath, or the neighborhood (now long gone) in which you or your ancestors grew up, or. . . again, the possibilities are endless. (The unfamiliar can be informational, too: the habits of spiders, the anatomy of the marine life of one’s choice, the habitat of an extraterrestrial being, the physics of subatomic particles). Each in its own way, A Nightmare on Elm Street and King Kong employ this technique, both to great effect.

Alter reality. We take things for granted, believing that such-and-such a thing means this and nothing else and that our view of the world is more-or-less correct. Upset the metaphysical, the ontological, the epistemological, the ethical, or some other applecart; terror (and horror) may well ensue, as it does, for example, in 1408.

Adapt to a new environment. Create an imaginary world full of danger. Then, toss your protagonist (and a handful--or a horde--of other characters) into this dangerous environment so that they must adapt and survive or die. It’s evolution all over again, but in a completely different world or environment. Harry Harrison’s Deathworld Trilogy is an example of this approach.

Correct wrong assumptions. Base part of the story upon the incorrect assumptions that a character or a group of characters make concerning the significance of a person, place, or thing and then, when the time is right, redirect the story by having a character or a group of characters learn the correct meaning of this person, place, or thing. A whole series of false assumptions and corrected interpretations could advance the storyline and keep the plot interesting and fresh for readers.

In reading this post, one might think, the examples don’t show anything new. That’s true, but only because they are examples of novels and films that have already been done. You have to apply the principles I identify in your own way in order to freshen your fiction, just as the writers and works I cite did when they applied these principles. When all is said and done, the world around us (and inside us) is the source of innovation (and inspiration), but you and you alone must be the source of originality.

Ironic Endings

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Spectral Forms,” a chapter of The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror, and Fear, Dani Cavallaro presents an observation with which, one might expect, most readers would agree: “Many people would probably be disinclined to confront disembodied voices and floating shapes, let alone share a dwelling with them.” However, having established this seemingly self-evident premise, she introduces “some potentially amusing exceptions, not only in fiction but also in real life,” one of which is recounted in Karen Farrington’s The History of the Supernatural and involves a homeowner who, disappointed that his recently purchased house has not lived up to its reputation, so to speak, of being haunted, sues the seller for what amounts to fraud (79).

Cavallaro’s example provides the basis for introducing a spin or a twist to one’s tale, which, although simple, is, or can be, effective, depending upon one’s treatment of it: suggest that one’s narrative will be resolved in one direction, but end the story in the opposite way. Such an approach depends upon the use of situational irony that is effected through the human mind’s seemingly natural tendency to think in, and, indeed, to create, polarities. The one to which Farrington, through Cavallaro, alludes involves that of the undesirable (the rule, as it were, which applies to interacting with “disembodied voices and floating shapes”) and the desirable (the “exception” to this rule, represented by the disappointed homeowner’s hope of encountering a ghost in the supposedly haunted house he’s recently purchased).

To apply this formula to other narratives, which may or may not involve ghosts or rumors of ghosts, a writer need only to construct a pair of opposites, drive his or her narrative toward one of the two possibilities for resolution, so that, unexpectedly, the story ends in the opposite manner to that which the author has led the reader to expect the tale will conclude. Alfred Hitchcock does this in Psycho. Encouraging viewers to assume that Norman Bates' mother has committed murder, the resolution of the plot shares the secret that it is the protagonist himself, who, impersonating his deceased mother, kills his victims. The movie The Others, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace Newman, is an example of this technique at work as well. The film suggests that Grace and her children are haunted by a family of ghosts when, in fact, as it turns out, it is she and her children who are the ghosts who haunt the house’s human tenants. Likewise, in The Sixth Sense, directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Bruce Willis as Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist, who helps Cole Sear, a disturbed boy with dark secrets and claims to see ghosts, one of these phantoms, as it turns out, is Crowe himself, who has returned from the dead, after having been murdered by another patient, named Vincent, to assist Cole and to find closure for his own previous existence.

Shyamalan is a notoriously uneven director with more failures than successes to his credit, and his unsuccessful ventures, Lady in the Water and The Happening in particular, show how an inept handling of situational irony results in the introduction of a plot twist that leaves an audience disappointed and annoyed rather than satisfied.

Rather than constituting an integral part of the overall plot, many of the director’s endings appear tacked on, as it were, solely to deliver the supposed surprise for which he and his films have become known. The surprise endings are forced to fit, having become the trademark for his films.

To the contrary, Psycho, The Others, and, yes, even The Sixth Sense represent effective ways to employ situational irony to create a surprise ending; in each case, the endings issue from the characters of the protagonists: Norman Bates’ transvestism is a manifestation of his dead mother’s unbreakable hold upon his ego; Grace Newman’s guilt in murdering her own children caused her to kill herself and to spend what appears to be purgatory for her sins; Malcolm Crowe comes back from the dead the business of the living which has led to his own untimely demise and his failed marriage.

The twist ending to The Happening (a toxin secreted by plants who are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore from environmentally insensitive people who pollute the planet are causing people to go insane and kill themselves) has no bearing upon the personal crisis of the protagonist (whose problem appears to be that his wife had lunch with a male coworker). Thousands of years ago, in Poetics, Aristotle wrote of the necessity for the end of a narrative to be integral to everything that precedes it rather than being a dues ex machina that unrealistically and illogically concludes the tale. This is a lesson lost on the likes of Shyamalan, apparently, but, when a plot twist is executed with finesse, it can introduce a surprise ending that both jolts and satisfies. The films of Alfred Hitchcock, Alejandro Amenábar, and, indeed, Shayamalan (at one time, for a film or two) are proof of this.

Thrillers

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

To date, Chillers and Thrillers has had precious little to say concerning the latter term in its title, having focused, instead, almost exclusively on chillers (that is, horror stories) and such related fare as fantasies and science fiction. In this post, thanks to Charles Derry’s excellent book on thrillers, this oversight is finally corrected.

In the second chapter of The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock, “Thrills; or, How Objects and Empty Spaces Compete to Threaten Us,” Charles Derry identifies the objects that are used, in several films, as symbols, or “visual correlatives”: “The cymbals in The Man Who Knew Too Much,” which represent “the assassination and the whole movement of the narrative”; “the windmill in Foreign Correspondent,” which symbolizes “the arrival of an airplane to take away the villains”; and “the glass of milk in Suspicion,” which signifies “the imminent poisoning of Joan Fontaine [sic]”; and “the blood-stained doll in Stage Fright,” which suggests “an accusation of murder” (21).

According to Derry, other symbolic objects include:

The painting of the Madonna in Obsession, which works as a symbol of the protagonists’ dilemma and the narrative; the escaping balloons in La Rupture, which works as a complex symbol of escape and freedom; Faye Dunaway’s [sic] photographs in Three Days of the Condor, which work as a symbol of trust in a morally bankrupt world; the mirrors in Lady from Shanghai, which work in part as a symbol of the destructive nature of the American woman (21).

In addition to such symbolic objects, thrillers also employ both “ocnophilic” and “philobatic” objects, Derry argues, employing terms coined by Michael Balint in Thrills and Regressions. Essentially, the former type of object is apt to be one among many that are associated with the safety and security of one’s everyday environment, whereas the other (usually one or a few “special” objects) is linked to potential dangers or risks. Examples of the ocnophilic object to which the philobat “clings,“ Derry says, include the lion-tamer’s whip, the tight-rope walker’s pole, the skier’s ski-poles, the conductor’s baton, the soldier’s rifle, the artist’s paintbrush, and the pilot’s joy-stick (25). The ocnophilic object, Derry adds, “is perhaps the antithesis of the safe ‘ocnophilic object’ embraced by the philobat and represents the most overwhelming symbol of the philobat’s inability to get away from objects that are unconquerable and oppressive,” although “the objects that the philobat encounters need not be instantly harmful” (25). Moreover, the philobat may transform a threatening or dangerous oncophilic object into “a co-operative partner” by “showing consideration, regard, or concern about” it, as “Cary Grant [sic]” does in North By Northwest when he :turns the objects at the auction into his cooperative partners and is thus able to escape the villains” or as Paul Newman‘s character does in Torn Curtain when he “allows the paper flames in the ballet set to provide him with inspiration to escape from the theatre” (26). Since the ocnophil equates ocnophilic objects with safety and security, he or she is disturbed when one or more of these objects must be abandoned or he or she is abandoned by it or them. “For the octophil,” Derry says, “the world consist of objects which are separated by terrifying empty spaces,” and, Balint contends, as Derry notes in quoting him, “The octophil lives from object to object, cutting his sojourns in the empty spaces as short as possible. Fear is provoked by leaving the objects, and allayed by rejoining them” (26). For this reason, too, “an object which remains no threatening is a source of much security, and the philobat certainly doesn’t want this object taken away” (27).

Before I had encountered Derry’s book or heard of Balint’s taxonomy of the thriller, I unknowingly described a different type of ocnophilic object in my article, “Taking Away the Teddy Bear,” except that the object was more a state of mind than an object per se. The person (or, perhaps, place or thing) that anchors us to our existence, giving us a reason to go on, despite the vicissitudes of fate and the traumas and crises of life, might be regarded as an ocnophilic object of sorts, for its possession makes us feel that life is worth living. The ultimate “teddy bear,” I suggest is one’s faith in God, which, taken away, results in despair and horror in face of the monster of meaninglessness.

Although neither Derry nor Balint identifies such an object, one might argue, for the existence of anti-ocnophilic, as opposed to both ocnophilic and philobatic, objects as well, which is to say, things--or even states of mind--that remind men and women of persons, places, or things that they find repulsive rather than comforting; an African-American might view a rebel flag in such a manner; a racist, an interracial couple; a homophobe, two men or women holding hands with one another. Rather than finding reassurance in such objects and seeking to retain or to be reunited with them, a character would seek to avoid or discard them. In some cases, an object that is initially regarded as ocnophilic might later be considered anti-ocnophilic, as, for example, one might argue, the monkey’s paw in W. W. Jacobs’ short story first is and later becomes to the elderly couple who come into possession of this talisman.

In the thriller, Derry argues, based upon his reading of Balint, the protagonist fears a “real external danger,” to which he or she voluntarily exposes him- or herself, confident in his or her hope that he or she can survive it. Balint contends that “this mixture of fear, pleasure, and confident hope is what constitutes the fundamental elements of all thrills,” and, likewise, according to Derry, comprise the “three-part progression” of “most suspense thriller plots,” to which may be added thrills “associated with high speed, such as racing, horse-riding, skiing, sailing, and flying”; thrills “associated with exposed [or risky] situations, such as jumping, diving, rock climbing, taming wild animals, and traveling into foreign lands”; and thrills “associated with unfamiliar forms of satisfaction, such as new foods, new customs, and new sexual experiences” (22).

In Thrills and Regressions, Balint coins the words philobatism and ocnophilia to refer, respectively, to the thrill seeker and his or her opposite, who is quite content to avoid thrills of any kind. Using Balint’s terminology and Derry’s insights, one could define a suspense thriller as a story in which an initially ocnophilic protagonist enters the philobatic world of external danger, triumphs over the peril, and is able, thereafter, to balance the extremes of a safe but uneventful existence with the dangerous but thrilling aspects of life.

Although the thriller plot’s emphasis upon a “real external threat” and an ultimately thrill-seeking protagonist suggests that such stories are more likely to be addressed to male audiences, it is clear, given the synopsis of Wait Until Dark, which involves a female protagonist, that this storyline can also involve female protagonists and can be directed toward female audiences:

In Wait Until Dark. . . the ocnophilic and clinging Audrey Hepburn [sic] loses the secure protection of her husband and home base, faces a series of terrifying thrills which she conquers, emerges victorious, and returns unharmed to the security of her husband, although now in touch with her own philobatic abilities and no longer in need of his protection” (24-25).

Indeed, as Derry himself points out,

there are many notable female protagonists in thrillers (as for example in Shadow of a Doubt, Le Boucher, or The China Syndrome) who become adventurers. . . and there are so many female spectators who have been moved by the thriller that it would be wrong to argue that these works are--more than any other popular genre--unusually reflective of sexist male fantasy (29).

In this chapter of his book, Derry also suggests how empty spaces can threaten the philobatic protagonist. For example, Derry contends that “in Wait Until Dark. . . it is precisely the empty spaces that are terrifying to the blind heroine; the empty spaces are blank, and she is unable to maneuver herself from place to place without the help of the anchored objects which make up her world” (26).

Two passages in Derry’s book explain how and why the suspense thriller differs from the horror story. In the first of these passages, Derry, alluding to the observations of both Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle, suggests that the suspense thriller “excludes horror,” just as it excludes “traditional whodunnits and detective films,” because, as Hitchcock insists, “the whodunnit generates a kid of curiosity that is void of emotion, and emotion is an essential ingredient in suspense” and horror often includes “supernatural suppositions” that identify the genre as “outright fantasy.”

For his part, Castle defines horror as the use of a monster to frighten audiences, whereas he defines a thriller as using “an identifiable person” such as someone the moviegoer could actually encounter and with whom he or she could empathize “in jeopardy” so that the audience can “root for” him or her (8-9).

The second passage adds a contemporary, all-too-human monster to the traditional ones that Castle featured in his films: “in certain horror films,” Derry points out, “the ‘monster’ is not a mystical or fantastic creature, but an insane individual who commits crimes,” and “because their murderous protagonists are presented as objects of horror and virtual monsters, films such as Psycho (1960), Repulsion (1965), and The Collector (1965) might most accurately be perceived as belonging to both the suspense thriller and horror genres simultaneously” (324-325). One could argue, indeed, that Dean Koontz’s much-vaunted “cross-genre” novels represent an even greater hybridization of genre fiction, often including, as it does, elements of science fiction, romance, the thriller, and the traditional horror story.

In the table of contents of The Suspense Thriller, and based upon his study of the thriller genre, Derry identifies six specific subtypes and promises (“To Be Continued”) more, perhaps, in a future volume: the thriller of murderous passions, the political thriller, the thriller of acquired identity, the psychotraumatic thriller, the thriller of moral confrontation, and the innocent-on-the-run thriller (vii). Perhaps Chillers and Thrillers will feature more summaries and commentaries upon these chapters of Derry’s excellent book in the future. Stay tuned (so to speak.)

Perspective and Setting: An Overlap of Cinematographic and Literary Technique

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In Film Narratology, Peter Verstraten explains how, in adopting the perspective of the birds as they sweep down from the sky to attack the residents of Bodega Bay, California, Alfred Hitchcock forces The Birds audience to “reflect on the sadist in ourselves” (122).

Other films require us to see ourselves from the victims’ point of view, thereby presumably encouraging us to consider the masochistic element of our personalities. The infamous shower scene in Psycho is a notable example: it puts the audience in the shower with Marion Crane, letting us see the curtain as it is torn aside and the knife’s blade as it flashes toward us.

Indeed, one might argue that the shower scene is sadomasochistic, alternating between the perspective of the murderer and the perspective of the murdered, so that, in effect, we become suicidal, the killer and the killer of, and the killed by, ourselves.

Some stories create suspense by including a killer among a team of investigators as they seek clues and argue theories as to how a murder may have been committed or who may have committed it, with the killer, perhaps, offering his or her own ideas concerning the topic. In her nonfiction book, The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule includes an alternative version of this perspective by including serial killer Ted Bundy among the university students who discuss a mass murder on their campus. Bundy disagrees with their view of the crime and the killer. One of the students considers the murderer “a lunatic” who is “probably lying low as the police investigation accelerated.” Bundy disagrees: “No. . . this was a professional job; the man has done it before. He’s probably long gone by now” (344). Bundy, typically, is telling a half-truth. He, the killer, has definitely “done it before,” but he is far from “long gone”; he is in the midst of the students with whom he debates the issue. His presence is an eerie and disturbing incident among many other such incidents.

In Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema’s “Making Up Monsters: Set and Costume Design in Horror Films,” Tamao Nakahara explains how, in Psycho, “décor becomes the narrative’s organising [sic] image” (141):

In the film‘s trailer, Hitchcock makes a point to associate the killer, Norman Bates. . . with his safe have and with the birds he sews up: “his favorite spot was the little parlour [sic] behind his office in the motel. . . . I suppose you’d call this his hideaway. His hobby as you see was taxidermy. A crow here. . . an owl there”. During the scene in which Norman invites his future victim, Marion Crane. . . into the parlour [sic] for supper, he is visually defined by the way that the frame unites him with the various stuffed birds in the room. As the shots and shot-reverse-shots alternate between Norman and Marion during their conversation, the camera remains generally in the same position for all of Marion’s shots, while those for Norman change angles to frame him with one bird and then another in the set design. While the conversation is light, the camera shows Norman from the waist up to the right of a dresser with a couple of small birds. As soon as the topic of “mother” is broached, the camera angle changes to show him in a low angle medium shot in front of two paintings (one of a nude) and two menacing spread-winged birds near the ceiling--an image that suggests Norman’s conflicted feelings of sexual arousal and self-censure for that arousal. Finally, when Marion suggests putting Norman’s mother away in an institution, the enraged Norman is shown in close-up flanked by two birds abutting against his ears. As if to provide a wall ornament for each mood and emotion, Norman’s sanctuary, and his behaviour [sic] in it, hints at his multiple personalities (142-143).

Although, as Verstraten observes, “the narrative techniques and stylistic procedures in cinema are inevitably fundamentally different than those in literature (or those in comics, music, painting, sculpture, and theater, to name but a few),” and, in some cases, the twain between these “techniques and. . . procedures” in one medium will never meet those of another medium, there are narrative and stylistic techniques that do, in part, overlap, such as do (to some extent) both point of view (in both media) and set design (in cinema) and description (in literature), from which both cinematographic and literary artists can, and should, learn from on another.

Sources

Nakahara, Tamao. "Making Up Monsters: Set and Costume Design in Horror Films." Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, 2010: Print.

Rule, Ann. The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy. New York: Pocket Books, 2009. Print.

Verstraten, Peter. Film Narratology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Print.

"Psycho" and "The Birds": The Reason They Endure

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Looking back at some of the “classic” horror movies of the forties, fifties, and sixties, it’s difficult to determine just what (and why) these films were considered frightening. This difficulty applies even to such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds.

Maybe I can get some insight into this matter by considering some of these movies’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. This site awards Psycho (1960) a 99% “fresh” rating, meaning that 99 percent of the site’s reviews award it a favorable review. What is the bases of these favorable reviews?

One critic views the movie as a trailblazer.

Another critic considers it “shocking.”

A third opines that “Alfred Hitchcock should be credited with making the first slasher film” and thereby providing the “template” for future films of this type.

Still another commentator regards the movie as being “more analyzed” than any other.

According to another pundit, the film is “impressive” in having been well crafted.

Another critic seems to attribute the movie’s success to Janet Leigh’s attractiveness and taste in brassieres: “Janet Leigh, stalking around in pointy brassieres, making bird-gestures, and flirting with the coprophobic Perkins, is one of cinema's most deliciously perverse pleasures.”

One authority claims the film’s popularity derives from several of its scenes: “The music, the setting, the shower scene, the mother in the cellar... everything about this iconic film has passed into cinema history. “

How about the film’s “manipulation of audience identification” and “style”? One critic sees these attributes as being largely responsible for the movie’s enduring appeal.

None of these comments seem all that insightful concerning Psycho’s attractiveness to moviegoers over half a century.

What about Rotten Tomatoes’ take on the lasting popularity of another horror film by Hitchcock, namely The Birds (1963)? The website labels this movie 95% “fresh,” with reviewers offering the following comments concerning the film:

“The only thing dated is the special effects. The suspense holds up well.”

“Although not as horrifically shocking as ‘Psycho,’ [sic] ‘The Birds’ [sic] is a more sophisticated film, and represents a high watermark [sic] in the prolific career of a true maestro of cinema.”

“Alfred Hitchcock's most abstract film (1963), and perhaps his subtlest, still yielding new meanings and inflections after a dozen or more viewings.”

“More novelty than spectacle, but overall a chilling exercise in nihilistic terror.”

“Still a dream come true after you've met enough Californians.”

“It's fierce and Freudian as well as great cinematic fun, with ample fodder for the amateur psychologist following up on Hitch's tortuous involvement with his leading ladies.”

“Inventive classic.”

Are these reviewers’ comments any more helpful in establishing this film’s almost half-a-century-long appeal? You decide.

For my part, I have a simple, but, I think, affective, explanation for these movie’s continuing appeal. They were filmed in more innocent times, before the multiplicity of media sources and choices, when the concept of the serial killer was fairly new and the crimes of Ed Gein, upon whom Norman Bates is based, were both contemporary, shocking millions across the country and around the world, thanks to the news and to Robert Bloch’s novel. (The term “serial killer” was not coined until the 1970s, Wikipedia tells us, and Psycho was released in 1960.) In other words, for the relatively innocent audiences of the day, Norman Bates represented a new kind of bogeyman--the transvestite momma’s boy-become-killer whose penchant for helpless young women made every young woman a potential victim of similar homicidal maniacs. Why does the movie continue to appeal to the more jaded audiences of today? I think it does so because of its nostalgic nature, hearkening back, as it does, to a day in which relatively innocent audiences were confronted with a new type of bogeyman.

How, then, do I explain the original and the continuing popularity of The Birds? I think that it represents society’s unconscious fear that something will go wrong. What, precisely, will go wrong, when it will go wrong, and why it will go wrong are unknown and, perhaps, unknowable. They are also, strangely enough, unimportant. What matters is the uneasy, the disquieting, the unsettling and vague notion, the inkling, the hunch, the gut feeling, the intuition that something, sooner or later, is going to happen, something that probably makes no sense and has no business happening, something as absurd as it horrific--and catastrophic: the end of time, the end of the world, the apocalypse that mystics have predicted, again and again, off and on for centuries and millennia. In other words, The Birds symbolizes the haunting suspicion that we don’t really quite deserve the bounty of riches with which we’ve been blessed and that, someday, harpies of some sort, will be sent to us from above to harass and punish us, stripping away the blessings and destroying the bounty. In Hitchcock’s film, the harpies are birds of all kinds, coming, it seems, from everywhere, attacking Bodega Bay, California today and, tomorrow, the world. . . .

Generating, Heightening, and Maintaining Suspense

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

To create suspense, signal to the reader that something dire is about to happen. Use dramatic irony so that the reader knows more (namely, that something dire is about to happen) than the protagonist knows. Alternatively, situational irony can be employed to mislead the reader into thinking that something other than what does, in fact, occur is likely to happen. (As I point out in “The Others: A Masterpiece of Situational Irony,” this film does a superb job of using situational irony to create, heighten, and maintain suspense.)

A writer can employ the journalist’s technique to generate and develop suspense as well, asking who? what? when? where? how? and why?

Who is to be subjected to the dire circumstances, situation, or event? By identifying several characters as being liable to suffer from an impending crisis, the writer allows the reader to sit on pins and needles, so to speak, waiting to see which potential victim must endure the expected catastrophe. By making one character stand out as nobler or more sympathetic or more likeable than the others and another as more ignoble, unsympathetic, or unlikable, the writer can increase the reader’s anxiety, making him or her wonder whether doom will befall the former or the latter character.

What may happen can also be a means of generating, heightening, and maintaining suspense. By being vague about the nature of the threat or by identifying several possible catastrophes, the writer can make the reader fret over which one will occur. The suspense can be increased, too, by offering a range of possible cataclysms, from mile (a flash flood, say) to wild (perhaps a tsunami), any of which may occur.

When will the tragedy befall the characters? This question will keep the reader turning pages long past bedtime. Alfred Hitchcock spoke of the efficacy of making his audience sweat by making them wait. He used the example of a time bomb of which the audience was aware is set to explode at a predetermined, not-too-distant moment. Oblivious of the danger, the protagonist goes blithely about his or her business, possibly, the audience fears, until it is too late.

Where will the calamity take place? If the reader knows but the protagonist does not and his or her itinerary includes the location of the impending disaster, the reader will grow more and more anxious as zero hour approaches and the main character is on a path that may put him or her in harm’s way.

How will the catastrophe occur? If we know and know, moreover, how to circumvent or stop it, we may anxiously wait to see whether the hero or the heroine figures out how to save him- or herself (and, possibly, the world) in time or are incinerated, eviscerated, bludgeoned, or otherwise unpleasantly dispatched.

The question of why a villain chooses to commit murder, mayhem, genocide, or some other dastardly crime may not be as immediate a cause of suspense as other questions may be, but the reader will want to know what motivated the antagonist, and the reader will read on, anticipating that, at some point, usually toward the end of the narrative, the writer will make everything clear.

The use of dramatic and situational irony, coupled with the use of the journalist’s who? what? when? where? how? and why? Questions will help the author of horror stories, including you, generate, heighten, and maintain suspense!