Sexing It Up, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

With few exceptions, horror fiction has a reputation for being puerile and jejune. One might add that this reputation, hard won, is well deserved. However, the same charge may be leveled accurately at any other genre of fiction and, indeed, has been leveled at many classics in mainstream fiction as well by the critics and contemporary authors of the day in which these literary classics made their debuts. It may be interesting to some to review the plots of a few of the more brazenly irrelevant examples of what might be termed erotic films. In doing so, it should be apparent to any that the flimsiest excuse for a model or an actress to doff her clothing was regarded as reason enough for her to do so. What is good for the goose of the sexploitation movie, one may argue further, should be good for the gander of the horror story. Violence and, indeed, gore needs no more persuasive or socially redeeming reason for being than erotica disguised as--well, let’s look at the rationales, suggested or stated directly, for the sexploitation films of the past and see just what reasons they do offer for their existence.

2069: A Sex Odyssey: Venus’ females (who, as it turns out, resemble the most beautiful women that planet Earth has to offer) visit our planet to fornicate with men so as to preserve their own species. Reason for being: Species survival.


The Beautiful, The Bloody, and the Bare: Behind Closed Doors: A nude photographer--no, he’s not nude; his models are--takes fine glamour shots unless the color red appears. The color of blood drives him to lust--for blood--and, therefore, to murder. Reason for being: Art for art’s sake.


Philosophy of a Knife: A documentary (kind of) concerning the Japanese version of Nazi Germany’s Dr. Mengele. (Okay, so this one does have a little real reason for its gratuitous displays of nudity, which make such displays no longer gratuitous, just nude.) Reason for being: Documentary of human villainy.


Bikini Airways: Sexy stewardesses find a way to earn their pay after their airlines seems to be going belly up financially: they rent their aircraft as a flying forum for wild bachelor parties. Reason for being: Financial survival.


Brigitta: Swingers’ fantasies about swinging. Reason for being: Uh, Brigitta?


Curse of the Erotic Tiki: A talisman sold at a bikini shop causes whoever wears it to lose her sexual inhibitions. Reason for being: Magic and enchantment.

Okay, now that we’ve taken a squint at some of the lamer sexploitation flicks and their reasons for being, let’s look at a few horror movie plots to see whether the excuses that they offer for their existence are any less lame.


Species: An alien female mates with Earthmen to avoid her species’ extinction. Reason for being: Species survival.


The Picture of Dorian Gray: Due to his sins, Dorian’s portrait ages while he stays young. Reason for being: Art for art’s sake.


Ed Gein: A transvestite killer wants his mom back--from the grave. Reason for being: Documentary of human villainy.


Hostel: An entrepreneur’s inn of supposed pleasure turns out to be a not-so-public house of pain. Reason for being: Financial survival.


The Abominable Dr. Phibes: The doctor is a rabbi, maybe, who uses the same sort of amulet that Moses apparently used to stir up the plagues in ancient Egypt, because he’s doing the same thing now, in modern America, using a set of his own similar charms. Reason for being: Magic and enchantment.

Wow! It looks like a tie, proving that other film genres--in this case, sexploitation films--offer excuses for their existence that are just as flimsy--in fact, identical at times--as those of the weak excuses that horror films advance for their existence. In fact, at times, it’s hard to tell the two genres apart, since many horror films are made to exploit the adolescent crowd, as are sexploitation films. Sex and violence both sell, and, with the former, as with the latter, there is often the added bonus of bikini-clad girls or actual nudity. What does a little prurience matter, along with the puerility or a little jiggle along with the jejunity? It’s all harmless fun until someone gets an eye poked out.

Fear: A Cultural History: A Partial Review and Summary, Part 4

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, is the author of Fear: A Cultural History. Although she explores several other important aspects of this most basic emotion, Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear concludes its partial review and summary of Bourke’s book with a consideration of her chapter on “Nuclear Threats.”

As Bourke indicates, these threats resulted in a generation of children’ being “raised to fear.” There were the thermonuclear fireball and its resulting widespread, catastrophic physical destruction and the hideous deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of citizens, but there were also the long-term threat of radioactive fallout and lingering death from radiation sickness. Radiation could cause genetic mutations, too, so, if the explosion or radiation sickness didn’t kill one, he or she might undergo grotesque, painful, and eventually lethal mutations, becoming a monster before becoming a corpse.

Also disturbing was the fact that the wholesale slaughter of humanity--or a sizeable portion of the species--was in the hands of a few nations and, within those nations, a few individuals--and not the types of individuals in whom most people had confidence:

With the means of world devastation available to the elite of a few nations, fear became widespread. No longer were humanity’s primary enemies hidden in the
crevices of individual unconsciousness, capable of being lured out by a reassuring confidant. Instead, the fate of humankind seemed to rest with people no one trusted: soldiers, scientists and statesmen.

In fact, “fears about generals, scientists, super-computers, and terrorists,” Bourke states, “were a staple of this genre [science fiction], as was the argument that nuclear war was simply an inevitable consequence of paranoid Cold War animosities.” Another popular subject for such fiction were flying saucers: “It was no coincidence that sightings of UFOs began immediately after the Second World War, a tangible reflection of nuclear and Cold War fears.”

Worse yet, the oceans that lay between America’s east and west coasts were no longer reassuring to its citizens; “long-range aeroplanes and nuclear warheads destroyed this sense of security.”

Bourke points out that the post-war years gave rise to some important themes in the science fiction and horror genres. The most famous such example, she suggests, was Godzilla, “a prehistoric monster resurrected as a result of H-bomb experiments,” who appeared in 1956, starring in “at least sixteen feature films thereafter.” A line of dialogue in Them!, a movie about gigantic, mutated ants, suggests the metaphor that underlies the film: “Has the Cold War gotten hot?” As Bourke points out, the post-war era and the world’s newfound fear of nuclear threats inspired several novels as well, including Margot Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954), Tyrone C. Barr’s The Last Fourteen (1959), Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog (1969), as well as Jim Harman’s short story “The Place Where Chicago Was” (1962), and Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow “did not flinch from describing a woman sitting on some stairs after a nuclear attack, vainly trying to shove her unborn baby back inside her split belly.”

Overwhelmed by the many horrors and terrors associated with nuclear threats, psychologists warned government officials to expect people to “denial and avoidance,” which would require the use of special techniques of communication, command, and control.

The Civil Defense program that the United States sponsored during the years of the Cold War was never intended, despite its name, to defend civilians from nuclear attack or its consequences, Bourke says--not directly, anyway. Instead, its purpose was to convince the public that, even in the event of a nuclear war, many people could survive by following the procedures they’d learned as participants in the program. Convinced of their potential survival, the general populace, government officials believed--or hoped--would agree with attempts on the part of their leaders to maintain a mutual deterrence policy with the then-Soviet Union, despite the cost of such a policy. Meanwhile, government leaders also endeavored to get citizens to accept the need “to militarize society in the event of a nuclear attack,” to conform to policies and procedures (those who did not might be arrested and “neutralized”), and to accept restrictions upon personal privileges and legal rights. Even the Constitutional right to free speech might be curtailed. The media would likely be controlled by the government to suppress rumors. Leaders hoped that the people would follow the procedures they had been taught as participants in the nation’s longstanding Civil Defense program: “Familiarity with air-raid drills would ensure that people would passively fall into a familiar drill procedure, thus keeping their minds busy and reducing the likelihood of panic.” Meanwhile, radios and vehicles, including airplanes and helicopters, equipped with loudspeakers would transmit or broadcast reassuring messages:

Confusion foreshadowed panic. Irrespective of the veracity of the message, a ‘calm, authoritative voice’ broadcast on an ‘intact public address system’ was crucial. As the Bulletin for the Atomic Scientists put it in 1953: ‘The human being whose normal picture of the world around him is suddenly torn to pieces struggles to replace it with another picture so that he can steer his activity.’ Loudspeakers and radios in public shelters would reorient people, preparing them for a transformed world. Since many people would not have access to radios in the event of a nuclear attack, and since rubble and fires would prevent ground vehicles from getting information to them, disaster agencies would prevent ground vehicles from getting information to them, disaster agencies recommended the use of light planes, preferably helicopters, which would broadcast information and ‘counteract panics.’ All information had to be given
in a factual, calm and easily understood manner so that ‘depressed, fearful and
resentful victims of the disaster’ would be able to understand it.’

Bourke points out that experts admitted that they didn’t really know how people would react in the wake of such a terrible and extensive catastrophe, for nothing of such a scale had ever happened, especially to a civilian population. However, they did think that, possibly at the expense of strangers, family members would stay together and look out for the welfare of one another, and it was believed that men, having more survival skills than women, would be likely to do comparatively well, and women comparatively poorly, in the exercise of adaptive behavior (that is, behavior adapted to the crises at hand). Officials might discover that their greater problem might not be “preventing hysterical flight,” but “getting them to move at all.” Nevertheless, “to provide guidance, disaster experts identified four situations that predisposed people to panic when faced with danger”:

First, partial entrapment was liable to make people panic. . . . Secondly, when the threat was seen as imminent. . . people were likely to ‘freeze’. . . . Emotional extremes would be exacerbated if, thirdly, a blocked or jammed escape faced them. Fourth, confusion and uncertainty about the nature and intensity of threat was particularly distressing.

Never had the world, despite all the many wars its nations had waged, faced such a situation as was posed by nuclear threats. The situation would be characterized by confusion, mistrust, distrust, and fear, and human beings, for the first time in history, would be seen as having “more conclusive” powers than “God, in being bale to annihilate irredeemably and without possibility of redemption.”

In such a world as the disaster experts painted, the horrors of prehistoric monsters, gigantic ants, leveled cities, and even hostile visitors from beyond the stars were mild, even comical, threats, indeed. The horrors of the human technology had outpaced the horrors of the artistic imagination.

Bourke, Joanna, Fear: A Cultural History. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.

Poe and King: Two Unlikely Beauties

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Since the term “aesthetics” is generally used in relation to beauty, it may strike one as odd, or even bizarre, to see it associated with horror. A word of explanation is in order.

Structure has beauty. Unity has beauty. Coherence has beauty. Harmony and balance have beauty. A work, even if it treats of the horrifying and the terrifying, is beautiful if it exhibits these qualities. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems show these attributes. Therefore, such narratives as The Raven, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of the Amontillado,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are beautiful. They are works of art. Each word, each image, each figure of speech, and each part of the whole, in each case, builds toward a single effect--fear. Poe means to frighten his readers, and he carefully plots every incident of his story’s action to do just this. In his theory, outlined in “The Philosophy of Composition,” every word has a place in the bigger scheme of things, and every word must be in its place. The fact that his name remains in lights a century after his death is a measure of his success.

In horror fiction, Poe remains the master of masters. In our time, Stephen King is often held up as, well, the king of the horror genre. It’s doubtful that even King himself would claim to be of the same rank as Poe as a literary artist, though, however popular and prolific in output King may be. In fact, he refers to himself as the “literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” Can it be said, though, that King has an aesthetics of horror? Maybe.

If we regard Aristotle as correct in his judgment that plot is the most important element of narrative, we may charge King with having an aesthetic. King knows how to tell a story, creating and maintaining suspense alongside pace and throwing a curve to his readers at just the right moment to keep them guessing (and reading). If Aristotle was right, King, in plotting his novels, might be said to create things of lasting beauty.

If, in striving for effect, Poe created whole new literary genres, King, in plotting his tales, recreated at least one--the horror genre. He took age-old, moldering themes, such as the vampire, and reenergized them. In bringing the parasitic bloodsuckers from Europe’s Gothic landscapes and installing them in small-town 'Salem's Lot, King not only gave them a local, and an American, home, but he also modernized them, making them, in a willing-suspension-of-disbelief-kind-of-way, believable and, therefore, frightening. King knows that home is not where one hangs one’s hat, but, rather, where one’s heart is, and, by making old world horrors at home in small-town America, he shocked and terrified and repulsed his countrymen, here and now. He also revolutionized the horror genre, which is no small feat in itself.

Home is Eden, King knows, and, so, he brought the serpent back into the garden. He did it by plotting his novels to demonstrate something simple but vital: what threatens one’s local community, one’s hometown, or one’s neighborhood, threatens oneself. That’s what’s scary nowadays, whether the threat takes the form of ancient vampires and werewolves or contemporary shape shifters and extraterrestrial entities beyond human ken.

Of course, some believe that Aristotle is mistaken about plot’s being the most important narrative element, pointing, instead, to character. The creation of memorable and significant literary personages who embody a great and lasting insight into humanity, as Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, or even Scarlett O’Hara, does, is, these critics argue, what counts as great literary art. One Huckleberry Finn or Carrie White is worth any number of plots, they say.

If their point of view is true, King stands, on less certain ground in having developed a horror aesthetic, for, in fact, character doesn’t depend upon horror; stories of all types are peopled, as it were, with characters, many of high artistic quality. Many of Charles Dickens’ novels have little to do with horror as a genre that is represented by Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, King, and the like, but his characters certainly are giants among their peers or, in many cases, hey are peerless.

For many, Henry James solved the problem of plot, raised, on one hand, by Aristotle and of character, raised, on the other hand, by the philosopher’s critics, asserting that the two are but flip sides of the same coin. Action (the incidents of which comprise the plot) represents character, James suggested, just as character determines action. To put it in simpler terms, one is what one does, and what one does is what one is. An alcoholic, for example, is someone who drinks to excess, and someone who drinks to excess is an alcoholic. If James is right, in plotting the action of his novels, King is representing his characters, and his characters, in turn, determine what will happen in his books.

Action, one may quibble, is not the same as plot. Action is what happens; plot is how and why it happens. Action is what a character does; plot is how and why he or she does it. E. M. Forrester (I believe) distinguished between the two with a simple example--or two simple examples, actually. This is an example of action, he said:

The queen died. Then, the king died.

This is an example of plot, he said:

The queen died. Then, the king died of grief.

The addition of the two words “of grief” explain how and why the king died. In the first instance, there is no necessary connection between the incident of the queen’s death and that of the king’s demise. The two incidents are related strictly through chronological sequence: one happens before the other. In the second instance, there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two incidents: the king’s grief, which was caused by the queen’s death, effects his own demise. A plot is a series of causally related incidents, each of which is cause by its antecedent and, in turn, causes its successor to occur.

In King’s fiction, bizarre, horrifying incidents (actions) occur with great regularity, but they don’t occur in a vacuum. They are related by a chain of cause and effect. Moreover, these plots happen in relation to a specific type of character--the man, woman, or child who lives in small-town, modern-day America. In tying together plots that involve strange incidents with today’s small-town residents, King unites past with present, old world with new world, tradition with innovation, childhood with adulthood, monsters with contemporary fears and anxieties. This marriage, whether made in heaven or in the other place, has a structure, a unity, a coherence, a harmony, and a balance that is beautiful to see--and to read. It seems safe to say that King’s horror fiction has an aesthetic; it’s just not lik, e Poe’s.

Not Everyone Loves A Victim

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

America loves victims. Being a victim excuses one from irresponsibility. Victims receive a free pass that excuses them from responsible behavior and from the consequences of their irresponsible actions. Victimization is a marvelous source of self-pity that helps to perpetuate one’s anger at the world and one’s belief that one is justified in doing whatever one likes, since, after all, one has been victimized. Something unjust has happened; therefore, one is entitled to act in whatever fashion he or she wishes to act.

Horror fiction takes issue with this stance. In horror stories, victims are frequently dispatched without mercy, violently and with finality, or are allowed to survive only to be further victimized, even more horribly, before they’re killed in some hideous manner or another, at an appropriately climactic moment.

In the past, most horror victims have been women, a fact that many feminists attribute to misogyny. There may be some truth to this charge, as witness the declaration of Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Philosophy of Composition”: “The death. . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” However, there may be reasons other than simply misogyny. There may be practical considerations.

In American society, women are permitted to cry unashamedly, for pretty much any reason and under pretty much any circumstances, and they tend to do so with regularity, expressing a wide range of emotions that includes both happiness and sorrow as well as anger and fear. In general, women are allowed--indeed, encouraged--to be more emotionally expressive than men, and, again, they tend to do so. This tendency makes them ideal as emotional indicators. In movies (and, indeed, in literary texts), they show the audience (or the readers) how to feel about a situation. The audience, identifying with them, understands that they should feel the same way about what is happening to the characters as the emotive female character, or the emotional indicator, feels.

Although it is not a horror movie, Tank illustrates the use of this technique. At various moments, as circumstances warrant, Jenilee Harrison’s character, Sarah, traveling inside the tank driven by James Garner’s character, Sgt. Zack Carey, at various moments, expresses anxiety, concern, fear, and exultation. Seeing her convey these emotions, the audience understands that they, too, should feel the same way. She’s the film’s emotional indicator.

The same technique is used to good effect in horror films (and literary narratives), although the emotional range tends to be much more limited, restricted, pretty much, to horror and its related feelings, such as anxiety, fear, revulsion, and terror. (That’s why actresses who appear in horror movies are known as "scream queens.") Because American society allows women a freer exercise of emotion, horror fiction often makes women victims. Stalked by a mad killer, abducted by a lovelorn monster, or hunted or attacked by an unspeakable creature, female victims’ expressions of terror, disgust, and panic inspire the same feelings in audiences and readers.

Women are physically weaker than men. Therefore, chivalry demands that men protect them from threats to life, limb, and sanity. In other words, female characters motivate male characters to risk their lives when, otherwise, the men folk might find it more desirable to exercise the better part of valor. In newsreel footage of one of Bob Hope’s USO shows, he brings out a beautiful female celebrity--Ann-Margaret, perhaps--and says to the assembled troops, “I just wanted to remind you of what you’re fighting for.”

The same principle is behind horror fiction’s employment of the weak, but luscious, female victim. Whether she lives or dies, she’s an inspiration to the fighting man. If she survives, he succeeds. If she dies, he fails. Therefore, her survival (or death) is an indicator of the heroic male character’s success (or failure) as a hero as well. The female victim or potential victim, as the case may be, both inspires the protective male and shows the audience that he’s a winner or a loser, depending upon whether his intervention on her behalf merits her trust. If she lives, her trust was merited; if she dies, it was not. If her protector succeeds, and she lives, he earns the audience’s respect and, if he already has their respect, it increases. If the macho man is to triumph, ultimately, over the monster, his doing so will be more believable because he has been able to defend the life of the potential female victim. If he fails, the audience accepts his failure because, earlier, he was unable to protect the female victim. In either case, the question as to whether the female character will live or die (and whether the male character will win or lose) provides suspense.

Not only do women, as victims, suggest how the audience or the readers should feel, motivate male characters, and indicate the manliness (or lack thereof) of their masculine protectors, but, when they meet their doom, they also heighten the horror of the story. This is probably what Poe had in mind when he stated that “the death. . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” We want to believe that life has purpose, meaning, and value, and that all is not for naught. We want to believe that life is not “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We feel that beauty indicates an interest on the part of the Creator in his creation, for beauty is not a quality that needs to be present in order for the universe to exist and operate. After all, despite the presence of any number of unattractive people, the universe seems to function according to impersonal “laws of nature.” Although most people would not want to do so, we could, if we had to, get by without beauty.

The death of a beautiful woman is a reminder that something we value highly--beauty (and not just beauty of any sort, but beauty in the flesh, or feminine beauty)--is unnecessary, perhaps even accidental. If it’s accidental, rather than bestowed, there may be no Creator. There may be no God. We may be on our own. If so, the world that seems, at times, at least, to be meaningful and purposeful and valuable may be simply absurd. We may be absurd! The death of a beautiful woman reminds us of this possibility. Therefore, the death of a beautiful woman is horrible, both in itself and beyond itself.

Of course, female victims also add a dimension of sexuality to horror stories, which, in the past and, to a large extent, even now, depict the monstrous as being male. The metaphor is simple: monsters (males) = rapists. The exclusive or primary victims of the creature of the black lagoon, King Kong, the xenomorphs in Alien and its sequels, Freddy Kreuger, Michael Myers, and even the devil in The Exorcist (and many other monsters with male appendages) were female rather than male. The implication is that the monsters were interested in women not solely because they’re good screamers. Critics have also seen the monster-as-disguised rapist as being an embodiment of a racist white patriarchal society’s fear of and revulsion toward miscegenation. It was because Rosemary’s baby is a “half-breed” of sorts, such critics contend, that makes him a devil’s child.

The sexualization of the male body that followed the feminist movement resulted in more than the Chippendales. Men became sexual objects. Therefore, they became potential victims of sexual predators. Not only did female high school teachers begin to sexually assault teenage boys, but female monsters began to rape and kill male victims in movies such as Species and Alien and in television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What had formerly been good only for the goose became good for the gander as well, as victimization became an equal opportunity condition. Likewise, the metaphor of monsters (females) = rapists entered the American and the international psyches. Accompanying this development was another role reversal. If men were now acceptable as victims, women were now acceptable as protective heroines. It is not only the male Marines in Alien and its successors who fight against the monster; Lt. Ripley also protects and defends her crew. The only difference is that she succeeds, whereas her male comrades fail.

The male victim is unsettling because of these role reversals. Sex and gender are basic to the human condition, and it is disturbing when assumptions that are taken for granted as being true are challenged or overturned. In a society that has regarded women as weaker and dependent upon men for protection, the depiction of men as weak and dependent upon women for protection runs counter to convention and is, therefore, distressing. Horror fiction capitalizes upon anything that is disturbing, and the use of the male victim provides another means of effecting disquiet that can, with a shove at the right moment, effect horror.

In horror fiction, weakness of any kind--physical, emotional, spiritual, or even of gender identity--is punished swiftly, violently, and, frequently, lethally. The implication that being a victim is not a good thing and that it does not give one immunity from personal responsibility or the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” whether the universe is of divine origin or not, is a censure to the permissiveness of a society that has come to all-but-idolize victims. In horror fiction, one had better not pout and had better not cry, for the Santa Claus who’s coming to town might just be a sociopathic killer in disguise.