Horror Story Survival Tactics

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

One would suppose that, to a demon that has taken up residence in the corpse of a recently deceased man or woman and has a penchant both for sucking the blood of the living and transforming as many of them into fellow vampires as possible, a clove of garlic would be the least of its concerns. Such is not the case. To vampires, as such bloodsuckers are more commonly known--to devotees of horror, if no one else--a bit of garlic is itself a horror, ranking with the cross of Christ or holy water, to be avoided at all costs. Sure, garlic, after it’s eaten, can be pretty funky, but, then again, so can a body that’s been buried for a few days, especially when, as during the days of Dracula, the deceased wasn’t extended the courtesy of having been embalmed first. Nevertheless, it seems that it was the vampire’s fear of the stench that led to garlic’s use as a means among the living to ward off the unwelcome advances of the undead. According to “Garlic and Vampires”:

Garlic has been used in Romania for centuries to ward off evil. In Romania, garlic is a weapon of choice against vampires. Romanians used to make certain that they ate some garlic every day for their personal protection. . . . They also smeared garlic on the windows. . . [and the] doors of their houses, on the gates to their farmyards, and even on the horns of their cattle. They believed that the undead had a great fear of garlic. . . . The stuff tastes divine but smells awful! In Romania if a corpse was thought to be in danger of becoming a vampire, one of the most common [means of] protection was stuffing some pieces of garlic into the orifices of the corpse, especially the mouth. This was done in order to prevent evil spirits from entering the dead body. . . . Another interesting vampire practice is smearing the corpse with a mixture of oil, fat, incense, gunpowder and--of course--garlic. That was probably a pretty good embalming method.

Garlic was also used, according to “Vampires and Werewolves,” as a means of identifying suspected vampires:

People would hang it outside their doorways to keep evil spirits from entering their homes. The ancient societies got a little carried away with garlic[,] condemning anyone who had an aversion to garlic as a vampire. Garlic was also passed out during church ceremonies so that church official could be sure that no evil spirits were attending.

For demon-possessed cadavers, vampires are, in many ways, a rather timid lot, fearing not only garlic but also sunlight, fire, crucifixes, holy water, and mirrors.


“Vampires and Werewolves” points out that vampires’ alleged fear of ultraviolet radiation is a recent addition to the lore concerning these creatures of the night, as is the idea itself that vampires, like werewolves, are necessarily nocturnal:

It's believed that sunlight will destroy vampires. It burns and scares [sic; no doubt, the writer means “scars“] their flesh. If they stay in the light long enough it will burn them completely to ashes. This is not a traditional belief of early cultures. This belief that sunlight kills vampires caught on less than sixty years ago in pop culture and movies and has since become a standard way of destroying a vampire. In traditional times vampires could come out in the sunlight without fear of being harmed by the light itself. However, their powers would be severely weakened in the daytime hours so most vampires probably wouldn't risk being exposed in the day. Smart vampires would stay hidden and sleep until nightfall when they would have all their supernatural powers at their disposal.

It seems that vampires fear the Roman Catholic, rather than the Protestant, idea of God, for they are frightened by the crucifix, not the cross--but only if, as humans, they were God-fearing members of the Christian community; crucifixes didn’t faze Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim vampires, as “Vampires and Werewolves” makes clear:

A crucifix, not a cross! There is a difference. A crucifix has the likeness of Jesus Christ on it while the cross is just a cross. The power of the crucifix comes from the Christian religion and Jesus Christ's ability to combat and force out evil. Vampires are considered to be demonic agents. The crucifix will only have power over evil if you believe in its power. If you don't believe in the power of the Christian faith then the crucifix will have little use.

It’s pretty obvious as to why vampires fear fire. It burns. Apparently, they fear holy water for the same reason; blessed by a clergyman, it has the same effect upon vampire flesh as acid has upon human skin. As “Vampires and Werewolves” observes, wine can have the same effect as holy water upon vampire epidermises, since wine symbolizes Christ’s blood.



If sunlight, fire, crucifixes, holy water, or mirrors happen to be unavailable, one can slow down a vampire by throwing seeds at it or a rope tied with a lot of knots, preferably in a variety of styles:

Vampires are said to have personality defects that most of us regular mortals would consider odd or even crazy. Vampires are known to have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). OCD is a neurobiological disorder where the affected have recurrent, intrusive thoughts, impulses, and obsessions of repetitive behaviors and mental acts.

Common symptoms of vampire OCD include bizarre checking and counting rituals. For example, a traditional method of escaping from a vampire was to throw down a handful of seeds. The vampire is powerless against its obsession to stop, pick up and count every single seed that was thrown down before doing anything else. An ancient method of stopping a vampire involved filling up its coffin with seeds. The vampire would never be able to escape from it's own impulses [to]. . . check and [count]
. . . the seeds.

Vampires also have [to] . . . [untie] every single knot that they come across. If you were to tie one thousand knots on one thousand strings a vampire would have to stop and untie all one thousand knots. It's sounds crazy to many people, but OCD is a real disorder that affects millions of people and vampires all over the world (“Vampires and Werewolves”).

Although authorities disagree, some claim that vampires also fear looking-glasses, because of a phobic dread of mirrors. As “Holiday Insights: Halloween Vampires” observes, “the phobia is known as eisoptrophobia.” Perhaps it springs from the fact that vampires have no reflections and they would give themselves away if they stood before a mirror.

Since the protagonist (or any other character) in a horror story might be accosted by a vampire, a werewolf, or some other sort of monster at any time, it is better to be safe than sorry. A little research could save one’s life, as Rupert Giles, mentor to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, often reminded his protégé, albeit to little or no avail (Buffy was killed--three times--after all.)

Most of us know that werewolves can be killed by a silver bullet, so it’s doubtful that the Lone Ranger and his trusty sidekick Tonto had much to fear from wolfmen. Perhaps that’s the real reason that the Indian brave followed the masked man around; maybe the Wild West was wilder than we realize, with hirsute werefolk running around the plains and prairies. With regard to werewolves, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, to be sure, and, fortunately, as “Vampires and Werewolves” points out, there are a number of signs by which one can identify these beastly beasties, including “pale skin,” “excessive thirst,” “howling until dawn,” “obsession with walking in cemeteries,” “excessive hair,” “unpleasant odors,” “skin that gradually changes color,” and “the mark of the werewolf,” which is “the pentagram, a five[-]pointed star and magical symbol. . . found somewhere on the werewolf. . . . usually found on the chest or hand (palm) of the werewolf.”

We’ve given you the dirt, so to speak, on vampires and werewolves. There are many other otherworldly, paranormal, and supernatural monsters abroad in horror fiction, many as bad, of not worse, than one’s mother-in-law, as hard as that may be to believe, so a textbook or two in the subject of how to survive these threats might be a good investment. One such book is How To Survive A Horror Movie: All the Skills to Dodge the Kills, which offers such tips as:

1. Don’t consume recreational drugs.
2. Never say “I’ll be right back”; if you do, you won’t.
3. Turn on the lights upon entering a room.
4. Avoid reciting spells concerning the invocation or summoning of demons.
5. Never go into an attic or a basement, especially alone.
6. Check your back seat before getting into your automobile.
7. Be prepared to kill your cat.
8. Flee from mad serial killers (or any other kind) by exiting the house, not by dashing upstairs or into the interior of the house.
9. Never separate; the monster knows the strategy of divide and conquer.
10. The monster is never dead, not even after it’s been decapitated, crushed, shot, stabbed, and strangled, so don’t check to see if it is.

Horror Story Formulae

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

I. General Horror Formula

1. A series of bizarre, seemingly unrelated incidents occurs.
2. The protagonist (and, sometimes, his or her friends or associates) discover the cause of the incidents (often, it is a monster).
3. Using their newfound knowledge, they end the bizarre incidents (perhaps by killing the monster).

Examples: It, Summer of Night, The Exorcist

II. Specific Horror Authors’ Formulae

H. G. Wells

1. An ordinary man lives an ordinary life.
2. He is confronted by extraordinary circumstances.
3. He has trouble fitting back into an ordinary life.

Examples: The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau

Edgar Allan Poe (1)

1. A man and a woman fall in love.
2. The woman dies.
3. The grieving man seeks to survive the woman’s death.

Examples: “Annabelle Lee,” The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe (2)

1. A villain insults the protagonist or the protagonist’s beloved.
2. The protagonist executes revenge.
3. The protagonist and/or the protagonist and his beloved escape.

Examples: “Hop-Frog,” “The Cask of the Amontillado” Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (3)

1. A madman becomes obsessed with another person.
2. The madman kills the other person or violates him or her in some way.
3. The madman succumbs to his madness.

Examples: “Berenice,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Stephen King

1. A fairy tale is reduced to its basic narrative elements.
2. The fairy tale’s conflict symbolizes a contemporary issue or concern (theme).
3. The fairy tale is retold in contemporary terms, in a small-town setting.

Examples: Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Misery

Dean Koontz

1. A guy meets a girl.
2. The couple encounters a force that tries to kill them.
3. The couple, surviving, fall in love.

Gary Pullman

1. Neglected or abused children face a common threat.
2. As a team, they fight their common threat.
3. They overcome the threat and become friends.

Examples: Saturday’s Child, Mystic Mansion, Revelation Point, Wild Wicca Woman

III. Christian Formulae

Christian (1)

1. People enjoy paradise.
2. Paradise is invaded, or the people give in to temptation.
3. Paradise is corrupted or destroyed or the people are exiled from it.

Example: Adam and Eve

Christian (2a)

1. People displease God.
2. God warns the people to repent.
3. When the people refuse to repent, God destroys them.

Example: Noah and the ark; the curses against pharaoh and the Egyptians

Christian (2b)

1. People displease God.
2. God warns the people to repent.
3. When the people refuse to repent, God curses them, and they suffer the consequences of the curse.

Example: Moses and the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness

Christian (3)

1. A people is oppressed by a tyrant.
2. God elects a leader to rescue them.
3. The people are rescued from the tyrant.

Example: Exodus

Christian (4)

1. God promises a people that it shall have a land in which to build a nation.
2. Through leaders, God seizes the land from its inhabitants.
3. The people occupy the land and build a nation.

Examples: Judges and Kings

Christian (5a)

1. A chosen one is called to undertake a mission.
2. The chosen one performs the mission.
3. The fortunes of a tribe, a nation, or the human race is improved.

Example: Moses, David, Israel, church

Christian (5b)

1. God promises a Messiah.
2. The Messiah arrives, performing his ministry.
3. The Messiah redeems humanity.

Example: Jesus Christ

IV. Another Formula

Hans Christian Andersen

1. A character is rejected by his or her peers or community.
2. The character accomplishes a great deed on behalf of his peers or community.
3. The character is accepted with praise by his peers or community.

Examples: "The Ugly Duckling," "The Littlest Christmas Tree," Revelation Point

Writers’ Considerations: Readers’ Likes and Dislikes

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

While it is true that a writer should not let his or her writing be determined solely by readers’ observations (i. e., likes and dislikes) about his or her work, any more than a politician should allow his or her politics to be solely determined by public opinion polls, it is also true that a writer (or a politician) has an audience whose interests he or she disregards at his or her own peril. Since a writer writes for an audience (or audiences, since one is apt to consist of professional critical and another composed of amateur fans), he or she should understand what his or her readers like and dislike about his or her fiction, and an astute reader, whether professional or amateur, can, and frequently does, offer valid observations from which all but the most insulated and arrogant writer can profit.

In doing so, one is advised to keep in mind the adage about following the money trail; some reviewers offer uncritically positive views because they are selling the book. One should also weed out blatantly unfair comments, especially on the negative side, as well. Be mindful, too, that some observations will be diametrically opposed to others, as when one reviewer calls the plot “boring” or “predictable” and another sees it as “well-paced” or “surprising.” (I tend to winnow out such contradictions unless there are many more on one side than there are on the other.) Also be careful to reject comments that are nothing more than superlatives (“rich plot”) or their opposites (“stupid plot”) which are so general and vague as to be meaningless.

This enterprise also offers a handy dandy way of distinguishing which features of a story female readers like or dislike and which male readers enjoy or find objectionable, and one can tell, just by eyeballing the lengths of the respective “Likes” and “Dislikes” columns, whether the book, in general, seemed to receive more favorable than unfavorable comments. (Admittedly, this is not a scientific approach, but it works reasonably well as a rule of thumb for those writers who lack the time, money, expertise, equipment, and laboratories in which to conduct the bona fide experiments that scientific research requires.)

Occasionally, younger readers will offer a review of the book without having finished reading it. Of course, this is not acceptable for most readers outside the circle of their peers, but it offers writers one advantage. Most writers, especially mystery writers and horror writers, present their readers with a red herring regarding the cause of the plot’s events, saving, for near the end, the true cause. For example, in The Taking, Dean Koontz suggests that aliens who seek to terraform the Earth in reverse, to make it hospitable for the army of their kind which is to follow, are responsible for the horrific incidents he details, whereas, in fact, the true cause is something else (an invasion of demons). According to the half-baked reviews of the adolescents who submit their takes on Desperation before they have finished reading King’s novel, the cause of the strange goings-on in the story is the madness of a police officer. Their reviews show that King has succeeded, with these reviewers, at least, in his sleight-of-mind suggestions that the strange and uncanny events are caused by something other than their true cause, which, as it urns out, is not a “mad cop,” as one reviewer believes (and as King has led him to suppose), but a demon, Tak, who has escaped from a caved-in mine and who now seeks to show his superiority over God, whom Tak regards as merely a competitive deity, rather than the one and only Supreme Being.

As an example of this approach, this post offers the following “likes and dislikes” of a number of readers of Dan Simmons’ novels The Terror and Summer of Night and of Stephen King’s Desperation. Obviously, the same two-column-table approach could be applied to any other writer’s work, recent or previous, including one’s own.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

Desperation by Stephen King

In case you were wondering (you probably weren’t), my own takes are that Summer of Night is well worth reading, The Terror is nigh unreadable, and Desperation is one of King’s best books ever. The reasons for these assessments, in nutshells, are Summer of Night's realistic and believable recreation of America as it was for many during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, sympathetic characters, effective chills and thrills, and an interesting back story concerning the history of the bell that focuses and draws the ancient evil to the novel’s unsuspecting and enchanting town; The Terror's needless detail about the most minute aspects of everything nautical and historical, characters who are difficult to get to know, much less to care about, and a lack of overt action during most of the story; and Desperation's sympathetic and believable characters (always a strength in King’s fiction), an interesting antagonist, high stakes, the religious and moral dimensions, and, of course, the chills and thrills. Concerning Desperation, it was difficult to find any negative comments among horror fans.

Generating Horror Plots, Part V

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

 

A careful analysis of the storylines of motion pictures, novels, narrative poems, and short stories in the horror genre discloses recurring plot motifs, or formulae. Here are the final of our list of a baker’s dozen (plus one) of them, each of which is complete with one or more examples to get you started on the compilation and maintenance of your own list of such plot patterns. 1. Find the ugly within or among the beautiful. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 2. Develop a continuing theme. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 3. Enact revenge. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 4. Rescue a damsel in distress. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 5. Find the strange in the familiar. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 6. Bring up the past (and relate it to the present). We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 7. Conduct an experiment. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 8. Invade paradise. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 9. Dig up that which has been buried (repressed). We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 10. Bite the hand that feeds you (betrayal). We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 11. Uncover a secret. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 12. Threaten the near and the dear. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 

 

13. Explore unfamiliar surroundings. From their earliest days, human beings have been driven by a need to know. There is a quality about the unfamiliar, the mysterious, and the unknown that more than merely attracts people’s attention; it compels them to investigate, to explore, and to study. We want to know other things because our knowledge and our appreciation (or, at least, our understanding) of them helps to extend ourselves. The more we know, the more we become, containing, eventually, multitudes, as Walt Whitman suggests, and, even then, as both Soren Kierkegaard and Emily Dickinson, each in his or her own way, declare, we ourselves are left over--and left hungry--a partial void that can never be completely filled. It is this impulse to investigate, to explore, and to study that makes travelers of us all, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We travel, like Hernando Cortez, through actual worlds, or like John Keats, through “realms of gold.” Writers of horror choose to visit the stranger, more frightening and repulsive of such worlds and realms. One such movie that does so, both literally and figuratively, is The Thing From Another World (1951), which mixes horror with science fiction as a team of scientists and support personnel, conducting research at a remote outpost in the arctic, stumble upon an extraterrestrial creature encased in ice. Being scientists, they recover the specimen and take it to their laboratory, where, eventually, it thaws, terrorizing the tiny community. Dogs attack the creature, biting off one of its arms, and the thawing limb is revived by the dog’s blood. The scientists discover that the creature is a plant, despite its humanoid appearance, and one of them, Dr. Carrington, seeks to grow more of its kind by sprinkling seedlings removed from the arm with plasma he takes from the compound’s infirmary. Interestingly, Dr. Carrington believes that he can reason with the plant, but the Air Force personnel who guard the station hold the view that it is hostile toward humans and must be destroyed, especially since it needs blood to sustain its own existence and they are the creature’s only source of this vital nutrient. They finally end the creature’s threat by electrocuting it after Dr. Carrington’s last-minute appeal to the creature’s reason fails, showing that the skeptical military men, not the trusting scientist, were right in their assessment of the creature’s nature and intentions. In The Terror, Dan Simmons takes his readers on an exploration of the arctic aboard Her Majesty’s ship the Terror. The ship becomes stranded in the ice, and its starving crew resort to cannibalism; at the same time, a monster begins to kill and devour the crew members, thereby increasing the trapped sailors’ terror. In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne offers an earlier science fiction novel that is based upon the exploration of an unknown locale--the center of the Earth itself. Although a science fiction story, it includes some elements of horror. The protagonist, Professor Linderbrock, leads a team of scientists down the interior of an Icelandic volcano, where they observe many wonders, the fiercest of which are the dinosaurs that have survived extinction in the subterranean world and giant insects and animals--and a prehistoric man or humanoid creature, all of which they avoid. Their way out of the underground world is blocked, but they set off an explosion that unleashes a torrent of water that buoys them out of the volcano. It is only after their escape that they realize that their travels inside the earth and the flood of waters that carried them through the subterranean environment has relocated them to Italy. Many other stories, in the science fiction genre, the horror genre, and other genres, also employ storylines that are based upon an exploration of unfamiliar surroundings.

 

14. Bring down the house. This storyline depends upon the destruction or the status quo. As Carlos Fuentes observes, “Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.” Stephen King, likewise, declares, “Terror. . . often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment: that things are in the unmaking.” The primordial prototype of this storyline is that in which Satan, in the guise of the serpent, tempts Eve to partake of the forbidden fruit and, in this act and in the same act, committed by Adam, afterward, brings about the fall and spiritual death of humanity and their own exile from paradise. Almost every horror story is built upon this foundation, so it seems unnecessary to offer any specific examples; every horror story is itself an instance of the erosion or sudden cessation of the order that is implicit in social, political, religious, moral, cultural, and other values and institutions that, collectively, constitute the structure and organization--in short, the order--that is prerequisite to chaos, and it is the restoration of this order, or some semblance of it, however temporal and tenuous, that forms the resolution of virtually every horror story, past, present, and, it seems inevitably

"Christabel": The Prototypical Lesbian Vampire

She’s sweet and chaste and pure and innocent and sexy and girl-next-door and religious and probably blonde, and she’s named Christabel. She’s the victim.

Her dark half and lover is mysterious and sexually experienced and seductive and exotic and blasphemous and probably brunette, and she’s named Geraldine. She’s the prototypical lesbian vampire.

Reveler upon opium when he was not writing poetry or literary criticism (or dodging bill collectors), poor, but brilliant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, among other eerie poems, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan,” a narrative ditty about a lesbian vampire named Christabel. It has gotten relatively short shrift among publishers and is not as well known among the general public as other of the poet’s works. If one has encountered the poem at all, it was most likely during a class concerning poetry or English literature. It is a disturbing poem, and, since it involves a good deal of horror, terror, revulsion, and abnormality, it is a good subject for study by horror writers, professional and aspiring.

While praying beside an oak tree in the wee hours of the morning, Christabel encounters a strange stranger named Geraldine, who says men have abducted her from her home. Enchanted by Geraldine’s seductive beauty, Christabel, perhaps knowing a good thing when she sees it (she may even regard Geraldine as a response to her prayer), takes the stranger home with her, whereupon Christabel’s father, Sir Leoline, a baron, becoming infatuated with Geraldine, orders a celebratory parade to declare her rescue. Here, the poem (another of Cole ridge’s “fragments”) ends, although the poet is alleged to have intended to finish it according to this storyline, identified by Coleridge’s biographer, James Gilman:

Over the mountains, the Bard, as directed by Sir Leoline, hastes with his disciple; but in consequence of one of those inundations supposed to be common to this country, the spot only where the castle once stood is discovered--the edifice itself being washed away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all that is passing, like the weird sisters in Macbeth, vanishes. Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in the meantime, by her wily arts, all the anger she could rouse in the Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to have been susceptible. The old Bard and the youth at length arrive, and therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of the accepted, though absent, lover of Christabel. Now ensues a courtship most distressing to Christabel, who feels--she knows not why--great disgust for her once favored knight.

This coldness is very painful to the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and consents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover, returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had once given him in sign of her. . . [betrothal]. Thus defeated, the supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle bell tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a reconciliation and explanation between father and daughter.

The verse is almost adolescent, or, as critics prefer to say, when addressing the work of a member of the literary canon, childlike:

‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu--whit!-- Tu--whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.

Coleridge not-so-subtly plants some clues that Geraldine may be as monstrous as she is beautiful, for she refuses to thank the Virgin Mary for her rescue:

So free from danger, free from fear,
They crossed the court : right glad they were.
And Christabel devoutly cried
To the Lady by her side,
Praise we the Virgin all divine
Who hath rescued thee from thy distress!
Alas, alas! said Geraldine, I cannot speak for weariness.

Uh oh!

The fire likes her, too; it leaps in her presence, to show the reader, again, that there’s something odd about Geraldine:

They passed the hall, that echoes still,
Pass as lightly as you will!
The brands were flat, the brands were dying,
Amid their own white ashes lying;
But when the lady passed, there came
A tongue of light, a fit of flame;
And Christabel saw the lady's eye,
And nothing else saw she thereby. . . .

Smitten by her seductress, mesmerizing houseguest, Christabel assures Geraldine that Christabel’s father sleeps: “O softly tread, said Christabel,/ My father seldom sleepeth well.” Is Christabel’s caution a concern for her father’s rest or an invitation of sexual dalliance with Geraldine? Their destination, and they stealthy way in which they approach it, suggests that Christabel may not be as innocent and virtuous as she appears to be, for she leads her houseguest, with the utmost caution, to her bedroom, where she offers her a glass of wine that Christabel’s now-deceased mother (and, presently, her “guardian spirit”) made from wildflowers:

Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare,
And jealous of the listening air
They steal their way from stair to stair,
Now in glimmer, and now in gloom,
And now they pass the Baron's room,
As still as death, with stifled breath!
And now have reached her chamber door;
And now doth Geraldine press down
The rushes of the chamber floor. . . .

. . . O weary lady, Geraldine,
I pray you, drink this cordial wine!
It is a wine of virtuous powers;
My mother made it of wildflowers.

The next moment, her name having been mentioned, the spirit of Christabel’s mother appears, but only Geraldine can see the phantom, and she orders the ghost to leave.

O mother dear! that thou wert here!
I would, said Geraldine, she were!

But soon with altered voice, said she--
`Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine!
I have power to bid thee flee.'
Alas! what ails poor Geraldine?
Why stares she with unsettled eye?
Can she the bodiless dead espy?
And why with hollow voice cries she,
`Off, woman, off! this hour is mine--
Though thou her guardian spirit be,
Off, woman. off! 'tis given to me.'

Invoking her authority to be alone with Christabel, Geraldine enforces her right, not wanting to be bothered by her enchanted hostess’ mother’s spirit hanging about like a spectral chaperone. Once the ghost has departed, Geraldine wastes no time in further seducing Christabel. She instructs Christabel to “unrobe” herself and to get into bed. Christabel does as she’s directed, obviously still under Geraldine’s spell. Unable to sleep, she studies Geraldine’s beautiful face and form, and the young hostess’ voyeurism is rewarded by a glimpse of Geraldine’s breast, which elicits a cry from the poem’s narrator for divine protection for Christabel:

But now unrobe yourself; for I
Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie.'

Quoth Christabel, So let it be!
And as the lady bade, did she.
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness.

But through her brain of weal and woe
So many thoughts moved to and fro,
That vain it were her lids to close;
So half-way from the bed she rose,
And on her elbow did recline
To look at the lady Geraldine.

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around;
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom, and half her side--
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

Her charms having worked their magic, Geraldine, after a moment’s confused hesitation (probably included to make the meter work), gets into bed with Christabel, wherein they stretch out alongside one another, lay in one another’s arms, and, presumably, experience greater intimacies than those that a mere embrace may provide:

Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs;
Ah! what a stricken look was hers!
Deep from within she seems half-way
To lift some weight with sick assay,
And eyes the maid and seeks delay;
Then suddenly as one defied
Collects herself in scorn and pride,
And lay down by the Maiden's side!--
And in her arms the maid she took. . . .!

At last, the mesmerizing Geraldine explains the magic of her enchanted “bosom” to her victim:

And with low voice and doleful look
These words did say :
`In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!

So ends the first part of the poem, in which the princess Christabel, having befriended a strange, abducted woman, Geraldine, whom she’d met while she’d been praying in the woods near her father’s castle, shelters her for the night, only to be seduced by her houseguest’s beauty and to be spellbound by her magic breasts.

Despite the adolescent versification and the clumsy plot, the poem does have a certain seductive and mesmerizing effect upon the reader, drawing him or her into the magic of Geraldine’s enchanted “bosom” and suggesting that the poor, chaste Christabel, despite the narrator’s continued pleas for her protection, is, both sexually and otherwise, her houseguest’s victim:

It was a lovely sight to see
The lady Christabel, when she
Was praying at the old oak tree.
Amid the jaggéd shadows
Of mossy leafless boughs,
Kneeling in the moonlight,
To make her gentle vows.

Her slender palms together prest,
Heaving sometimes on her breast;
Her face resigned to bliss or bale--
Her face, oh call it fair not pale,
And both blue eyes more bright than clear.
Each about to have a tear.:

With open eyes (ah, woe is me!)
Asleep, and dreaming fearfully,
Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis,
Dreaming that alone, which is--
O sorrow and shame! Can this be she,
The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree?
And lo! the worker of these harms,
That holds the maiden in her arms,
Seems to slumber still and mild,
As a mother with her child.

A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine! since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady's prison.
O Geraldine! one hour was thine--
Thou'st had thy will! By tairn and rill,
The night-birds all that hour were still.
But now they are jubilant anew,
From cliff and tower, tu--whoo! tu--whoo!
Tu--whoo! tu--whoo! from wood and fell!

And see! the lady Christabel
Gathers herself from out her trance;
Her limbs relax, her countenance
Grows sad and soft; the smooth thin lids
Close o'er her eyes; and tears she sheds--
Large tears that leave the lashes bright!
And oft the while she seems to smile
As infants at a sudden light!

Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep,
Like a youthful hermitess,
Beauteous in a wilderness,
Who, praying always, prays in sleep.
And, if she move unquietly,
Perchance, 'tis but the blood so free
Comes back and tingles in her feet.
No doubt, she hath a vision sweet.
What if her guardian spirit 'twere,
What if she knew her mother near?
But this she knows, in joys and woes,
That saints will aid if men will call :
For the blue sky bends over all!.

No wonder lesbian and feminist critics regard this fragmented poem as one of the great ones of world lit.

The lesbian vampire has since become a staple of erotic horror, appearing in many legitimate, if “R”-rated, films, including:

Eternal (2004): Detective Raymond Pope’s search for his missing wife leads him to the estate of a wealthy woman, Elizabeth Kane, who may be the latest incarnation of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the vampire who bathed in virgins’ blood.

Lost for a Vampire (1971): A writer researching a book visits an all-girls’ boarding school inhabited by lesbian vampire students.

Vampyros Lesbos (1971): In Turkey, American lawyer Linda Westinghouse’s dreams about being harassed and seduced by a dark-haired lesbian vampire beauty come true.

Les Frissons des Vampires (1970): Honeymooning couples are victimized by a castle of lesbian vampires.

Vampyres (1974): A lesbian couple lures innocent passersby to their deaths, one of the seductresses finally falling prey to a woman she seduces.

The Velvet Vampire (1971): A vampire woman comes out of the desert to seduce a hippie couple.

The Vampire Lovers (1970): The first of a trilogy of films about lesbian vampires, this one recreates, more or less faithfully, Sheridan LeFanu’s novel, Camilla. The lesbian is rival against a man for the affections of a woman whom both desire. He wins.

Blood and Roses (1960): A dead vampire’s spirit lives again by possessing Camilla, who narrates the tale.

Daughters of Darkness (1971): A honeymooning couple encounters Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who seduces the bride.

The Hunger (1983): Miriam Blaylock seduces scientist Sarah Roberts.

One into which it was harder for some critics to sink their teeth into is Lesbian Vampire Killers (to be released in 2009), a comedy in which men seek to rescue their women from a gang of lesbian vampires who have victimized a small Welsh town.

What’s So Scary About. . . .

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Too often, writers write the way people too often speak: without thinking or, more specifically, without planning. They hope for inspiration as they put pen to paper or (more typically fingertips to keyboard). However, a bit of forethought could go a long way, in horror writing or in the writing of any other genre of fiction. By brainstorming as to what’s so scary about a potential or chosen setting, the horror writer is better able to capitalize upon features of the locale that are uniquely or especially eerie, frightening, or repulsive. Here are a few key settings for horror stories. The aspiring horror writer can add more of his or her own and update the list as new elements of the horrible and the terrible occur to him or her concerning such places.

Attic

It is seldom visited, and its contents, to some extent, are apt to be forgotten; therefore, the attic is more or less unfamiliar and may house dangers, such as bats, rats, spiders, rabid squirrels, or human intruders.

It is unlit or dimly lit and full of shadows in which dangers may lurk or be concealed.

Its contents may be old or unused and may, therefore, represent mementos of death.

It is not spacious, and it lacks headroom, making one feel trapped.

Depending upon the weather, it could be hot, humid, musty, or damp.

It could smell of mold decay (if the body of an animal that has died in the attic’s walls or elsewhere has begun to rot).

Because of the boxes, crates, and other containers it often contains, the attic features many potential hiding places from which one may be ambushed.

It may lack continuous flooring, which impedes movement and escape.

Its being little visited and kept locked suggests that the attic is a “forbidden” place.

It seems unnaturally quiet.

Noises, lights, and smells, in a closed or locked attic suggests that something is amiss (i. e., that the attic is occupied by an animal, a human intruder, or a ghost, perhaps).

The ladder or the narrow, steep flight of steps leading to the attic suggests the unusual character of the attic.

It is isolated from the rest of the house and, therefore, from the rest of the family.

Its floorboards and hinges may creak.

It is likely to be unfurnished, undecorated, and unadorned; it may be unfinished as well, suggesting a place that has been abandoned and lacks the typical comforts of home.

Note: Flowers in the Attic is set, in large part, in an attic.

Basement

Many of the eerie elements associated with an attic are also associated with a basement, making a basement scary for the same reasons that an attic may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a basement:

The knowledge that, in descending a ladder or a flight of steps, one is going underground (where things are often buried) enhances the uneasiness one may feel
in entering a basement.

Its windows, if any, are apt to be small, perhaps mere vertical slits, which obscures one’s vision to the outside world and makes escape impossible.

It may contain a furnace, the fiery grate or interior of which, in the otherwise relative darkness, may appear eerie or even hellish.

Its cupboards, if any, may contain unusual odds and ends or “secrets” that are better left unknown.

Its walls may be stained or discolored or in disrepair.

Note: The movie The People Under the Stairs is set mostly in a family’s basement.

Crawlspace

Many of the eerie elements associated with an attic are also associated with a basement, making a basement scary for the same reasons that an attic may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a basement:

It is even more cramped and inspires claustrophobia even more than an attic or a
basement, reducing movement to a slow, even potentially painful, crawl.

It is dirty and may be stuffy or musty.

Its pipes, joists, beams, and other obstructions impede movement and/or escape.

Animal carcasses could be present or their bones may be scattered inside the crawlspace. (John Wayne Gacy buried the bodies of many of his victims in his house’s crawlspace, and a lesbian stalker lived in her victim’s crawlspace.)

Tunnels from the crawlspace could lead elsewhere.

Note: As its title implies, the movie Crawlspace featured this setting.

Hotel

It is large, both in space and in the number of rooms, allowing multiple possibilities of ambush, for being trapped, or for having one’s escape cut off.

It is full of strangers, some or all of whom may be hostile or untrustworthy.

As a guest, one is in a dependent role.

Others have keys to one’s room or suite.

It could be haunted.

It operates on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week basis, even while one is asleep and, therefore, vulnerable).

One could get stuck in an elevator, between floors.

Who knows what extra ingredients could be added to a drink in the hotel’s cocktail lounge or to a meal served in the hotel’s restaurant or delivered by room service?

One or more of its employees could be replaced by imposters.

Any weakness in its security could be exploited.

Its surveillance cameras are watching guests all the time, everywhere.

It could be isolated; even when it is not, it is a self-contained and relatively self-sufficient world unto itself (a total institution) of great resources.

It can feature fountains or statues in its lobby and courtyards or grounds.

It can harbor strange sights and sounds (and smells).

Its floor plans could be like a mazes, and, behind each door, a possible threat could wait to ambush a guest.

Power may fail.

Fog or other atmospheric or meteorological effects may occur.

Insects, animals, or humans may intrude.

Note: Stephen King’s short story “1408” takes place in a hotel, as does the movie, 1408, based upon it; King’s novel (and the movie based upon it), The Shining also takes place in a hotel.

Mansion

Many of the eerie elements associated with a hotel are also associated with a mansion, making a mansion scary for the same reasons that a hotel may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a mansion:

Things look different in the dark than they do in the light.

It is isolated behind walls and iron gates, obscured by trees and other vegetation.

Its ornamentation and decoration may be odd (demon doorknockers, gargoyles,
bizarre statues or portraits).

It is associated with an ancestry and heirs (in other words, the house has a past, as it were, which may be filled with guilty secrets).

Its library may contain forbidden books.

“What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?” What, indeed!

It may have an evil-looking façade or aura (as does the House of Usher, the
Amityville house, and Ed Gein’s house).

Its grounds may contain the family’s private cemetery.

It can be personified (“if these walls could only talk!”).

Almost by definition, abandoned houses are scary (they suggest the fragility of life, or relationships, of stability, and a person, too, as a former resident, may be fragile, unstable, or abandoned.)

It could be really haunted or it could become “haunted” (e. g., as a Halloween fund-raiser), attracting real ghosts or demons.

Its various rooms symbolize various aspects of the personality, as dream dictionaries indicate.

An ascent can become a descent.

What was left behind in an abandoned mansion (a mirror, a birdcage, a cabinet, an organ) could be demonic.

Abandoned and in a state of disrepair, it is apt to be unsafe because of weak floors or stairs or crumbling ceilings or walls.

Note: Many horror stories, both in print and on film, including The Amityville Horror, Rose Red, ‘Salem’s Lot, Psycho, and The Haunting of Hill House being but a few of the better known among them, are set, in full or in large part, in mansions.

Island

It is remote and inaccessible.

It may be inhabited by “savages” and/or strange and dangerous plants and animals.

It is at the “mercy” of the sea.

It may contain caverns, mountains, or forests that are habitats for unusual, or even bizarre, and threatening menaces of a vegetative, animal, or human nature.

It may have an odd shape (Skull Island) that is frightening in itself.

It may have been used for nefarious purposes.

It may be volcanic.

It may suggest an alternative evolutionary origin.

Note: The Island of Dr. Moreau, King Kong, Jurassic Park, and many other novels and movies take place upon islands.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In the 1960’s, the X-Men trained in the Danger Room. A spacious chamber in their mansion, it was full of hidden traps, launchers, catapults, collapsing floors, and various other mechanical threats. From the control booth, an individual observed the exercise while ensuring the participants’ safety. Improvements replaced some of the mechanical effects with computerized and holographic hazards. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse, also writes for Marvel Comics on occasion, and, during a stint for The Amazing X-Men, he made the danger room self-conscious. Unfortunately, he also personified it as a female character known as Danger. The room has since been replaced with the Danger Cave, a cavern beneath the mutants’ mansion, which uses holograms to review the X-Men’s battles with enemy mutants, rather after the fashion of professional football teams’ use of taped games to identify areas in which players can improve their play. 

Horror movies often employ a sort of metaphorical danger room by confining characters in a close, often locked, sometimes remote area into which the monster or other threat, natural, paranormal, or supernatural, is introduced. The characters are thus forced to fight the monster at close quarters without being able to escape. Beowulf, Alien, The Thing From Another World, 1408, Jurassic Park (Michael Creighton), The Island of Dr. Moreau (H. G. Wells), The Funhouse (Dean Koontz), Storm of the Century (Stephen King), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Ghost Ship, The Descent, Saw, The Mummy, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and many other novels and movies, both science fiction, horror, and otherwise, employ such a “danger room.” Perhaps the greatest use of the concept appears in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Premature Burial,” in which the danger room is a coffin, inside which the buried person, still alive, must confront the monster of his own terror. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome specifies one of the rules, as it were, for the sort of danger room that appears in horror fiction: “Two men enter; one man leaves,” except that the numbers may differ, both with regard to those who enter the setting and those who survive the monster’s attacks. In other words, there are going to be one (or many) victims and one (or more) survivors before the monster is killed, if it is killed. Unlike the X-Men’s danger room, this chamber of horrors is, in a horror story, full of real and terrible dangers, even when they are mental, rather than physical, in nature, and they will be, for some, at least, lethal. There is no escape or, at least, no easy way out. (As the protagonist of 1408 is told, the only way out of the danger room is “feet first.”) Another rule seems to be that the dangers, although predetermined, must be, to the characters they threaten, both unknown and varied. If the narrative has only one monster, as most horror stories do, its terror must be multiplied in some way, whether by its ability to reproduce quickly, sexually or asexually; its ability to transform itself into other entities or forces; its use of different deathtraps and devices of torture; or some other technique or combination of techniques. The protagonist and the other characters must be kept constantly off balance. Therefore, if they figure out how or why the monster attacks, the monster must then attack in a completely unexpected way as a result of an unknown or unforeseen impulse, motive, or cause, or the intervention of another character. There must also be a reason for the danger room’s existence--in other words, a plausible and believable cause for the existence of the story’s setting. Alien takes place aboard a derelict spaceship; the extraterrestrial in The Thing From Another World is the frozen body of an alien pilot whose spaceship crashed in the arctic, where a team of scientists set up a research station; Jurassic Park is built on an island as a future tourist attraction that is half-zoo, half amusement park; Dr. Moreau has come to an uncharted island to conduct his unethical research; and so it goes, each story providing a reason for the existence of its particular version of the figurative danger room. Poe gives a great early example of a danger room as literal as that of the one that appears in the 1960’s X-Men comics: a dungeon wherein there is both a pit and a razor-sharp pendulum as well as red-hot walls that close upon prisoners in the same manner as the walls of the giant trash compactor close in upon Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Chewbacca in the original Star Wars movie. Likewise, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” the danger room is also an actual, physical place: the palace of Prince Prospero. However, the danger room can be, as Poe shows, the mind itself, as it is in not only “The Premature Burial,” but also several of his other stories, including “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Black Cat.” Madness can be a place, as it were, in which traps and missiles and collapsing floors appear as thoughts, feelings, attitudes, delusions, fears, and assorted other inner demons from which escape is truly impossible and in which survival may or may not occur for the poor soul that is beset by these monstrous dangers. In constructing a danger room of one’s own, a writer should remember these principles:

1. There must be victims and at least one survivor before the monster is killed, if it is killed.
2. The dangers must be unknown to the characters and varied.
3. There must be a plausible reason for the danger room.
4. Escape is difficult, if not impossible.
5. The danger room may be actual and physical or figurative and psychological.

Paradise, Heroism, and the Eternal Return: A Formula for Both Myth and Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Much of the argument and many of the insights that Paul Nathanson shares with readers of his Over the Rainbow: Secular Myths of America can be applied to the horror genre. Taking a leaf from Micea Eliade, Nathanson points out that the cosmos--the orderly system that originates from chaos as a result of divine creation--represents the “familiar world,” whereas chaos corresponds to the world of the unknown, which is inhabited by “ghosts, demons, and foreigners.” We can apply Nathanson’s observation, by way of Eliade, to the garden of Eden versus the great wilderness beyond it. Into the familiar world of the cosmos, Nathanson observes, the unknown can erupt, via kratophanies, hierophanies, and theophanies; the unknown, like the sacred, can also be repeated through myths and rituals. The sacred becomes a way of orienting a tribe or a nation, Nathanson states; it delineates that which is desirable by separating the sacred and the profane or the sacred and the secular.

There is always a sacred center to the world, Nathanson, echoing Eliade, points out. This center, the axis mundi, is often a “mountain, city, temple, palace,” or island, whereat are met heaven, earth, and hell. The revelation of the sacred is the revelation of the real.

The axis mundi need not number one; there can be several, or even many, of these sacred centers. As Nathanson points out, every spatial hierophany or consecrated space is “equivalent to a cosmology.” There are, after all, many sacred mountains, cities, temples, palaces, islands, groves, wells, hills, and other such centers of the sacred life. However, all such places have something in common, Nathanson says. In existential terms, they form a “sacred cycle in which cosmogonic events” are experienced anew from time to time “through the ritual reenactment of myths by which man recreates,” or repeats, “the act of creation” that is represented by the sacred calendar and year; these mystical rituals reenact the original creation of the gods.

In religion, to be real is to have meaning, Nathanson contends, and for a ritual act to have meaning, it must symbolically repeat its sacred, prototypical event, whether spatially or chronologically, since the cosmos is the prototype, or archetype, of reality itself. The harmony of the cosmos is desirable and to be embraced; the disharmony of chaos is undesirable and is to be rejected. Moreover, Nathanson observes, the cosmic interpretations of reality are both communal (Israel, the Church) and individual (the Jew, the Christian). This twofold character of the cosmos led the question of whether paradise is future and otherworldly or here and now.

According to Nathanson, the tension between these two possible understandings was never resolved, but has been allowed to enrich the concept of paradise, as does the possibility of one’s understanding it in either literal or figurative terms. For example, we can glimpse eternity from within time (before our own individual deaths) or paradise from within history (before the end of history). Indeed, as religious faith declines, utopias sometimes take the place of paradise, just as the idea of progress replaced the idea of providence, with destiny being seen as something better than, rather than a return to, the origins of things.

By definition, the city, in ancient times, was a walled enclosure, and by including some persons and things, it also excluded others. That which was within the walls was part of the sacred place, paradise. That which was without the walls was part of the secular or the profane world, and, as such, was, as it were, exiled, condemned, or damned. With this understanding before us, it is easy to comprehend why Nathaniel exercised such passionate devotion in the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls following his return from the Israelites’ dispersal into Babylon.

The difference, Nathanson says, between paradise lost and paradise regained is the snake: in the former, it is present; in the latter, it is absent.

In horror fiction, these themes are often invoked, whether overtly or symbolically. There is the sacred center, or axis mundi; myths and rituals, or their equivalents; and an orientation toward that which is valued and that which is devalued; there is inclusion, and there is exclusion. For example, we can also apply this concept to Heorot, the hall of Danish fellowship, and to the wilderness, inhabited by the monstrous, outcast Grendel that lay beyond its walls. Likewise, think of Eden, Jerusalem, or, for that matter, Yggsdrasil or the Hellmouth. Just as Grendel and his mother (and, later, the dragon) are alive and well in the fallen world of the Danes’ Heorot (and, later, in Beowulf’s own realm), they are absent in these regained versions of these sacred centers. They have been not banished or exiled, but destroyed, just as, in Buffy, the Hellmouth is destroyed (although, as it turns out, there is another elsewhere).

Paradise shifts from the garden to the Promised Land to the frontier, Nathanson points out, and is, at present “located. . . in outer space.” It is also invaded, or overrun, for a time, and is abandoned in favor of a new paradise or until the pilgrims’ return. The interval of the sojourn is one of maturation if not, indeed, perfection, so that, as the sojourners move into a new paradise or return to their home, it is they, not the sacred center, that has changed. They have become the home that they sought elsewhere, sinners become saints, just as Beowulf earned immortality by his heroic deeds or Buffy passed her powers to hundreds of other “potential” slayers.

Duma Key: The Decline of Horror?

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In recent years, it seems that Stephen King has begun to think of himself as a great American writer who can write simply to please himself. In reality, most of his fiction is apt to be forgotten soon after his demise. One or two books, perhaps, will survive their author. Duma Key isn’t likely to be one, any more than the self-parody that was Lisey’s Story. His latest (and certainly not his greatest) is self-indulgent and pretentious and disappointing as hell.

The protagonist, Edgar Freemantle, loses his right arm and then his wife. He becomes suicidal, and his shrink tells him to seek a change of scenery, which leads him to Duma Key, Florida. Too bad the shrink didn’t tell Edgar to go ahead and end it all. His having done so would have spared readers his endless bellyaching.

At Duma Key, Edgar tries his hand at art. He also meets a lawyer who also wanted to commit suicide (and should have) after his wife and daughter were killed; he did manage to put a bullet in his brain, and although even that didn’t end it for him, at least he made the attempt, which is more than can be said for Edgar.

There’s something supernatural about Edgar’s artistic talent; he can use it to kill or to heal and to paint a mysterious “ship of the dead” that troubles him. From here, the plot, such as it is, sickens further, dying well before the story’s absurd denouement. Suffice it to say that this is another King-size ripoff, involving, this time, a goddess-doll that collects servant-souls and commands the ship of the dead that Edgar spends most of his days trying to paint. After the goddess-doll kills Edgar’s daughter Ilse, Edgar encounters a giant alligator, and--well, who cares, really? Certainly, King doesn’t seem to have.

For the most part, since his own death-defying accident, King’s fiction has become increasing self-indulgent and unnecessarily circuitous, losing any pizzazz, suspense, or horror. They’re just interminably boring. Maybe there’s another book up King’s sleeve that’s worth reading, but he hasn’t written one in the past 10 years or so.

What does this decline mean? If it’s only King’s decline, not all that much, but if his deterioration heralds that of horror fiction per se, then it’s noteworthy--and scary. For many years, King’s name has been more or less synonymous with contemporary horror fiction and with horror fiction that was relatively good. If anything, it’s since become tantamount to wallowing in the slime of narcissism. Dean Koontz, who cut his fangs in the science fiction and horror genres, is pretty much writing cross-genre stuff about as meaningless as Duma Key and Lisey’s Story, recycling the same sad story lines as he’s been using for the last 20 or 30 years. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have discarded everything but Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his tiresome ward, Constance. Dan Simmons has gone over to the science fiction side of the Farce, and his writing has become impossibly self-important, denser than Herman Melville or William Faulkner or Henry James on their worst days. Bentley Little has told the same story, in different settings, nearly a dozen times--and still hasn’t figured out how to end the damned thing. James Rollins’ stories, although not horror per se, are page-turners, but, again, each seems much the same as the next, since he writes, as do so many in the genre, according to a fairly rigid formula. Robert MacCammon hasn’t written anything worth reading in well over a decade. True, there’s Speaks the Nightbird, but it’s not worth reading.

It may not be merely King who’s petering out; it may be the whole horror genre. Maybe a moratorium on horror is needed. Maybe the ingredients need to steep a while or new ingredients need to be brewed.

King’s attempt to pass the torch to his son, Joe Hill, is proof that more of the same isn’t going to work; the best thing about Junior‘s book is its title, Heart-Shaped Box. The rest is of the same quality as an expletive deleted.

Unless there’s an Edgar Allan Poe or an H. P. Lovecraft waiting in the wings, the horror genre’s immediate future seems bleak, indeed.

Bleaker, perhaps, even than Duma Key.

What’s So Weird About Weird Tales?

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A pulp magazine of horror and the supernatural, Weird Tales has had an on-again, off-again publication history that spans from 1923 to the present. In its tumultuous career, the magazine has published many authors whose names have subsequently earned fame in a variety of fiction genres.

Weird Tales cover art by Hannes Bok.

Among the names that one can drop in relation to Weird Tales are those of Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Theodore Sturgeon, and Tennessee Williams. (Yes, the Tennessee Williams.)

During its history, the magazine also has provided opportunities for a number of illustrators to showcase their artwork, both on its covers and within its pages. Included among their number are Margaret Brundage, Virgil Finlay, and Hannes Bok.

Weird Tales cover art by Margaret Brundage.

A selection of Weird Tales’ current stories includes Jay Lake’s “Thomas Edison and His Telegraphic Harpoon” (“The steam ram City of Hoboken moved like a drunken bear in all weathers, pistons groaning with the pain of metal as the great machine walked the prairies”); Karen Heuler’s “Landscape, With Fish” (“He never actually saw the fish take off — he always caught them flying, instead — but he had to assume they did a kind of leap first, so he put up a higher fence”); Mikal Trimm and Marcie Lynn Tentchoff‘s “In the Company of Women” (“Seamus stared down into the grave, shaking from more than just the frost-tinged air. She’d been pretty once, true, but not now, surely not now”); and Lisa Mantchev’s “Six Scents” (“Men find it hard to fall in love with a dead girl. They tell her it’s a turn-off that they take her hand at the movies and a finger lands in the popcorn”).

Weird Tales cover art by Virgil Finlay.

The genre’s writers, it seems, are increasingly women, and the stories’ tone has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Weird Tales’ stories have stopped taking their own genre seriously, a fact which marks the passing of a once-great source of superior pulp fiction of the horror kind. Today, unfortunately, that’s about all that’s weird about Weird Tales.

Hell on Earth

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In previous posts, we argued that horror fiction is about the survival of loss and that the monsters it features are often metaphors for various real (i. e., existential) threats. We also suggested that, for many contemporary horror writers, the evils which threaten us today are apathy and indifference, whether personal, social, or cosmic in nature. Evil, these writers seem to agree, flourishes when good men do nothing. Stephen King seems to be the odd man out in suggesting that modern evil should be considered more a threat against one’s community, on whatever scale, than apathy or indifference per se.

Writers--especially horror writers--are always Dante, creating hells, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment. The modern hell results from the evils of apathy and indifference, from the loss, in other words, of altruism and self-sacrifice. We are the waylaid traveler in a world in which there are few, if any, good Samaritans.

In past times, the threats of loss with which society was faced--the monsters of the moment, as it were--were different. After World War II, Japan, with good reason, feared the atomic bomb, and Godzilla arose, a towering monster born of underwater nuclear waste, to terrorize Tokyo as Fat Man and Little Boy had terrorized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The monster represented the annihilation of the Japanese people, a sort of genocidal doom imposed by strangers from afar.

King Kong, if we are to believe Carl Denham, seems to represent the bestial component not of humanity as such, but of the male of the species, whom only female Beauty can tame. What is the giant ape but the uncivilized and the undomesticated, and, therefore, the hyper-masculine, male? He is masculinity unrestrained, a rampage of testosterone that has not, as yet, met its match in the humanizing effects of estrogen. Too large, to be sure, to be a rapist, Kong is nevertheless an abductor who, quite literally, carries Ann Darrow back to nature, a primitive world in which there is no law other than that of the survival of the fittest. It is only when, tempted, as it were, by Ann, that Kong is captured (emasculated) and taken to the concrete jungle that he is subdued, however temporarily, and, at last, killed. As Denham laments, “’Tis Beauty killed the Beast.” The lesson of this masterful cautionary tale is as simple as it is profound: The undomesticated male is a threat not only to the female but to society--indeed, to civilization--itself, and, if it cannot be tamed, it must be destroyed by the tribe.

Beowulf’s monster, Grendel, was an outcast. A descendent of Cain, who was sent into exile by God himself, Grendel envied the fellowship displayed by the Danish warriors who met over mead in their great hall, Heorot, for which reason he attacked and killed as many of their number as he could, until, at last, he himself was dispatched by the Geatish hero. Critics see him as representing the feuding principle which, like that among today’s street gangs, requires that an outrage, real or perceived, by one tribe against another, be avenged. The act of vengeance itself, of course, requires, in turn, another act of vengeance, ad infinitum, thereby threatening the social order that is the foundation of civilization. By defeating this principle, Beowulf introduced social stability and ended the threat to the status quo that continuous intertribal warfare, in the guise of the monster, represented.

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero overcomes the monster of his own--and of the rest of humanity’s--mortality. He does not defeat death itself, but the fear of it that immobilized his will and made life seem hardly worth the living. In other words, he learns to live with death, establishing the pagan alternative to Christian immortality: the name of the man of accomplishment, if not the man himself, will be remembered forever. To be forgotten is to be annihilated. However, the man of great accomplishment is apt to be memorialized both in stone monuments and in such poems as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, so his memory is assured, and he need not fear being forgotten; in this sense, he will live forever.

Epic narratives, by definition, deal with civilizations, nations, or societies. Other types of fiction may, also, but they need not do so. Often, other genres do not. Sometimes, the focus is finer. The group is more select, and the context is more contracted. For example, according to its creator, Joss Whedon, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is based upon the simple premise that high school is hell. It is a place that one is compelled to attend. The day progresses according to a predetermined structure that is imposed upon one by others. The setting is a more-or-less self-contained, self-sufficient environment--in sociological terms, a total institution. One is forced to participate in activities, such as physical education and geometry and English class assignments, that are abhorrent and painful, emotionally if not always physically. One is made to keep company with others whose presence one finds undesirable or even repulsive. Certain behaviors that one enjoys, whether chewing gum or making out with a member of the opposite sex, are discouraged or even forbidden, and the manner in which one would dress may be restricted or dictated by adults with no fashion sense. Pretty much everything one does is controlled by one’s keepers--the teachers and administrators--and even a visit to the rest room must be approved by someone else. High school students suffer not only a loss of freedom, but they also experience losses of autonomy, dignity, and individuality. Moreover, attempts are made to “socialize” them and to make them think in certain ways about certain things--in a sense, to brainwash them. Maybe, in many ways, high school is hell, as Whedon and others (Carrie’s director, Brian De Palma, for example) have suggested.

Buffy offers a convenient way of examining hell on earth, because it confines itself pretty much (for the first three of its seasons, anyway) to the microcosm of high school (and thereafter to the microcosm of college); because it ran for seven seasons before its demise; and because it frequently features a monster of the week, which supplies quite a bestiary of monsters, beastly, demonic, and otherwise, which suggests how horror writers are always Dante, creating hells, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment.

In “The Witch,” the third episode of season one, a high school cheerleader’s mother, who is also a witch, uses her magic to eliminate her daughter’s rivals so that she, the mother, can relive her glory days as a head cheerleader through her daughter, once the latter gains a spot on the squad. Although this plot may seem ludicrous, it has a real-life precedent in which a woman murdered the rivals of her daughter to ensure her win. The hell of high school, it seems, is home to abusive parents who, seeking to live vicariously through their children, represent real dangers to their offspring’s health and welfare.

“The Pack,” the sixth episode of the same season, examines the threats of peer pressure and mindless conformity to individuals’ personal integrity. Buffy Summers’ friend, Xander Harris, bitten by a hyena, becomes more and more feral and predatory, both socially and sexually, turning against his best friend Willow Rosenberg and his romantic interest, the Slayer herself. High school’s hell includes the demons of groupthink and the lockstep behavior that attends it.

The eighth episode of this season, “I Robot, You Jane,” takes on the dangers of the anonymous predators of Internet chat rooms: Willow meets a seemingly sweet suitor who is actually a demon that was released from the book in which its spirit was magically bound when the school’s librarian, Rupert Giles, orders the text to be scanned into the library’s electronic database and the demon escapes into cyberspace.

“Out of Sight, Out of Mind” shows the psychologically destructive effects of cliques who ignore all others but their own members: a girl who is ignored by students and teachers alike gradually becomes invisible and seeks to avenge herself upon her passive-aggressive tormentors before, defeated by Buffy, she finds a home, of sorts, with a covert government organization (most likely the Central Intelligence Agency) that performs espionage activities.

Other episodes in this and other seasons of the show provide plenty of other examples of the types of loss that high school students face and the types of monsters that threaten them with these losses. Many have to do with matters of identity, multiculturalism and cultural assimilation, sexism and chauvinism, attempts to avoid personal responsibility and duty, the effects of past deeds upon one’s present life, the consequences of refusing or being unable to repress instincts and primitive impulses, the emotional manipulation of others, unrestrained passion, child abuse, unresolved guilt, misogyny, adolescent behavior, social ostracism, service to others, and autonomy. In other words, high school hell, as it is depicted in this series for teens and young adults, is layered with personal, social, and political strata, much like the world of adults. The difference is that many of the concerns are adolescent. Adults, for the most part, have survived the losses associated with adolescence and have moved on to face other dragons. The new monsters are not necessarily bigger and more terrible (although some may be), but they’re different, for different ages, whether with respect to the individual or his or her society, nation, or culture, differ over time. In every age, however, the rejected and the exiled, the repressed and the banished, become the condemned, or the damned, and new hells are created, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment. The demons are the threats of loss; the effects that follow such losses make up the atmosphere of hell. In the hell that is high school, the blessed are the ones who, surviving these losses, ascend to new levels of knowledge and wisdom.

Of course, that’s just the hell of high school. Once writers realized that there is not one world, but worlds within worlds, the numbers and kinds of hell, like the number and types of demons, multiplied significantly. There is the hell of school, of the workplace, of the home, of the place of worship, of places of leisure, and some hells are not places at all, but states of existence, such as illness, or situations, such as a loveless marriage, or events, such as the death of a loved one. Truly, as Edgar Allan Poe observed, “misery is manifold.” Hell is on earth because, as Jean Paul Sartre points out, in No Exit, hell is other people. It is also ourselves. As John Milton observes, Satan carries hell within himself, for it is a state of mind in which he has alienated himself from God. The same is true of us as well.

One might say of this post what some critics said of Milton’s poem. Much has been said of hell, but little of heaven. That’s because, too often, we count our curses, so to speak, rather than our blessings, seeing the bad and ignoring the good. By identifying the hellish, we have, by implication, also identified its opposite, the heavenly, which is why, as we have argued in a previous post, horror fiction is a guide to the good life as well as a body of cautionary tales. Whatever we fear to lose, we value, and heaven is the realm wherein we have stored up the things we deem to be valuable beyond all else, very little of which, as it turns out, is comprised of physical or material objects.

Toward a Taxonomy of Horror Fiction

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

“Taxonomy” is a fancy word for classification system--a sort of intellectual file cabinet for grouping things on the basis of their similarity to one another or their sharing of a common trait that excludes anything that lacks this trait. In biology, organisms are grouped by whether they have a backbone (vertebrates) or not (invertebrates), and animals are grouped as reptiles (scales), amphibians (able to breathe in water or on land), and mammals (ability to bear live young).

Whether horror fiction can be so classified is a debatable point. What is the single trait that is essential to literature that would be cause it to be considered horror fiction? Literary works that cause readers to feel fear, one might suggest, are specimens of horror fiction. This approach to the taxonomic problem classifies the work by its effect. Certainly, Edgar Allan Poe would subscribe to such a principle, as his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” makes clear.

Many things that one would not ordinarily, if at all, regard as horrific nevertheless disturb us: a steelworker’s accidental fall from a skyscraper, the crash landing of a jet airplane on the ocean, a house on fire, the sight of an animal’s cadaver alongside the highway. We tend to speak of such events as “tragic” or “unfortunate,” or “gross,” but, although they shock, sicken, and disturb us, they seldom actually frighten us.


For an incident or a situation to be horrifying, it must be personal: it must affect us individually and personally, directly or vicariously. Otherwise, it may be terrifying, atrocious, and sickening, but it is not horrific or horrifying.

This seems to be the first criterion for classifying a narrative as a horror story, then: it must affect us individually and personally, directly or vicariously.

If we are on board, a runaway train is terrifying, as would be a car that won’t stop, no matter how many times or how hard the brake pedal is stomped, or an airplane that takes a sudden and irreversible nosedive into the planet. However, it is not the train, the car, or the airplane itself that terrifies. Rather, it is the fact that it is on an uncontrollable course that could well result in our own injuries, deaths, and destruction. Since we are passengers aboard the train, or in the car, or aboard the airplane, the uncontrollable, headlong dash toward injury, death, and destruction makes the situation personal. It affects us directly and individually. Even if the runaway train, out-of-control car, or plummeting airplane were to be brought under control, its initial behavior would be harrowing. During the time that we were, as it were, at the mercy of the vehicle, we would experience true horror. If we analyze the cause of our horror, however, we understand that it is not the mere train, car, or airplane that horrifies but the fact that it is out of control. We can make no appeal to a machine, for it has neither ears to hear nor brain to think nor heart to feel.


This seems to be the second criterion for classifying a narrative as a horror story, then: the menace with which we are threatened must be out of control (beyond appeal). When the menace is a human being, part of what may make him or her uncontrollable, or beyond appeal, could be his or her inhumanity. A lack of the ability to experience emotions or the lack of a conscience, for example, puts a sociopath beyond appeal. Emotional pleas mean nothing, because he or she feels neither sympathy nor empathy, and moral appeals mean nothing, because he or she has no sense of right and wrong.

Although the threats with which horror fiction confronts its readers need not be human, and, therefore, may lack discernment and purpose, a third criterion, perhaps more desirable than necessary, as an ingredient of horror fiction is consciousness, or intelligence, for it seems that an out-of-control menace that threatens us personally and individually, directly or vicariously, is more horrific if it is intelligent than if it is merely a insentient force or being like a forest fire, a disease, or a runaway train. Intelligence gives the menace will and the ability to execute sophisticated plots. A madman, who is able to reason, after a fashion, and yet who lacks humanity--a sociopath, in other words--is far more horrific a threat than even a plummeting airplane, because he or she threatens us personally and individually, is out of control (beyond appeal), and is able to carry out his or her schemes relentlessly.

Perhaps we can classify any story, in print or on film, that meets these two criteria as being an instance of horror fiction:

1. The threat must affect the reader or audience individually and personally, whether directly or vicariously.
2. The menace with which the reader or audience is threatened must be out of control (beyond appeal).

These two elements, we may say, are essential characteristics of the horror story. To them, we can add a nice-to-have element, which, like a good seasoning, spices the plot:

3. The menace with which the reader or audience is threatened should be conscious, or intelligent, if possible.

The adoption of these criteria leaves ample room for the most monstrous monster, but it also allows us to include such stories as Psycho, Jaws, Cujo, and The Island of Dr. Moreau in our taxonomy, and most horror writers, fans, and critics would agree that these stories, involving a mad, transvestite killer; a shark; a rabid dog; and quasi-intelligent human-animal hybrids, respectively, should be accorded room on the genre’s specimen boards.

Of course, a taxonomy usually also includes subtypes. Perhaps they shall be the topic of a future post.