The Feminization of Horror: The Horror! The Horror!

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Traditionally, the monsters of horror stories have had masculine character traits--or, at least, more masculine than feminine characteristics. The monster was aggressive, dominant, forceful, strong, self-reliant, tough, daring, competitive, and, in its own way, athletic and courageous. Today’s monsters, however, following the contemporary trend in which males seem, more and more, to be undergoing feminization, are also adopting more and more of the traits that have been associated, traditionally, with women.

Often, before killing its prey, the predatory monster will stalk it. Whether the intended victim is male or (as is more commonly the case) female, the audience (or reader) will identify with the human, over the monster. Therefore, since the victim is seen through the eyes of the monster-as-stalker, the audience, despite the gender of the individual moviegoer or reader, will identify with the victim, seeing him- or herself in this role. Whether the victim has traditional feminine traits per se, he or she will be defined in opposition to the monster’s hyper-masculinity and will be seen as weak, vulnerable, defenseless, helpless, imperiled. In short, the victim, regardless of his or her gender, will be a damsel, as it were, in distress.

Not only does the feminization of the victim, regardless of his or her gender, result from the threat of the hyper-masculine monster, but the larger community is characterized as feminine as well in many contemporary horror stories. The lone hero of Beowulf seldom makes an appearance to take on the monster in single combat. Instead, the monster is defeated by committee. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, it takes a community to kill a monster. Traditionally, the characteristics that make community cooperation--like cooperation itself--possible are labeled feminine: unselfishness; sympathy; the affinity for establishing and maintaining interpersonal, familial, and communal relationships; yielding to others; helpfulness; loyalty; reliability; and sensitivity. Even such traditionally feminine qualities as secretiveness and understanding can help in the community’s cooperative effort to protect its members and to destroy the monster.


Although the monster itself retains many of the characteristics that, traditionally, are counted as masculine, it has also begun to be characterized, in some ways, as being feminine. In other words, it becomes a bestial sort of phallic woman. As such, it is often the antagonist of an equally hyper-masculinized phallic woman protagonist. Traditionally, the male body is considered to be normative. The female body has been labeled as not only derivative (Eve, after all is created from a rib taken from Adam), but also deviant: it is a deviation from the norm of the masculine physique. Possibly for this reason, some of the deviance of femininity is associated with the monster, as in Dracula’s ruby lips, the menstrual-like lunar cycles characteristic of the werewolf, and the wearing of feminine clothing by Norman Bates and even of female body parts and skin by The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill. Moreover, the monster is often a disguised phallic woman in the sense that it is intent upon emasculating the male characters, by forcing male audience members to adopt the feminine role of exhibitionistic victim rather than the male role of voyeuristic stalker and by, sometimes literally, castrating them (that is, by dismembering them). When, instead of a community's cooperating to kill the monster, it is a woman, such as Lieutenant Ripley, in Alien and its sequels, Xena the Warrior Princess, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who takes upon herself such a duty, the feminization of the male is complete, for not only are the male members of the audience forced to adopt a feminine role and a feminine point of view as potential victims of a hyper-masculine monster, but their rescuer is female, rather than male, inverting the traditional polarities of the masculine-feminine continuum by positing phallic women as the protectors and rescuers of feminized males.


In horror fiction, women have been the traditional victims of the hyper-masculine monster. Some remain such. More and more often, however, their ranks are increased by male characters. While female characters, by definition as well as by reference to the traditional traits of femininity, are female, males as victims are not. Their being cast, as it were, into this role, therefore, constitutes a feminization of them and not merely a role reversal. They retain the male physique, but psychologically they are transformed. They become, as it were, women trapped in men’s bodies, or psychological hermaphrodites, or transsexuals.


By feminizing both male audience members-as-victims, their larger communities, and the monster itself (as well as, occasionally, the slayer of the monster), contemporary horror movies are part of the ongoing feminization of American (and, indeed, international) culture. Although some may find such a metamorphosis to be desirable, many others find it--in a word--horrific. It seems that all is grist for the mill, after all. Hence, the feminization of the contemporary male is another of the many themes and topics that writers of horror have adopted recently, as such television series as Xena, Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and such movies as Psycho, Dressed To Kill, Alien and its sequels, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (starring none other than Renee Zellweger!), The Silence of the Lambs, Species, Sleepaway Camp, The Descent, and others suggest.

Evil As A Threat To Social or Communal Values

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A society fears the opposite traits or conditions that it values and regards these contraries as threats. Therefore, for the society that values certain qualities or circumstances, a creature that symbolizes the traits or conditions that are opposed to these values represents a monster. These are qualities and objects that the tribes of Beowulf value and the opposites of, or the threats to, these values:

The monsters in the poem threaten several of the Anglo-Saxon values that Beowulf defends. In addition, Grendel is Beowulf’s shadow--the monster represents values that the Anglo-Saxon society of which Beowulf is a member and, indeed, a leader. In exiling him from human company, God has cut him off from humanity. The attitudes, beliefs, emotions, ideas, and other qualities that Grendel embraces are spurned by the Danes and Geats. He, his mother, and their kind, as well as their values, are rejected by Beowulf and his people and by the other peoples of their world.

In myths that have developed a concept of paradise, such as that of the Norse, one can easily discern the social values behind or beneath the idea of heaven. These are the sources, in fact, of the bliss that the blessed experience in paradise. In Norse mythology, Valhalla, as the Hall of the Slain, is the warriors’ portion of the paradisiacal Asgard. By day, the dead warriors, restored to life, feast, drink, and enjoy the attentions of their Valkyrie lovers. In the afternoon, they take to the heavenly battlefield and hack at one another with axes, stab and slice one another to pieces with swords, and club one another with spiked maces, to be made restored to life, health, and wholeness at the end of the day by Odin. The cycle is repeated until the advent of Ragnarok, the final battle between the gods and the frost giants that ushers in a new age. The ticket to Valhalla is valor; only the warriors who die courageously on the battlefield are selected as residents of the Norse paradise. Those who die of illness or old age spend their afterlives in Hel. It is easy to identify the values that these myths reflect and their opposites, the threats against the values:

The early and modern Christian church represents a community more than a society as such. Its enemy, however, threatens its values just as other monsters may threaten a society’s (or even a civilization’s) values, as Beowulf threatens the values of the medieval Scandinavian nations’ values.

According to the New Testament, the “fruits of the Spirit” number nine and, together, comprise a truly loving and godly personality; their opposites represent threats to such a personality:

In Christianity, Satan is Jesus’ shadow (in the Jungian sense), because Satan is able to tempt Jesus. Therefore, Satan represents qualities or things that Jesus would like to have. Instead, Jesus represses his desires for these things, resisting the devil. To ask what Jesus values, we need simply to identify the temptations with which Satan tempted him. There were three.

In the first, Satan invited Jesus to end his fast by transforming a stone into a loaf of bread.

In the second, Satan challenged Jesus to throw himself down from a high place, arguing that God would send his angels to protect Jesus from harm.

In the third, Satan told Jesus that if he would worship him, Satan would give Jesus dominion over the world.

It seems that Jesus was tempted to set aside his dependence upon God for his food, to demonstrate his status as the Son of God and of God’s love for him as such, and to take upon himself the rule of humanity. In each case, Jesus was tempted to act according to his own will and to accomplish his desires in his own way, as Satan did when he rebelled against God and was exiled from heaven. Satan tempts Jesus to act out of pride rather than humility and out of his own will rather than out of faith. These are the impulses within himself that Jesus represses.

Beowulf: The Prototypical Monster Killer

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Killed By Death,” an episode of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, Buffy tells a hospitalized boy that monsters do exist, as the boy suspects, but that there is also good news: heroes who slay monsters also exist. In English literature, the prototypical monster killer is Beowulf, the protagonist of the Anglo-Saxon poem that’s named in his honor. As a hero, Beowulf possesses the characteristics that typify such a character:

• He represents a nation or a community.


• He’s willing to risk danger or sacrifice himself for others.


• His actions benefit humanity or a nation.


• He fights for a greater cause.


• He behaves in a chivalrous manner, especially toward women.


• He lives according to the dictates of a social code of conduct.


• He often represents the nobility or upper class.


• He behaves honorably at all times.


• He has a strongly developed sense of right and wrong.


• He’s praised and rewarded by society.

These characteristics are opposite to the traits of personality that typify the anti-hero:

• He represents himself.


• He’s willing to risk danger or to sacrifice himself for wealth or egoistic satisfaction.


• His actions benefit him or only a select few.


• He fights for his own principles.


• Chivalry is dead to him.


• He lives according to his own code of conduct.


• He often represents the middle or the lower class.


• He will let the end justify the means at times.


• He’s often amoral or acts according to a highly individualized moral code.


• He may be condemned or punished by society.

In Beowulf, the monster Grendel and his mother, the descendents of the God-cursed Cain, represent anti-heroes of a sort, and the heroic culture of Beowulf stands in opposition to the anti-heroic culture of the monsters. Two ways of life vie against one another for survival. The pagan society of Beowulf is becoming Christian; it is being Christianized. The society of Grendel and his mother remains not only pagan but also uncivilized, savage, and barbaric. The former society, the poem implies, gives rise to the hero who is concerned about others as well as himself, whereas the latter maintains a narcissistic world view in which only the desires of the self and those whom it values are important. It is this self-centered, anti-heroic world view, Beowulf suggests, which threatens society and is wicked because sinful: Grendel is opposed not only to human civilization, as represented by the Danes he attacks and by their defender, Beowulf the Geat, but also to God, who has cursed the monster’s race and made them exiles in the earth, cut off from human fellowship. Grendel is inspired by his envy for human companionship. It is because he is an outcast who cannot enjoy such friendship that he attacks the Danes. He would destroy that which God has denied to him. His mother is motivated by vengeance, but it is a vengeance restricted to her own offspring; it does not extend to the members of a whole society of her peers.

The prototypical hero serves his community. Those who serve only themselves and their immediate families, by contrast, represent evil threats to community that the hero must confront and vanquish.

Value as a Clue to Horror

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Life is always fragile. One might suppose, however, that, before the advancements in science and technology that we enjoy (sometimes) today, the world must have been fraught with many more perils. Human life must have been especially precarious without the benefits of such modern marvels as antibiotics, computers, incandescent light, and firearms, to name but a few. Pneumonia, tornados, the blindness imposed by darkness, and inefficient or unreliable weapons must have caused many deaths that, today, could be averted or avoided. No wonder Gilgamesh sought immortality. Life in his day must have been both mean and brief. What did others seek? The treasures that were the objects of their quests tell us the things their societies valued most. Whatever threatened these treasures represented their fears, because we fear what we may lose (or want but may never gain). If Gilgamesh sought immortality, he valued life and, consequently, feared death, which may be the greatest loss of all.

“The wages of sin,” the Bible tells us, “is death,” and this is frequently the punishment that God metes out to the unrepentant, as he did with regard to Adam and Eve, to the civilization that existed at the time of the flood, to the residents of Sodom, and to many others throughout the pages of both Testaments. However, according to Christian thought, there are two types of death: physical and spiritual, as the following scripture suggests:

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both the soul and body in hell. --
Matthew 10:28

The one who can destroy both the body and the soul in hell is God, and, many times, the Bible warns the faithful to “fear God,” as does Matthew 10:20. There is a worse condition that death and a worse place than the grave, as the damned find out when they arrive to spend an eternity’s torment in hell. If hell is considered the state of the soul as it exists apart from God, then its opposite is the value that the existence of hell threatens, namely, being in the presence of God (or love, for “God is love”) for eternity. To be an eternal outcast of love is hell.

A threat to one’s whole way of life, which the Trojan War represented to the ancient Greeks, indicates that a people--in this case, the ancient Greeks--valued their culture. Although war is horrible, it’s not usually a horror story’s antagonist, because the monsters of horror fiction are, as we see in another post, metaphorical in nature. They’re symbolic of something else. Instead of a war threatening one’s way of life, therefore, a horror story might posit an extraterrestrial race, as in The War of the Worlds or Alien, as the antagonist, but, make no mistake, these monsters aren’t going to be satisfied with killing only a handful of victims; they want nothing less than a whole nation or, perhaps, the entire planet. In Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four, Galactus represents such a threat to humanity. Following the lead of his herald, the Silver Surfer, who locates inhabited planets, Galactus literally devours the energy that sustains the planets’ life forms, whether they are human or otherwise, going from planet to planet to appease his hunger. Since Galactus threatens humanity itself, as do, or could, the Martians or the extraterrestrial monsters of Alien, he represents the destruction of a whole way of life, or a civilization and its culture. This same monster--the threat to culture--appears in Beowulf, in the guise of Grendel,

Grendel’s mother, and the dragon.

Such monsters, in a more specific mask and costume, showed up in the horror films of the 1950’s. After World War II, which culminated in the nuclear destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world feared wholesale annihilation, a worldwide nuclear holocaust, and the monsters of horror represented such a threat in the guise of Godzilla, giant ants (Them!), and aliens with enormous destructive capabilities (Invaders from Mars).

The post-war decades (1960’s-present) of horror produced more personal monsters, products of the decade’s emphases on sex, drugs, and rock and roll--experiments with sexual freedom (or license), altered consciousness, and the pursuit of passion, adventure, and excitement for their own sake: deranged serial killers, cannibals, and paranormal or supernatural aberrations and entities who acted, as often as not, on the bases of vengeance, lust, or sadism, rather than on the basis of any rational purpose. Again, the monsters are the threats to the values that the writers, filmmakers, and audiences hold dear. It’s hard to exercise one’s sexual freedom when there’s a sadistic serial killer on the loose or to enjoy one’s emotions when doing so could attract an alien or a demon who feeds off human feelings or the energy associated with them.

What’s to come? Time alone, it seems, has the answer. Whatever the new monster’s shape, though, it will be the shadow of the values of the society of the day that spawns it.

Plotting Horror Fiction: The Invasion Plot

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Note: Refer to "Basic Plots" for other horror plot patterns that are common to this fiction genre.

 

This method of plotting works best for the Invasion plot. Other methods work better for other types of horror plots. We may outline these other techniques in future posts. In plotting, first develop the back story. In horror fiction, this is the true cause of the bizarre incidents that transpire in the story proper. For example, in Dean Koontz’s novel, The Taking, what seems to be reverse-terraforming on the part of invading aliens turns out to be a visit by Satan. The devil’s call is the true cause of the bizarre incidents that occur in the story.

 

In Koontz’s novel. The Good Guy, hints are distributed throughout the story proper concerning the reason that the protagonist is adept with firearms and strategizing. The back story, which is told toward the end of the novel explains why: he is a war hero and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who was instrumental in rescuing hundreds of hostages from their murderous captors. By delaying the explanation until most of the story proper has been told, Koontz maintains suspense. However, the back story, once it is told, provides a believable explanation as to why the main character is adept with firearms and developing battle plans. 

 

After plotting the back story, start with an everyday situation. Introduce the main character and important supporting characters. Set up the conflict. Establish the setting. Characterize the characters. Let the reader get to know and understand the characters. Let the reader like the ones you want him or her to like and dislike those whom you want him or her to dislike.

 

Dramatize the first of the bizarre incidents. Show it happening. Show it affecting the characters--victims and friends alike. Relate it to the main character’s basic emotions and goals. Perhaps tie it to the protagonist’s past or to the past of the locale--the story’s setting. It may be advantageous to do both. Stephen King does this by making the monster in It appear periodically, attacking a new generation of children in the same town every thirty or forty years. He also has the children who face the monster as preteens return to their hometown, when the monster next returns, to face it again, as adults.

 

Allow other bizarre incidents to occur. Usually, it’s best to let the incidents befall several characters, rather than the same character (although either course is possible), as doing so keeps the reader wondering why the monster is attacking various characters and looking for the common thread that ties the attacks together.

 

Remember that whatever causes or motivates the monster (whether it’s an impersonal force or an intelligent being) must be accounted for--in a believable fashion--in the back story.

 

If your story has a subplot (or two), weave it into the main plot. Often, horror stories have a romance between the main character and another character. Perhaps the main character is the new kid in town, rejected by everyone until he saves the most popular girl in school. Then, he wins her over (but no one else), and they become friends, with her losing her other friends as a result. Possibly, a woman comes to town seeking peace after an especially traumatic experience and, instead, encounters one even more terrifying and dangerous--the monster at the center of your story. Your protagonist will save the day--and her. Maybe there is not romance. Maybe, instead, your main character lacks something--self-esteem, self-confidence, self-respect, or whatever--and his fight against the monster allows him (or her) to gain what he (or she) originally lacked, as Beowulf does. In the poem named for him, Beowulf is considered a weakling who is, as such, unworthy of respect. When, in destroying Grendel and his mother, the warrior shows he’s as strong as he is courageous, he gains the esteem of his people; later, he becomes their king.

 

Of course, a story can have a romantic subplot as well as a plot that involves recognition, or self-discovery. However, you don’t want to have too many subplots, because your story is liable to lose its unity and focus.

 

The main character leads the fight against the monster, protecting his friends and townsfolk from them to the best of his ability. The main character and many others take the initiative at some point in the fight against the monster.

 

At some point, toward the end of the story, your main character must discover the cause of the bizarre incidents. Armed with this knowledge, the main character sets up a battle plan by which to overcome the monster. He or she takes the fight to the monster. This is a common plot convention. Characters in It, The Taking, Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night, Robert McCammon’s Stinger, and many other horror novels seize the initiative once they determine how to slay the monster. 

 

Nevertheless, the monster proves hard to kill, and it may have a trick or two to use against the protagonist and his or her loyal (or, as in Beowulf, not-so-loyal) band.

 

Ultimately, the main character is often triumphant (but he or she need not be). If so, the story frequently ends with an epilogue that suggests that the monster may return or that it may be reincarnated in some new form--in case the writer wants to write a sequel to the original story.