10 Bizarre Hand-painted Horror Movie Posters

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

 Artist Heavy J.( Source: Deadly Prey)

In the 1980s, Ghanaian entrepreneurs seized upon their country's recent importation of VCRs to show movies to members of neighborhood video clubs. Local artists who went by their first names or pseudonyms, including Leonardo, Heavy J, Farkira, Salvation, and Magasco, to name only a few, likewise benefited from these new enterprises, since club owners commissioned them to create original posters to advertise the films.

Using flour sacks for their canvasses, the painters offered their own garish interpretations of their subjects. Often combining violence and gore with bizarre interpretations of both Ghanaian movies and foreign films, including Hollywood blockbusters, the artists' work generated excitement about the movies, and the video clubs became huge hits.

Simple in design and execution, the outrageous hand-painted Ghana posters look nothing like the slick, mass-produced lobby cards seen in traditional movie theaters. Instead, the Ghana movie posters are truly one of a kind, offering those who may be unfamiliar with the nation's culture a window into the nature of Ghana's entertainment business, its local art, and the innovative nature of its entrepreneurs.

Cujo

Although Ghana posters advertise all film genres, many of the most shocking examples promote horror movies. Surprisingly, though, even movies that are designed to horrify are not always imagined as horrific by the Ghanaian artists who paint them, usually with little or no knowledge of the plots of the movies the posters are supposed to promote.

For Cujo, Lewis Teague's 1983 cinematic adaptation of Stephen King's 1981 novel of the same name, which pits a rabid St. Bernard against an isolated family, the theatrical release poster shows an isolated house under a dark, threatening sky; the neglected white picket fence in front of the distant residence bears, in dripping, blood-red paint, the warning, “Now there's a new name for terror: Cujo.”

 

Source: CNN

By contrast, the Ghanaian poster shows an adult female figure standing behind a male child. The sky is blue. An oversize dog, more closely resembling a Basset hound than a St. Bernard, lies across the bottom of the poster, the very picture of harmless calm—except for the blood slathering the canine's muzzle. Despite the blood, which appears almost an afterthought, the poster conveys more a sense of serenity and domestic bliss than it does an aura of dread and danger.

The reason for the differences in the theatrical release poster and its hand-painted counterpart is suggested by a question raised by writer Peter Shadbolt: “How would you design a movie poster for a Hollywood blockbuster you’d never seen, filled with characters you knew nothing about and actors you’d never heard of?” The Ghanaian Cujo poster is one answer to this question.

Fright Night

Such adjectives as “simple,” “unsophisticated,” “cartoonish,” “gaudy,” and “lurid” are often used to describe the strikingly original artwork displayed in Ghanaian movie posters. They were not intended to be masterpieces. Instead, they were commissioned with but one purpose. The artists paid to paint the posters were given much the same instruction as Frank Armah, who “began painting posters for Ghanaian movie theaters in the mid-1980s”; the goal of his posters was simple: “Sell as many tickets as possible.” The way to accomplish this objective was also simple: exaggerate. “If the movie was gory, the poster should be gorier (skulls, blood, skulls dripping blood). If it was sexy, make the poster sexier (breasts, lots of them, ideally at least watermelon-sized).”

During the 1980s and 1990s, the posters sold the movies. Today, they are sold to collectors for as much as $2000 each and grace the walls of American and European art galleries. In addition, the “cult following” of the artists' fans keep the painters busy creating copies of the original posters for sale to eager customers.

The fact that the posters so little depict the contents of the films they promote is the reason that they are in such demand as collectibles, art dealer Ernie Wolfe believes. “These posters appeal to people because [they] invite this really incredible dialogue—a comparison between what you know of a film and how the painter imagined it. And they’re also just really good art.”

The Ghanaian poster for Fright Night (1985), directed by Tom Holland, is a good example of this poster-movie disconnect. The theatrical release poster shows a group of ghastly apparitions hovering over a house. Inside, framed by the residence's only illuminated window, the silhouette of a standing man is visible. Apparently, the resident is oblivious to the presence of the maniacal spirits raging above his house. The darkness of the night sky, illuminated only by stars and a full moon, the darkness of the man's silhouette, and the darkness of the shadowy lawn in front of the isolated house reinforce the poster's caption: “There are some good reasons to be afraid of the dark.”

Source: The Atlantic

One Ghanaian version shows neither apparitions, house, occupant, night sky, nor dark lawn. Instead, it depicts a winged serpent in a blue business suit, complete with bloodstained necktie. The creature's pair of scaly human hands, one red, the other orange, reach toward a blonde; the tip of its tongue, between her lips, drools blood. The claws of the scaly orange hand reach inside the woman's mouth. Her brow, face, and neck are lacerated and bleeding, and the flesh of her upper right arm is torn. A young man's head rests against her side. The movie's title appears above the man's head. There is no darkness—at least no literal darkness—of which to be afraid, and the woman looks more exhausted than horrified, despite her wounds.

Rituals

During the 1980s, the video clubs showed mostly imported movies (horror and splatter movies from the U. S., kung fu pictures from Hong Kong, cannibal films from Italy and France, and Bollywood comedy productions from India), but, beginning in the next decade, especially in Nigeria, the clubs included both Ghanaian and Nigerian films, with the establishment of the Ghallywood and Nollywood film industries.

This more local fare sometimes reflected historical conflicts between Christianity and local religions in which, often, the former displaced the latter. These movies had a proselytizing mission. To convert their audiences from “the natural religions,” the films depicted the spirits of the local religions as “evil forces,” such as demons, or “pagan” forces, such as those of voodoo, which were overcome by God or a Christian priest. Often, the churches themselves financed these films.

Other themes include human sacrifice; cannibalism; and evil deeds involving children as victims, “perpetrators,” and witches. One of the posters promoting Rituals, a Nollywood movie (director unknown) that includes references to human sacrifice, is typical of the sensationalism of the Ghanaian horror movie posters. The poster depicts a semi-nude man, bandoleers crossed over his chest, setting a large bowl containing a bloody, decapitated man's head on a table occupied by six human skulls and a human bone. No caption provides any hints as to the situation; the sole clue that viewers receive is that which is supplied by the film's title: the head, skulls, and bone, are involved in “rituals” of some sort. Only a reference, external to the poster itself, relates these rituals to human sacrifices.

Jurassic Park

 

While Ghanaian movie posters do not always depict the actual contents of the films they promote, this discrepancy is not considered a flaw among art collectors and experts. “They're not just film posters,” says Karun Thakar, the curator of the African Gaze exhibition in London, England. The exhibition showcased over a hundred posters that, along roads and in markets and other “public spaces,” advertised screenings of Bollywood, Nollywood, Ghallywood, and Hollywood films by “mobile video clubs.”

Like others of their kind, these Ghanaian movie posters were “gruesome and gaudy,” and they usually did not have much to do with the actual plots of the movies they promoted. They also zeroed in on films' minor elements rather than key features of the movies if such elements were provocative. For example, the poster promoting Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) focused on the prostitute with three breasts who appears in only one short scene of the film.

Even when the posters deigned to feature the movie's protagonist, the main character was often illustrated as performing an action that is unrelated to the movie's plot, and the scene frequently differs drastically from the images in the film itself. The Ghanaian poster for Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) is a good example. The poster “features a freakish dinosaur,” resembling a hybrid Tyrannosaurus Rex-brontosaurus—“gobbling up a man and a person playing golf, indicating that the artists painting these posters might not have seen the films.”

Mandy

Brian Chankin, the proprietor of a video rental store in Chicago, Illinois, is a fan of Ghanaian movie posters. He not only collects and sells them, but he has also commissioned quite a few original paintings by noted Ghanaian movie poster painters. Chankin tours the United States, showing his collections from the mobile art gallery he operates. In addition, he partners with Ghana artists who make “huge tattoo flash paintings in the same style as the movie posters.”

Although the movie posters themselves seldom reflect what the films they advertise show, that's not an issue for fans, nor are the posters' occasional “misspellings and plot inconsistencies.” What counts, for admirers and collectors, is the posters' “eye-catching” qualities. 

Proceeds from the sales of the shop's prints of original art and a book, Deadly Prey, featuring photographs of the “earliest commission paintings” and essays by Chankin, commission agent Robert Kofi, and Terry Zwigoff, director of Ghost World, Bad Santa, and other horror films, support “artists in Ghana.”

In the Ghanaian poster for Panos Cosmatos's Mandy (2018), the man with the amputated right arm, the slashed left arm holding a decapitated head, and the slashed left leg who flees a chainsaw-wielding killer and a man with a knife does not look exactly like Nicholas Cage. However, the poster otherwise succeeds in conveying at least the essence of the horror movie it promotes.

The film concerns a couple, Red Miller and Mandy Bloom, who are living alone in a forest when they are attacked by a cult of hippies and demonic bikers. The sadistic attacks motivate Red to strike back, and his vengeance is predictably terrible, violent, and bloody. Red's wounds, cult member Marlene's decapitated head, Brother Klopek and his chainsaw, and Klopek's accomplice and his knife, like the sliced head and the woman with the gaping hole in the center of her abdomen, suggest the orgy of violence that the movie presents, and, although the action is compacted in the collection of images, as if they occur simultaneously, rather than successively, the poster is mostly true to the picture's plot, a relative rarity among Ghanaian movie posters.

Night of the Demons 3

The studios in which Ghanaian artists worked were simple by the standards of the countries in which the films were produced that were shown by the video clubs, as were the facilities the entrepreneurs used to exhibit the imported pictures. A 2005 photograph of a Ghanaian artist known as Leonardo shows the painter seated in a plastic chair, cans of paints and other supplies on a shelf behind him or stacked against the wall below the shelf, in crates, a galvanized steel tub, and plastic trash bags. Wearing only overalls and flip-flops, he sweats in the heat of the day inside concrete walls decorated with words in red, blue, and green paint. His tools—a hammer, brushes, cans, and large rectangular cuts of cotton for use as his canvases—are visible among the other stored items.

In another photograph, one of Leonardo's colleagues, Heavy J., stands beside his poster for Jim Kaufman's Night of the Demons 3 (1997). In his vision of the movie, a male lamia, or snake man, is wound around a kneeling woman who frantically tries to remove the monster's coils. The creature holds its arms up, as if it is about to claw an attacker. The poster is displayed at the front of one of the video club's theaters, advising audiences that the movie is scheduled to be shown at “6:30 PM.” The single bench shown in the photograph suggests the nature of the theater's seating, which is confirmed by other photographs apparently typical of the arrangements of seats.

In another photograph, a showing of a movie is seen in progress in Tema, Ghana. An audience of nine are present. Two stand, their hands raised overhead; the others sit, one or two to a bench, several with their hands raised as well, and all watch the television set on a high shelf inside a cabinet. Although plenty of seats remain along the six half-empty benches visible in the photograph, those in attendance seem to be enjoying the picture.

The Guardian

Source: Ernie Wolfe Gallery

The Ernie Wolfe Gallery is an online exhibition hall on which “Golden Age Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana” are on perpetual display. The collections show a variety of film genres, including horror, which seems as popular with Ghanaian audiences as it is with other moviegoers across the globe. Since the artists typically painted the posters of the movies to be presented before the films were actually shown to video clubs’ audiences, their art is almost always strikingly different than the actual movies the posters supposedly represent, offering viewers fresh perspectives on the films themselves. Although often lurid, the art is also highly imaginative.

Source:  Ernie Wolfe Gallery

The poster for William Friedkin's The Guardian (1990), features a personified tree that attacks adults and children alike. One victim hangs from a branch. Another struggles to free himself from the mouth in the tree's trunk. A third, armed with a chainsaw, the blade of which is smeared with blood from one of the tree's uncanny roots, is entangled in a looped branch, from which the party's fourth victim, while lying on the ground, wound in the coils of another branch, seeks to free him. The poster suggests that the movie is about an animated and malevolent forest. In reality, although a somewhat similar scene occurs in the film, the picture is about a nanny whom a young couple hire to care for their newborn baby—a nanny who is also a goddess intent upon protecting her domain.

Braindead

Besides the fact that Ghanaian artists often did not know, in any detail, if at all, what a movie actually showed, they were also handicapped by the facts that they did not have access to the foreign studios' posters for the movies or to reproductions of the original posters, since Ghana's “military rulers restricted the import of printing presses.”

To get prospective audiences into the buildings and tents in which the video clubs' cinematic offerings would be shown, local artists were instructed to pull out all the stops. They did so, starting with the dimensions of the paintings. Like the style of the art itself, the “canvases” the artists cut from flour sacks were larger than life, measuring “40 to 50 inches in width, and 55 to 70 inches in height.”

The artists were so successful in selling the movies that, “by the 1990s, the height of the movie club business, several dozen artists were employed to produce the posters.” By the 2000s, the demand for video clubs began to disappear, since “home viewing became more widespread and printing became more practical than commissioning original artworks.”

 

During the heyday of Ghanaian movie poster production, however, some truly fantastic, if bizarre, works were created, including artist Salvation’s poster for Braindead (1992), directed by Peter Jackson, which suggests the bloodbath that ensues when a woman who dies, after having been bitten by a Sumatran monkey, returns to life to feed on both animals and people, including her former friends and neighbors.

Source: Deadly Prey

Salvation's poster features a Lon Chaney look-alike with fangs and a missing eye, a pale ghoul spewing green bile, a beast that resembles a cross between a dog and a monkey, and a gang of vampires in pursuit of a brawny man wielding a sword. With no reference to the movie's plot in the artist's picture, potential viewers would likely have plenty of questions about the scene Salvation depicts, which is just what the video club owners would have wanted in commissioning the work.

Species

How might Roger Donaldson's Species (1995) be interpreted by an artist who had not seen the film? Thanks to the survival of the Ghanaian movie poster for this movie, we do not have to wonder.

 

Source: Wikiart

Although there is no evidence that the poster's painter knew of Rene Magritte's surreal paintings, the poster for Species resembles Magritte's oil painting The Harvest (1943). Just as Magritte paints the figure of his reclining female nude in several colors, with arms of different hues, a head of a tint that matches no other part of the figure's body, and legs of mismatched shades, the body of the Ghanaian artist's blonde-haired female alien is various shades of blue, green, and peach.

The painting's surreal quality is also evident in the inclusion of the naked man who crawls on his knees, eating one rat as he wraps his impossibly long, slender tongue around a second rodent. Although the poster's art has virtually nothing to do with the plot of the film it promotes, the warning presented by its caption, “Men cannot resist her; mankind cannot survive her,” is probably true enough.

Cannibal Terror

A largely panned French contribution to the fare the video clubs showed was the 1981 film Cannibal Terror directed by Alain Deruelle. The plot is simple. After their kidnapping goes awry, two inept kidnappers, Mario and Roberto, hole up in a friend's house in the jungle. In the process, Mario rapes the friend's wife. (With friends like these, who needs enemies, right?) Afterward, the criminals encounter a tribe of hungry cannibals.

The plot doesn't seem to have given the artist much with which to work, but the painter made the most of what he had, showing one of the criminals lying on the ground, on his back, as three members of the tribe, seated beneath the tree, dig in. One munches on the victim's calf; another devours his left forearm; and the third chows down on a length of intestines that he pulls from the gaping cavity carved into the dead man's abdomen. It's a bloody feast, and the rapist's vital fluid dribbles down his severed limbs, his slit-open belly, the stump of his amputated left leg, and the chests of those who make a meal of him. Despite the movie’s meager plot, the film rewards its audiences with plenty of blood and gore, according to the poster, at least.

 

Ghanaian movie poster artists (left to right):Salvation, Heavy J, Mr, Nana Agyq, Fakira, and Stoger

Source: Nerdist

Unfortunately, the artists who created these lurid masterpieces of tasteless, often violent and gory art, were probably underpaid, since their work took them as many as three days, “depending on the subject matter and what the artist could find out about the movie.” To expedite the painting process, artists relied on such “well-worn tropes [as] snake women, skeletons, zombies, witchcraft, and even the occasional giant fish” and sometimes mixed images from one movie with those of another film.

 

Images of Horror, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Psst! Here’s a secret: Horror writers should analyze visual images (such as occur both on screen and in movie posters) for ideas as to what is horrible about everyday situations. That’s such a good tip that it bears repetition (and a larger font size):

Horror writers should analyze visual images (such as occur both on screen and in movie posters) for ideas as to what is horrible about everyday situations.

Sounds pretty basic, right? A matter of common sense? You’d be surprised, perhaps, at how uncommon common sense is and at how often people forget the basics. Let’s practice this technique. Here’s a movie poster advertising Cujo, a movie based upon Stephen King’s novel of the same title. For the two or three who don’t know the story line, it goes something like this:

A faithful St. Bernard, having been bitten by a rabid bat, bites the hand that feeds him; the hand belongs to Donna Trenton (and her family).

(In analyzing images, one should remember to “read” them the same way that one reads text, from left to right and from top to bottom.) Centered at the top of the poster is the text, “From Stephen King’s novel comes a chilling tale of a quiet New England town and a horrible evil in the dead of summer.” The text drops the name of today’s most celebrated horror novelist, Stephen King, citing his novel, Cujo, as the film’s source. It also tells the reader how he or she should feel about the film: it narrates a “chilling tale.” There is the suggestion of a violent intrusion upon the serene, everyday world, and the menace that threatens to assault the film’s characters is heightened by the description of “dead summer”: the “horrible evil” is so “chilling” that it can, as it were, kill even the sunniest part of the year. (Summer is often symbolic of one’s youth, and, of course, one of Cujo’s victims will be Donna Trenton’s young son [sun], Tad). In short, the poster’s text suggests horror, fear, and a violent assault by “horrible evil.” The poster’s visual images build upon these linguistic images. Below the text and to the right is a large house. It stands alone in a large expanse of empty, treeless lawn, below a dark, ominous sky rippling with storm clouds. The house seems about to be blown away by the force of the wind that drives the black and gray clouds. Closer to the poster’s viewer, in the foreground, is a white picket fence. White picket fences have long been associated with suburban domestic bliss, and although the house seems to be more rural than suburban, the psychological associations of domesticity and happiness are retained--at least in part--by this symbol. However, there is something not quite right about the fence. It needs a fresh coat of paint. The slats are weathered and stained. Some bear long scratches. At the base of the fence, just before the image is lost to darkness, tufts of grass suggest that the lawn needs to be trimmed. It is a fence that, although not yet in a state of total disrepair, needs maintenance. It is neglected. If the fence symbolizes the bliss of domestic and suburban life, it is a happiness that could use a bit more care. In fact, Donna's own life is in an emotional, moral, and spiritual state of disrepair because of the adulterous affair she’s been having, a secret that her husband, Vic, has since learned. The destructiveness of her infidelity is about to destroy her family, Tad included. But there is more than a little thin paint, stains, and scratches wrong with the white picket fence. Centered upon it is a blood-red, streaming, dripping message to the viewer: “Now there’s a new name for terror. Cujo.” As Vic’s wife, Donna should have been his best friend. Instead, seized by a rabid lust for an itinerant furniture repairman and poet, she has betrayed her husband’s trust and her son’s welfare. In a way, she is Cujo. At the same time, Cujo represents the effects of her infidelity, which trap her, indirectly kill her son (Tad dies of heatstroke from being trapped inside his mother’s automobile), and emotionally devastate Vic. The novel and the movie are cautionary tales concerning the madness of adultery and the fatal consequences it may have, both literally and figuratively, upon the members of the betrayed family. The poster is an effective way of tying the overt action of the rabid dog’s attack upon Donna and Tad (and, indirectly, upon Vic) to the narrative’s covert message regarding the devastating effects of the threat to domestic bliss that the bestial monster, adultery, may have and shows, more than many movie posters, the strong relationship of plot to theme. At the same time, it intrigues potential moviegoers, interesting them in seeing another scary Stephen King story brought to the big screen--this one about a mad dog. (Of course, it’s really about adultery, but what’s scary about marital infidelity? This question is the very one that the story answers: infidelity is destructive to the family relationship and to the members of the family themselves.) Horror movie posters, when they are well executed, as the Cujo poster is, can show writers how to tie plot and theme together on a symbolic and metaphorical level while, at the same time, appealing to readers’ fears or other emotions, which is another reason that (psst!) horror writers should analyze visual images (such as occur both on screen and in movie posters) for ideas as to what is horrible about everyday situations.

Everyday Horrors: Giant Animals

copyright 2008 by Gray L. Pullman

Animals can be affectionate, loyal, and companionable. They can be amusing, amazing, and beautiful. They can work hard on our behalf, and even help to rescue people stranded in the wilderness or fight off would-be attackers, robbers, rapists, and murderers. Well, maybe not goldfish so much. On the other hand, they can also be cunning, ferocious, wild, dangerous, and deadly. Unless one of the friendly sort is going to end up first going mad and then going for the throat, however, as Cujo does, or become a victim of the monster, whatever it is, it’s not likely to be of much use to the horror writer, unless the author happens to be Dean Koontz, and loves dogs more than he does Greta (his wife). California has passed a law, it seems, that anyone who lives in Newport Beach, is a novelist, has a golden retriever, and is married to a woman named Greta who willingly takes second place to the dog must include at least one canine character in every novel he writes, and the dog must be above reproach, even if his or her master is not. For others who write in the genre, the fierce and ferocious--and, often, the biggest--animal is more likely to earn a spot in the story’s cast of characters.

In horror fiction, as in (from some men’s standpoint, but seldom women’s) breasts, generally, the bigger, the better. In another post, concerning “The Underbelly of the Bug-eyed Monster Movie,” we’ve already discussed some movies that feature big, bug-eyed monsters (hence the title of that particular post). Quite a few movies, especially in the past, featured such villains, as some do today, and novels, of course, and short stories (and some narrative poems, such as Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Beowulf) too, for that matter) feature giant animals as their monsters of choice. One of the ones that started it all, as far as novels are concerned, is H. G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods, in which a mad scientist develops a food additive that’s even better--way better, in fact--than Wonder Bread in developing strong bones and bodies or whatever Wonder Bread develops. The formula’s even better than Ovaltine!

Stories like these usually relied upon the past (dinosaurs), undiscovered countries or lands of the lost (dinosaurs) or mad scientists (giant experimental plants and animals), atomic radiation (giant plants and animals) or extraterrestrial visitations (alien animals) instead of central casting to supply these threats. However, they needn’t have gone to such trouble or looked so far. Nature, right here and right now, supplies writers with real-life giant animals. True, some are more frightening than others, but, if one is, like Stephen King, willing to gross out if he can’t scare a reader, what some of these giants may lack in the fright department they compensate for in the disgusting department.

Here are a few of the more repulsive, sometimes frightening alternatives Mother Nature has in stock at the moment:

• Camel spiders
• Giant catfish
• Giant rats
• Goliath beetles
• Goliath frogs

Camel spiders anesthetize people and then eat them alive. That’s what some American veterans returning from duty in Iraq, the home of the infamous spiders, claimed, anyway--who’d escaped such a fate--but that was an exaggerated contention in several ways. First, the camel spider isn’t really a spider at all. It’s a solpudgid, which is an arachnid, all right, just not one of the spider family. (Other non-spider arachnids include scorpions, mites, ticks, and Peter Parker.) As a solpudgid, the misnamed camel spider has no venom with which to poison (or even anesthetize) anyone, nor does it have a system by which it could deliver such a toxin, even if it had one to deliver. Still, the camel spider looks diabolical, even deadly, and, in horror fiction, appearances go a long way. The writer can always make up the facts as he or she goes along. If the author wants anesthetizing, or even poisoning, spiders, the author can and will have them. A good writer, especially a writer of horror fiction, never lets the facts get in the way of a good monster.


It might seem that the bewhiskered catfish would make an unlikely horror monster. If there wasn’t at least a glimmer of evil in its lidless, cold eyes, though, do you think it would have come to the attention of so august a body as the National Geographic Society, the same group who showed bare-breasted African women to the innocent schoolboys of 1950 America? Just look at this sucker! It’s nine feet long, and, according to The Society, as its members in good standing are allowed to call it, this fish is “as big as a grizzly bear,” and “tipped the scales at 646 pounds.” This variety of potential cat food is one of “the species known as the Mekong giant catfish.” Put a few teeth inside it, and it could be the next piranha, super-sized.

Africa’s Goliath frog grows to a length of thirteen inches and can weigh as many as seven pounds!

Its yuck factor is correspondingly great for anyone who has frog fear, which, as it turns out, may be more people, male and female, than one thinks. It can’t quite leap tall buildings in a single bound, but it can cover a distance of twenty feet in a single jump. It can live for fifteen years, so it’s capable of revenge, like Grendel’s mother. It lives in Africa, or, more specifically, Cameron’s Sanaga basin. People eat it, rather than the other way around (so who’s the real monsters?) or is sold to a zoo, where, usually, it doesn't do well. However, no self-respecting horror story writer would let a frog of this size go to waste as a potential peril to humankind. No way! Instead, like the non-poisonous, non-carnivorous, non-spider camel spiders, in horror fiction, these babies are going to be depicted as venomous, flesh-eating monsters that, having reproduced faster than their normal rate, for some reason having to do with human stupidity and/or greed, are now threats to humans, unable to subsist any longer on lesser animals such as the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and elephant.


Would a story featuring three-foot-long rats be scary? Duh! Stories involving rats only the size of puppies are frightening; a film or a novel featuring rats the size of Garfield or Odie would be terrifying (bigger generally is scarier). There’s just one thing wrong with such a scenario. Nobody would buy the existence of a rat that big, right? Wrong. The ones in H. G. Wells’ novel, The Food of the Gods, were even bigger, and, besides, there really are three-foot-long rats, just not in your neighborhood--at least, not yet. Of course, there’s no reason that a character in a horror story couldn’t legally (or illegally) import some from New Guinea’s Foja Mountains or they couldn’t be procured by a zoo (or even created in a scientific lab). According to Smithsonian Institution scientist Kristofer Helgen, “"The giant rat,” which weighs up to three pounds, “is about five times the size of a typical city rat," and has no fear of humans.

Another giant among us is the Goliath beetle, which measures about five inches (huge for a bug). It also lives in Africa, and eats human flesh. (Not really. They eat tree sap and fruit in the wild or cat food or dog food in captivity.) They sound like helicopters when they fly, because their bodies are heavily armored. They don’t bother people, but, because humans are naturally squeamish concerning creepy crawlies, they could, especially if they could be induced to swarm for the camera, be pretty good monsters. A writer would probably want to mutate them, though, so they could be transformed into carnivores. That way, they could prefer people meat to Tender Vittles or Kimbles ’n Bits.

Many people would have thought that giant animals, with a few exceptions, such as whales, elephants, and ostriches, are a thing of the past--the distant, prehistoric past--when dinosaurs roamed the planet. The discovery of new giants among us suggests that this is not true. Over four hundred new species have been discovered on Borneo alone since 1996, and Madagascar and South America, as well as the ocean, have yielded others. In King Kong, Carl Denham had to go to the uncharted (that is, imaginary) Skull Island to discover the lost world of the giant ape and surviving dinosaurs, but, with the dicovery of new species, including giants, seemingly every other day, horror writers may need to go no farther than Madagascar, the African continent, Japan, or South America to encounter real, living, breathing monstrosities. Who knows? There may even be one in your backyard, and it may be hungry.

Meanwhile, we can continue to turn to the pages of horror novels and science fiction stories to read about them or watch them wreck havoc on the big screen.

Update (3/21/08)

Over the past year, scientists, poking around in the world’s oceans and rain forests, have announced their discoveries of several new species of animals and of some giants among known species. Among the latest discoveries are giant macroptychaster starfish, measuring two feet across, which were located in New Zealand’s Antarctic Ocean. Other newly found giants include an 11-foot, 844-pound white shark, a 990-pound colossal squid, an Echizen jellyfish larger than a man, and a 23-pound lobster. Scientists aren’t the only ones to encounter these giants. On his farm near Eberswalde, Germany, Karl Szmolinsky breeds 20-pound giant rabbits, like the one he’s holding. More and more, the everyday world is catching up with the imaginary giant creatures of horror, fantasy, and science fiction literature. No doubt, some of these beasties will be tomorrow fiction’s featured creatures, although not, perhaps, the giant bunnies.

“Everyday Horrors: Giant Animals” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

There's Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself: Preying Upon People's Phobias

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Asked what he feared, Stephen King once replied, “Everything!”

While his reply might have been purposefully overstated, it suggests a way of enhancing the fear factor of the horror story. The horror fiction writer can enhance the audience’s aversion to and anxiety toward the story’s antagonist (the monster) by preying upon readers’ natural fears.

Fortunately, if they don’t fear quite everything, many people do fear many things. We tend to be rather fearful creatures.

First, there are the phobias. There are plenty. Although these fears are held to be irrational, there may be an organic cause for them, according to psychologists, who, Lea Winerman, author of “Figuring out phobias,” says, locate the amygdala, perhaps by way of the brain’s higher cortex, as the point of origin for fear. Dr. LeDoux offers an example of the split-second timing characteristic of the fear response to threatening stimuli: “If a bomb goes off, you might not quickly be able to evaluate any of the perceptual qualities of the sound, but the intensity is enough to trigger the amygdala. If you knew a lot about bombs, then through the cortex pathway you could evaluate the danger, but it will take longer.”

Although studies have focused on obsessive-compulsive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias were once believed to represent “abnormalities in the fast-track through the amygdala,” Dr. Scott Rauch declares, but further research suggests, instead, that “the amygdala responds immediately to anything that might be threatening, but that with more time to process other areas of the brain suppress the amygdala's initial response.”

Fear, like other emotions, appears to have an organic and chemical basis.

Meanwhile, there are the phobias, such as (just to list some that begin with “a”) acrophobia (fear of heights), agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), androphobia (fear of males), arachnaphobia (fear of spiders), astraphobia (fear of thunderstorms), autophobia (fear of being alone), aviophobia (fear of flying). For those who are interested in others, a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) article, “The A-Z of Fear,” lists a number of select others, only one of which, anuptaphobia, the fear of remaining single, begins with “a.”

How can phobias be used to heighten horror? Many people are claustrophobic. They fear close places, which suggests that they also fear being trapped. A person who is trapped is at the mercy of his or her environment, which means that the trapped individual is at the mercy of other people (perhaps his or her captors, from whom the person had escaped before becoming trapped), of wild animals, of extreme temperatures, of hunger and thirst. The trapped individual has no control over circumstances or events. By setting a story in a cramped environment from which there is no escape, such as a subterranean cavern that becomes sealed off by a landslide or an avalanche, a writer takes advantage of the audience’s claustrophobia. If, before reading such a story, a person was not claustrophobic, afterward, he or she might be.

Many horror movies have been produced that revolve around wild animals as the monsters. One reason may be that men and women fear quite a few animals, including cats (ailurophobia), bees (apiphobia), spiders (arachnaphobia), bats (chiroptophobia), dogs (cynophobia), insects (entomophobia), horses (equinophobia), reptiles (herpetophobia), mice or rats (musophobia), snakes (ophidophobia), birds (ornithophobia), frogs (ranidaphobia), and animals in general (zoophobia).

In reading through this list, you probably thought of several movies that are based upon these phobias, but let’s list a few, anyway, for those who may have missed them:

• Ailurophobia - Cat People
• Apiphobia - Attack of the Killer Bees
• Arachnaphobia - Arachnaphobia
• Chiroprophobia - Dracula
• Cynophobia - Cujo
• Entomophibia - Them!
• Musophobia - Willard
• Ophidophobia - Snakes on a Plane; Anaconda
• Ornithophobia - The Birds
• Xenophobia - The War of the Worlds; Alien
• Zoophobia (and some others as well) - The Food of the Gods

Another film, The Others, even preys upon photophobia, the irrational fear of light!

One might say that horror fiction itself is based upon phobophobia, the fear of fear.