Calling the Shots

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In The Annotated Poe, the observation is made that Edgar Allan Poe's work has suggested storytelling techniques that filmmakers have adopted in dramatizing their scripts:

. . . his influence in the history of cinema has been profound. He has since the early days of motion pictures provided filmmakers with subjects, while influencing the development of cinematic theory and technique (21).

For example, Poe “anticipates the technique of cinematic montage, in which brief shots are joined together to form a sequence that compresses space, time, and information” in order to accelerate “the action of the story, propelling readers towards its climax” (43).

In addition, Poe pioneered the narrative equivalent of alternating close-up shots, distance shots, and extreme close-ups combined with sound effects:

Poe depicts Metzengerstein in close-up (the “agony of his countenance'”, pulls back to show him from a distance (“the convulsive struggling of his frame”), and then supplies an extreme close-up (“his lacerated lips, which were bitten through and through”). The rapid shifting of the images quickens the narrative pace, which the ensuing cacophony of sound—the shriek of Metzengerstein, the clatter of hooves, the roar of the flames, and the shriek of the wind—further intensifies, thus providing a running start for the horse's final bound up the stairs” (34).

There's no reason that the cinema shouldn't return the favor, as short story writers and novelists adopt some of the camera angles that directors and cameramen (and women) have found most effective in filming horror movies.

In doing so, the writer simply adopts the strategy of using description to depict in words what the camera would show in images. In writing, the writer is also the director and the cameraman (or woman); the writer, therefore, calls the shots.

Here are a few examples. (In the descriptions, specific references to characters and situations have been deliberately eliminated in the interests of describing more generic scenes. The video clips are more specific, suggesting how particular writers, actors, directors, and other filmmaking crew members have depicted such situations.)

The extreme closeup is called for when “specific facial expressions” indicate that action “that might scare . . . a character” is about to occur or “has happened.”

Here's the same scene, from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), captured in the “camera” of descriptive writing:

Behind him, above the immense fireplace and its burning log, a mural of stylized girls in triangular skirts adorns the wall. To the left, Art Deco windows are set in the wall, beneath a mounted moose head; a table; chairs; twin candles in matching wall sconces. But decorative features are indistinct, pale, ghostly images, suggestions, more than realities. One's gaze is drawn to and fixated upon him. His high forehead, his winged eyebrows, his staring eyes, his parted lips command absolute attention, allegiance, devotion, as does his stance, exuding confidence and power. As I approach, his features remain the same; he does not blink, does not stir, does not change. Nearer still, and his eyes, his gaze, without altering, expresses, in its stillness and intensity, in its indomitable and unchanging will, in its immutable and insistent being, a demonic essence, at once both terrifying and mesmerizing, inescapable and compelling.

A point-of-view shot captures a character's own visual experience, showing what he or she would see in a particular situation, letting the reader view the scene as character sees the action.

The opening scene of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978):

Movement, a march, a cadence measured and purposeful, past a jack-o-lantern flickering from the fire inside; past dark foliage shapes; past the shadows of leaves upon a wall white in the darkness, to a scene framed by a window: inside a teens locked in an embrace kiss, frantic, until they hear a sound; they break, listening. Then, they run upstairs, excited. Movement, march, cadence, in reverse, back past the leaf-shadows, the dark foliage shapes, the fiery carved pumpkin, to the front yard. Up. The second-story window is illuminated, then dark. Around, through the darkness, to the door through the windows of which shows the kitchen. Enter. Light. Stove. Sink. Open a drawer, remove a knife, huge and sharp of edge and point. Dining room: table, candles, chairs, sideboard, shadow of a chandelier upon a wall. Hallway. Living room: television, rocking chair, sofa, pole lamp. A staircase, leading up. The teenage boy, walking downstairs, exits the front door, closing it behind him. Up the stairs, past a painting, framed and hanging on the wall, into the darkness. Cast-off clothing on the floor: jacket, bra, panties. The corner of a chair. Through a doorway, she sits, naked, the teenage girl, running a brush through her hair. Behind her, the bedding is in disarray, disheveled with the remnants of her lust. She brushes her hair. Turns. Screams, covering her breasts with her hands, modest now. The stabbing of the knife. Her fall, a collision with a dresser and the floor. Down the stairs, through the darkness. Ceiling lights, the foyer's hardwood floor, the door, opening upon deeper darkness and car lights. A man and a woman, hurry through the night, toward the house, their parked car abandoned. The mask is pulled away, and the killer, bloody knife in hand, their eight-year-old son, a clown, is revealed, is born, this Halloween.

The over-the-shoulder shot is used either to suggest that a character is conversing with another character or that another character is following the character shown in the shot. This camera angle focuses on a single character, emphasizing him or her, but implies that one or more other characters, although unseen, are also present. It can also set up a shock; for example, “the character could turn around and look possessed.”

Grace Newman learns something about herself in this scene from The Others (2001):

Seated on the floor, her back to the door, covered in a heavy, white voile veil and bundled in a matching dress, her young daughter, the puppeteer, has gnarly, old hands; an aged face, half-hidden beneath the ectoplasmic veil, attempts to deceive, but the pale, shocked thirty-year-old redhead in the black dress is not deceived: she knows this person, this thing, is not her daughter. The mother chokes the old crone, the impostor, the changeling; yanks the veil from her; and sees—the child in the dress is her daughter, after all. The child stares at her mother in disbelief, in terror: the stranger, her mother, this mad woman who disowned her, has tried to kill her!

The establishing shot, “usually shot at a distance” is 'a wide shot” that sets the scene by showing the site of upcoming action. Such a shot may be devoid of characters; if characters are present, they are merely window dressing, part of the scene itself—unless and until the “camera” (the description) zeroes in on them, picking them out from the crowd.

Stanley Kubrick's establishing shot is the sequence with which The Shining begins, as Jack Torrance drives to the Overlook Hotel:

A dark blue lake, a green island in its midst, parallels a two-lane mountain road meandering, a gray ribbon, or a snake, through a forest thick with shaggy conifers, passing no other cars for miles and miles. Wide, open land stretches away, before the mountains' jagged, snow-covered peaks. The car looks like a toy, as it follows the sweeping grandeur of the terrain. Up a slope, tight against a cliff on the right, a sheer drop-off on the left shored up by a retaining wall, the yellow VW rounds a curve, and the highway seems to open up, wide. Finally, another car, a white limousine—stalled, it seems—is seen; the VW swings past, leaving it behind. Ahead, a tunnel plunges through the mountainside beneath the pines; for a few moments, the VW disappears, then emerges, passes another stopped car, on the left shoulder, continuing to pursue the highway between the towering cliff on the right and the plummeting drop-off on the left. Passing another car—the third in what seems forever—the yellow VW now travels along a stretch of road cut into the steep slope of the mountainside itself; gone, for the moment, are the cliffs; all is mountainside, green with grass and stands, but no forests, of pines. In the distance, craggy mountains loom. Another car, a canoe on top, passes, and then, there is snow on the mountains and the roadside. At the base of a mountain decorated with fields of snow, a hotel sits, immense in itself, but tiny compared to the mountain rearing behind it, into the clear, dark-blue sky. Finally, the yellow VW has arrived.

The wide shot is similar to the establishing shot, but the wide shot focuses on the characters and can lend a sense of depth to the action' all the characters and objects are in focus and perspective, so this shot equalizes rather than highlights characters, objects, and actions.

Another clip from Halloween includes a wide shot:

A young woman in blue denim bell-bottom jeans and a light-blue blouse, hands in pockets, mounts the steps leading from a suburban lawn to a broad porch. At the entrance flanked by windows, she rings the doorbell, leans left to peer into the window, turns, and leaves, back across the porch and down the steps. She crosses the front yard, passes the porch railing and the fiery jack-o-lantern seated there, walks down the side of the house, with her shadow on the wall, and is lost to the darkness. She emerges from the night, approaching the back door, which is open. She hesitates. Steps into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. Passing through dark rooms, she climbs the stairs to the second floor, and is swallowed by the darkness. To her left, at the top of the stairs, light shines around and beneath a closed door. She approaches, down the hallway. Illuminated by ambient light, her face is a picture of curiosity. She opens the door, and her eyes widen. Laid out in the bed, her arms extended so that her corpse forms a cross, a woman lies, dead; a headstone propped behind her, against the head of the bed, reads, “Judith Myers.” A pumpkin, lit by candlelight, grins on the night table beside her. Gasping, the young woman covers her mouth in her hands and backs into the wall behind her. She turns, and the body of a young man, suspended upside-down, swings through the doorway beside her, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. She retreats, and a cabinet door opens to reveal a blonde woman her own age, blouse open, breasts revealed, staring at nothing. She flees into the hallway, crying, distraught and terrified, leaning against another room's doorjamb. A white mask appears in the darkness of the room beside her. The masked man emerges, and a butcher's knife plunges, ripping the sleeve of her blouse. She turns, falls over the staircase railing, onto the steps, and slides down the stairs. The masked man follows, standing at the head of the stairs for a moment, framed by the light of the room behind him, where the two female corpses are posed and the male body is rigged. Not dead, the young woman rises and steps forth, into the darkness.

The high-angle shot looks down on the action, making characters, objects, and settings seem small and insignificant, thus heightening their vulnerability.

Breaking Bad: Crawl Space (2011), directed by Scott Winant, alternates between high-angle shots and low-angle shots. The low-angle shots show a man in a crawlspace; these shots alternate with high-angle shots showing a blonde woman in the house, looking down at him.

A man on his hands and knees tears frantically at a sheet of plastic. He turns over, clutching bundles of cash. A blonde woman peers down at him. He demands to know something. Taken aback, the woman shakes her head. Lying on his back in the crawlspace, he kicks his heels, dislodging dirt, yelling up, through the opening in the floor that connects the crawlspace to the house. She gasps. In the crawlspace, he looks desperate. She closes her eyes, makes a response. He stares up at her, disbelief on his face, as asks more questions. Frightened, she explains. He puts his hands atop his head. She apologizes. He rants, clenching his fists. She kneels, looking down upon him, concerned. He rolls onto his left side, hands covering is face, whimpering. He rolls back onto his back, weeping and sobbing. She looks down, pity on her face, and makes a comment. His wailing turns to laughter, and her rolls onto his left shoulder, then onto his back again. Looking both concerned and frightened, the blonde woman backs away from the opening to the crawlspace, into the hallway. Elsewhere, a woman in dim light paces back and forth as she talks on a cell phone. The blonde walks along a hallway, past the door to a kitchen, and picks up the receiver to a telephone on a kitchen counter accessible from the hallway. She starts to talk, walking away, down the hallway. In the crawlspace, among the bundled cash, the man continues to laugh, as the view of him, framed by the opening to the crawlspace, becomes more and more distant, suggesting he is insignificant, alone, vulnerable, and trapped.

A shot similar to the high-angle shot, the bird's-eye view shot also looks down upon a character. Thanks to the bird's eye view shot, which looks 'straight down . . . usually [at] a setting” or a “place,” a character appears “short and squashed,” which makes this shot “effective in a horror movie” in which a character's movement is being tracked or as an establishing shot.

The low-angle shot is the opposite of the high-angle shot, looking up to another character, object, or aspect of the setting. This shot can suggest a character's lack of power or authority and can indicate confusion and “disorientation.”

The low-angle shots showing the man in the crawlspace alternate with the high-angle shots showing the woman in the house, looking down at him.

A shot similar to the low-angle shot, the worm's eye view shot also looks down upon a character. In the worm's eye view shot, the angle is even lower than that found in the low-angle shot. The angle in the worm's eye view shot is so low that it could be a worm's vision on things. This angle makes “things look tall and mighty” and can show a character “walking around a house” or some other location, without giving away the character's identity.

The canted-angle shot sets a character at a diagonal, tilting him or her, and suggests “imbalance and instability,” especially if it is combined with a point of vie shot. The canted angle shot implies that “something strange is about to happen.”

This example of the canted-angle shot, from Cindy Kaye's Dutch Angle: The Movie (2016) could be described this way:

A closed door at the end of a hallway, like the door frame, the vase of flowers at the in the hallway, near the door, the walls, and the corridor itself, tilt to the left. Another door opens, and a boy leans out. He looks at the door at the end of the hall. He starts toward it. The lights go out. The lights come back on. They blink, off and on, off and on. The boy turns left at the end of the hall. The lights go out. When they come on again, he is walking down the stairs to the first floor. The lights continue to blink off and on. At the bottom of the stairs, he turns left. The lights continue to blink off and on. Through an open doorway, the boy is seen lying prone, on the floor of a chamber that appears to be a dining room: it is furnished with a table and chairs and a cabinet full of dishes, but, there is also a made-up bed in the room. The lights go out; they do not come on again.

By deciding on the elements you want to include in a situation and the envisioning it as a scene, you can write descriptions that have immediacy, drama, unity, and coherence. At the same time, such descriptions will appeal to readers' senses, heightening verisimilitude, and facilitating the identification between the reader and the characters involved in such situations. Such descriptions guarantee that the scene you describe will have characters in conflict, thematic significance, narrative purpose, and interconnection with previous and subsequent scenes as well as a cause-and-effect relationship with other scenes in the plot.

It helps, when writing short stories or novels, to plot them meticulously, even to the storyboarding level that Alfred Hitchcock used in planning his movies' plots and the way action would be presented and appear on the screen. His care about details of audiovisual storytelling are one of the reasons for his great success and the respect he received and continues to receive. Best of all, the techniques he used, one of which was calling the shots well before filming a movie, are available to all storytellers and to storytellers of all kinds.

Getting to Know Them: H. P. Lovecraft

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Recently, I have begun reading biographical sketches of the masters of horror fiction. (Should you care to join me in this interesting and entertaining pastime, Ranker provides a good list of such authors.)

I read, most recently, about H. P. Lovecraft.

During a period of poverty, he subsisted on nothing more than a loaf of bread, a chunk of cheese and a can of beans.

Throughout his life, he corresponded with a good many people, including writers he mentored through his letters, whose ranks include August Derleth, Donald Wandrei (The Web of Easter Island), and Robert Bloch (Psycho).

As a child, he believed that the gods of ancient Greek mythology were real, while the Judaeo-Christian God was merely a myth (S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence), and he later turned to astrology as his guiding light. Once interested in anatomy (as well as chemistry), his passion for the former ended when he encountered the puzzling topic of the human reproductive system (Joshi).

Throughout his early years, he suffered several bouts of depression and “nervous breakdowns.” Perhaps he feared suffering the same fate as his father Winfield Scott Lovecraft, who was institutionalized when Lovecraft was a youth; it seems that Winfield had been given to doing and saying strange things” prior to his commitment (Joshi).

He married Sonia Greene, whose work as a milliner earned her a good income. After two years, their childless relationship ended, when they separated. Lovecraft's assurance that they were divorced allowed Sonia to marry again, but she discovered, later, that she was, in fact, still married to Lovecraft and, as a result, was guilty of bigamy.

Greene wrote the short stories “The Horror at Martin's Beach” and “4O'Clock.”

He was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Oswald Spengler, Robert W. Chambers, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood.

According to a variety of critics, his fiction is replete with such themes as forbidden knowledge, otherworldly influences, innate depravity, the rule of fate, threats to civilization, white supremacy, the potentially negative effects of scientism, an emphasis on polytheism, “cosmic indifference,” superstition, and an imaginary and recurrent geography unique to his fiction. He has been criticized for racism, homophobia, misogyny, and parochialism. His writing is not highly regarded by literary critics, although Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Alan Moore, F. Paul Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Neil Gaiman, and others name Lovecraft as a major influence on their own conceptions of horror fiction and their own writing.

Although he lived forever on the brink of absolute poverty, Lovecraft's cosmicism has influenced horror fiction.

Vampires:Three Scientific Explanations

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Chillers and Thrillers has devoted quite a bit of space to several articles on Tzvetan Todorov's insightful analysis of the literary fantastic. At this point, despite the oversimplification that results, we can say, for Todorov, the fantastic usually resolves itself into the explained and the unexplained. The former he calls “uncanny”; the latter, “marvelous.” Only when there is no resolution, one way or another, does the fantastic remain fantastic.

In our first post in this series, “Ghosts: A Half-Dozen Explanations,” we include a few examples of each type of story.

We also noted that, to write such a story, an author must allow either of two understandings of the action: either reason or science can explain the phenomena, bizarre though they may, as natural events or the strange phenomena are beyond explanation and, as such, may actually be of an otherworldly or supernatural origin. The tension between these two alternatives creates and maintains suspense. It is only when the story shows that the action is natural (explicable by reason or science) or supernatural (inexplicable by reason or science) that the story itself is no longer fantastic, but either uncanny or marvelous, respectively.

It helps, therefore, to know how scientists explain seemingly fantastic phenomena, such as (for example) ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies.

First, “Vampires: Fact, Fiction, and Folklore” explains why human vampirism is unlikely: imbibing blood on a regular basis would probably result in the imbiber's development “of haemochromatosis (iron overdose),” which is apt to lead to such serious health problems as damage to the nervous system and the liver. Drinking blood for a living is not advised, to say the least!

Another interesting refutation of human vampirism is mathematical in nature: If, at the end of a month, a vampire transforms a victim into a second vampire, and they both then transform two more people into vampires at the end of the next month, and so on, in two and a half years, everybody would be a vampire, and there would be no humans left to supply the blood the bloodsuckers need to survive. (Math can be pretty scary stuff!)

Although actual human vampires do not exist (or, at least, there is no proof that human corpses can be possessed by demons and go about their day “undead,” without eventually rotting, subsisting only on the blood of their living brethern—“Happy Meals with legs,” as Spike, a vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, calls his human hosts)—it is true that some people claim to be vampires; they may even truly believe that they are vampires.

They aren't. Here's why.

Porphyria may explain the belief, by some, in human vampirism. This condition causes sensitivity to light due to “irregularities in the production of heme, a chemical in the blood,” which produces “toxins” that erode “the lips and gums,” creating a “corpse-like, fanged appearance.”

Another explanation for the belief in human vampirism is found in some of the effects of tuberculosis. This disease causes pale skin, an aversion to sunlight, and the coughing up of blood due to lung damage. The highly contagious disease easily spreads from one person to another, a fact which might explain the belief that vampirism can be “transmitted” from vampire to victim through a bite.

Catalepsy, which causes victims to become rigid and immobile, was sometimes mistaken, in times past, for death, as it is in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories “The Premature Burial” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

There's also Renfield's syndrome, or clinical vampirism, an obsession with drinking blood. People who suffer from this psychological malady believe that drinking blood is beneficial to their health. The condition is marked by stages. First, a prepubescent child is sexually excited by blood or by consuming blood. Next, at puberty, the child begins to indulge in sexual fantasies concerning the consumption of blood and starts to devour his or her own blood; practicing autovampirism. Finally, the child preys upon animals or, perhaps, other human beings.

Sounds about as reasonable as anything in Freud, right?

And it is, which is to say, Renfield's Syndrome is 100-percent fake. Clinical psychologist Richard Noll invented Renfield's Syndrome as a parody of the psychobabble characteristic of the psychiatric and psychological professions' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

In doing so, Noll seems to have inspired his colleague, Katherine Ramsland, who is a professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, to invent her own “diagnosis,” “vampire personality disorder (VPD)” for her book The Science of Vampires.

And now we know how psychology is actually practiced, behind the scenes.

For more background reading (i. e., “research”) regarding social vampirism, check out “The people who drink blood.”

As is the case with ghosts, scientific explanations of vampirism suggest both fictional settings and characters.

Let's start with characters. Phlebotomists might be advisable, as might therapists, psychologists, or psychiatrists. (A writer might even toss in a mathematician or two.) There's certainly a place for a general practitioner and a few specialists, such as a hematologist, a neurologist, a pulmonologist, and maybe a dermatologist. There could even be a journalist or an author writing a series of articles or a book on vampirism. The police might be involved as well.

Obvious settings, for scenes if not entire stories, are laboratories; offices of therapists, psychologists, or psychiatrists; medical doctors' offices; mental institutions; and, possibly, jails or prisons.

Of course, thinking outside the box is often one of the things that distinguishes a writer like Poe from other authors of horror fiction. For him, a man aboard a ship is one of his victims of catalepsy, a berth on the ship the victim's actual resting place, and the grave in which he believes he's been buried alive an effect of his nightmares. Writers should be aware of their colleagues' treatments of themes and tropes, but they should also conceive of new treatments, perspectives, and approaches.

In our next post, we'll take a peek at what science says about werewolves.

Knowing Your Endgame

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Flash fiction works well for horror. We have the word from both Edgar Allan Poe, who said that a reader should be able to read a horror story in “a single sitting”—and he was talking short stories, not flash fiction as such. Although he was vague (what constitutes “a single sitting”?), we can, perhaps, get some direction from famed director Alfred Hitchcock, who brought both Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) to the big screen. He declared, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

Of course, his definition is also somewhat obscure: the “endurance of the human bladder” is apt to differ, sometimes considerably, among individuals. However, adults average 120 to 240 minutes between visits to the restroom to urinate. Assuming that Hitchcock applied his own criterion to the films he directed, a horror film, at least, should be between 109 minutes (Psycho) and 119 minutes (The Birds), which are well within the guidelines that he himself established.

Definitions of the permissible word length of “flash fiction” stories differ, with some suggesting that such stories should be no more than 600 to 1,000 words, while others argue that flash fiction stories could be as long as 2,000 words. Flash fiction author Michael Williams, author of Tales with a Twist, tries to stay at or below 1,000 words, but, occasionally, he admits, one of his stories reaches 1,200 words:

“I think setting my goal as 1,000 words, maximum, helps me focus. It gives me something to shoot for, but I wouldn't sacrifice a good story just to stay within an artificially imposed limit; if I have to go beyond, 1,000 words, I have to go beyond 1,000 words. For me, though, that's the exception. Most stories I write can be done well—probably better—in 1,000 words or fewer.”

Research finds that most people read at a rate of between 200 and 250 words per minute, so a flash fiction story, for most readers, would certainly meet both Poe's and Hitchcock's definitions:

A flash fiction story isn't characterized only by its brevity, however. “Flash fiction stories—I usually refer to them as flashes—usually end with a twist,” Williams says. “That's part of the their appeal, part of their fun. It's also a large part of their popularity.”

There are various ways to “twist a tale.”

One is to start with an outrageous, or even seemingly impossible, incident or situation. That's part one, the beginning, of the story. It hooks the reader. Then, follow with a logical result of this initial incident or situation. That's the middle of the story. The end of the story, part three, delivers the twist.

One way to generate the twist itself is to play with the six questions related to any form of communication: Who?, What?, When?, Where? How? and Why? Make a list, as complete as possible, of possible answers to each of these questions as they relate to your story's premise.”

Here's an example:

Beginning: A snowman melts, revealing a corpse.

Middle: Police respond.

End (twist): . . . .

To come up with the twist, start the list of answers to the seven questions that apply to any form of communication, including fiction:

1. WHO? WHO is the dead person? If he or she was murdered, WHO is the murder? WHO might be a character in the story? The body, of course and the murderer (if there was a murder). The police officers. A neighbor. The mail carrier. A repair person. A bus or a taxi driver or passenger. A spouse. A child, minor or adult. A delivery person. A maintenance person. A utility worker. A meter reader. A sanitation employee.
2. WHAT? What happened to the dead person? Murder? Suicide? A prank gone wrong? An ill-advised advertisement? An attention-seeking act gone astray?
3. WHEN? A two-day interval, on day one of which the person is encased in snow and, on day two of which, he or she is found as the snowman begins to melt.
4. WHERE? The front yard of a suburban home.
5. HOW? The person encased in snow freezes to death over night.
6. WHY? (This is usually the point at which the twist suggests itself, although any of the six questions could prompt an answer that includes the story's twist): A prop master who remains employed by his uncle, a movie director, despite the prop master's Alzheimer's, forgets that he has packed snow over an actor's body, and repeatedly does so, rather than freeing the actor from the “snowman” after the shot is complete, causing the unintended victim to die of exposure overnight.

 

Notice that the twist, in this example, is the result of the WHY? question, but the identity of the killer does not appear among the answers to the WHO? question. This just goes to show that, in actual practice, the questions themselves may not produce the “answer” that provides the twist, but, without having gone through this process, it's unlikely that the idea would have occur at all. Answering the questions starts the ball rolling, the mind thinking, and the imagination visualizing.

Now, we can complete the framework, or skeleton, of the story's plot:

Beginning: A snowman melts, revealing a corpse.

Middle: Police respond.

End (twist): A prop master, having developed Alzheimer's, forgets that he has packed snow over an actor's body and repeatedly does so, rather than freeing the actor from the “snowman” after the shot is complete, causing the unintended victim to die of exposure overnight.

Note: As in any story, before writing it, you need to research any technical aspects of the plot to make sure they are accurate. For example, would a person freeze to death if encased in snow overnight or would he or she suffocate? How long would such a death, whether of hypothermia or suffocation, take? Maybe overnight isn't long enough. Research and revise, as necessary. If the technical reality doesn't allow the ending you've conceived, think of one that will stand the test of the facts.

Article Word Length: 1,014

Estimated Reading Time: 4.05 to 5.07 minutes

The Horror of Objective and Subjective Threats

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Some horror fiction, both on the page and on the sound stage, features threats which are both objective and subjective. Just as objective threats can vary, so can subjective ones. If there is the threat of a loss of limb, or of mobility, or of stamina, or of life itself, there is also the threat of such losses as trust, of scruples, of faith, or of sanity.

These dual threats are depicted or dramatized through conflict: the villain or the monster is the agent by whom the objective threat is presented, and the physical threat, in turn, causes the subjective threat.

 

The outcome of conflict involving these two types of threat is resolved in one of at least seven ways:

1. The protagonist wins, overcoming both the objective threat and the subjective threat.
2. The protagonist partially wins, overcoming the objective, but not the subjective, threat.
3. The protagonist partially wins, being overcome by the objective, but overcoming the subjective, threat.
4. The protagonist loses, being overcome by both the objective threat and the subjective threat.
5. The protagonist overcomes the subjective threat, but the resolution regarding the objective threat remains unknown.
6. The protagonist overcomes the objective threat, but the resolution regarding the subjective threat remains unknown.
7. It remains unknown whether the protagonist overcomes either the objective or the subjective threat.
   
   
   
   
   

In the hands of skilled writers, these seven permutations can seem to multiply, as various twists are put upon each threat and each possible outcome.

Edgar Allan Poe's short stories often involve both objective and subjective threats. The outcome of the stories' conflicts vary across the spectrum of possibilities.

1. The protagonist wins, overcoming both the objective threat and the subjective threat. Hop-Frog and Tripetta, of “Hop-Frog,” not only overcome the threat of violence and possible death at the hands of the cruel king they serve, escaping after immolating the villain and his courtiers, but they also overcome the subjective threats to their pride and self-respect posed by the king's dehumanizing conduct toward them. Their victory is double; they regain both their physical freedom and their autonomy and self-esteem.

2. The protagonist partially wins, overcoming the objective, but not the subjective, threat. The protagonist of Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” imagines that an old man with a “vulture's eye” is a menace. He vanquishes this perceived objective threat by killing the old man. However, the police, alerted by a neighbor who'd heard the victim's screams, arrest the killer, and readers realize that the protagonist has not vanquished the subjective threat of his own madness—nor is he likely to escape the additional, real objective threat of prison or, possibly, hanging.

3. The protagonist partially wins, being overcome by the objective, but overcoming the subjective, threat. William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist is a good example of this variation. Father Karras is questioning his religious faith until, in an act of self-sacrifice, he bids the devil to forsake a girl he's possessed and possess him instead. However, when the devil makes the jump from the girl into the priest, Father Karras foils his adversary by leaping to his death from the upper-story window of the girl's bedroom, in which the exorcism had been being conducted. Although the objective threat of possession by the devil overcomes Father Karras, the priest retains his faith.

4. The protagonist loses, being overcome by both the objective threat and the subjective threat. During the American Civil War, Second-Lieutenant Brainerd Byring of the Union Army succumbs to his on imaginary fears when, on an isolated portion of terrain over which he stands guard, he encounters a dead enemy soldier. Byring fancies that he sees the Confederate soldier's body moving slowly, stealthily toward him. A captain and a surgeon find Byring the next morning.

He has driven his own sword through his heart, after hacking the dead Confederate's cadaver. The enemy soldier's weapon lies on the ground, unfired, and his body is rotten enough to indicate that he has been dead some days before Byring “killed” him. The fight hinted at in Ambrose Bierce's “The Tough Tussle” has been entirely Byring's own; he has survived neither the objective struggle with the corpse nor his delusion that the body was alive, that the dead Confederate soldier was, indeed, sneaking up on him under the cover of darkness to kill him.

5. The protagonist overcomes the objective threat, but the resolution regarding the subjective threat remains unknown. The protagonist of Poe's “The Pit and the Pendulum” avoids the objective threat—execution—when the Inquisition that has imposed the sentence of death upon him is defeated by its enemies and he is rescued. It is unclear whether he also triumphs over the terrors of helplessness and the horrors of physical and emotional abuse. The story's ending does not say or even imply.

6. The protagonist overcomes the objective threat, but the resolution regarding the subjective threat remains unknown. In H. G. Wells' short story “The Cone,” the protagonist, Raut, avenges himself upon Horrocks, the adulterer who has cuckolded him, by causing his wife's lover to fall into a furnace. The objective threat to his wife's violated fidelity has been ended, but the murderer himself may not as easily be rid of the humiliation and rage that appear to have driven him to this desperate act. Even if he does vanquish these emotions, he may have to struggle with another subjective threat, for he seems horrified at the terrible crime—the sin—he has committed: “God have mercy upon me!,” he prays, saying, “O God! what have I done?”

7. It remains unknown whether the protagonist overcomes either the objective or the subjective threat. Legs and his companion Hugh Tarpaulin escape the mad, self-proclaimed King Pest and his courtiers, who have taken refuge from the plague in the basement of an undertaker's shop, but it is unknown whether the rash sailors also escape the plague that has disfigured the afflicted. They might, in fact, be taking the disease aboard the very ship from which they earlier departed, for the narrator of Poe's “King Pest” informs readers,

the victorious Legs, seizing by the waist the fat lady in the shroud, rushed out with her into the street, and made a bee-line for the “Free and Easy,” followed under easy sail by the redoubtable Hugh Tarpaulin, who, having sneezed three or four times, panted and puffed after him with the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.

 

If they have not escaped the plague, it is doubtful that they will escape the terror that it will bring and, if the rest of the crew they infect understand that it was they who infected them, it is unlikely that they will escape the ire of their fellow seamen; indeed, a new objective threat may arise, one which costs them their very lives. They may have merely escaped one type of death to flee into hands of a death of another kind.

These seven variations on the theme of an objective threat coupled with an often-related subjective threat provide a fertile foundation for a multitude of treatments so that no story needs to be like another, even if they are based on the same dynamics—or, indeed, a specific dynamic within the seven-fold group of dynamics. Likewise, the same writer can produce a story from any one of the objective-subjective threat pairings or from the same one, treated differently.

"Shadowed": An Amusing Vignette

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Shadowed (2020), directed by David F. Sandberg, star his wife, Lotta Losten, and five shadow people. The plot is simple:

A woman (we'll call her Lotta) reads in bed. Her light goes out. She sits up quickly, on the edge of the bed. She hears a noise. Worried, she activates a small flashlight that she takes from the drawer of her bedside table. The beam illuminates a single, flat dish on the beside table. But two shadows show on the wall behind the table: the shadow of the dish and the shadow of a jar. As the shadow of the jar indicates, she picks up the invisible jar and then drops it back onto the table. She hears another noise. A shadowy woman sits in the chair near the foot of Lotta's bed. Lotta tosses a blanket on the bed over the shadow woman in the chair. The blanket falls onto the chair, assuming the shape of the chair's contours, suggesting the shadow woman has vacated her seat. Her bedroom door opens of its own accord, showing the hallway outside her bedroom. Lotta stands in the darkness of her bedroom. She approaches the bedroom's doorway. She enters the hallway. She follows the hallway to another part of the house, pausing near the foot of the stairs leading to the house's second story. A shadow of a man stands hunched over in front of a closed door. The shadow man twists, before turning quickly toward Lotta, and snarls, The shadow man continues to transform into a more clearly human shape. The shadow man rushes toward Lotta. She runs back down the hallway to her bedroom. Closed, her bedroom door is presumably locked. Trapped, Lotta turns when she hears a sound behind her. Five shadow figures—three women and two men, one of the which holds a shadow hatchet. Lotta mutters an unintelligible word or two—maybe “David” or “keep back.”

Some people believe that shadow people are spirits; others believe that they are beings from other dimensions. Some suggest that shadow people are evil; others think that shadow people are either friendly or neutral toward human beings. Scientists suggest that such figures may be hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis, and methamphetamine addicts have reported seeing shadow people as a result of sleep deprivation.

Sandberg's 1:48-second film doesn't provide many clues by which to decipher its message, if there is one. The view of the leaves of a tree through the small window in Lotta's bedroom indicates that it is nighttime. The bed is still made, and she is fully dressed, except for her shoes, and she is, we later learn, downstairs, possibly in the guestroom, which is sparsely furnished with a bed, a bedside table, a simple lamp, a fireplace, and a vaguely seen larger piece of furniture visible for a moment in the sweep of her flashlight beam as she turns toward the shadow woman in the chair. The only decorative items seem to the the dish on the bedside table. Such a sparsely furnished and relatively small room is obviously not the master bedroom. She wears no wedding ring, so, apparently, she is unmarried.

The bedroom door appears to open by itself. Later, it appears to have closed and possibly locked itself. We do not see any shadow people when these occurrences occur, and no other characters are present to provide us with a point of view other than Lotta's own. Therefore, it is possible that the shadow figures are nothing more than the products of her hallucinations, perhaps brought on by sleep deprivation: although it is night, she has neither undressed (except to remove her shoes) nor donned pajamas or a nightgown. She does not appear to be in her own bedroom, but in the guestroom. Instead of sleeping or trying to sleep, she reads.

At first, there is only one shadow person—a woman. Then, there is a shadow man. The first shadow person, the woman, does not behave in a threatening manner, but the shadow man rushes Lotta. Finally, there are five shadow people, three women and two men, one of the latter of whom holds a hatchet. The hatchet and the menacing manner of the five shadow people, as well as Lotta's fear of them and her attempt to flee from them and to return to the sanctuary of the guestroom suggest that they are hostile toward her and intend to harm her, although it is impossible to determine how they can do so, since they lack material substance. Their only means of attack seems to be to frighten Lotta to the extent that she injures herself by fleeing from them: she could run into a wall, into furniture, or trip and fall, as the narrator in H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” does.

 

Or are the shadow people immaterial?

They would seem to be, but the jar that Lotta picks up and then drops on the bedside table seems real enough and material enough. Although it appears to be invisible, its shadow rises on the wall as she lifts the object and “falls” on the wall when she returns the object to its original position on the tabletop. It is real enough and tangible enough to cast to block the light of the flashlight, real and tangible enough to cast a shadow. If the shadow jar is real, if it is tangible, the shadow people could be real and tangible as well. We do not see them exert force, but that does not mean that they are incapable of doing so, and Lotta certainly believes they are capable of harming her.

We must conclude that if the shadow people exist, they are definitely invisible and they could be tangible. However, we have no proof and no reason to believe that the shadow people are anything more than products of Lotta's hallucinations. They do not disturb anything. They do not move anything. They leave no trace of their presence, as far as we know—no footprints or fingerprints. They do not speak. True, the shadow man that Lotta sees as she stands at the foot of the stairs seems to undergo a transformation of sorts, as he twists and twitches and lifts his seemingly outsize head becomes more clearly human. But these apparent changes could be merely the effects of Lotta's imagination or results of hallucinations.

As we have seen in previous posts, Tzvetan Todorov categorizes fantastic literature, of which horror fiction is a type, into three varieties: the fantastic, the uncanny, and the marvelous. A story, he says, is uncanny if its incidents can be explained through scientific knowledge or through reason. It it remains inexplicable in such terms, it is marvelous. Only a story that cannot be resolved as being either uncanny (explicable) or marvelous (explicable) remains fantastic. For example, Wells's “The Red Room” is uncanny; Stephen King's short story “1408” is marvelous; and Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw is fantastic. Since science can explain the phenomena that trouble Lotta as effects of sleep paralysis or sleep deprivation (or, for that matter, a wild imagination), Sandberg's short must be reckoned an exercise in the uncanny.

Although Shadowed doesn't have a plot and is not, therefore, an example of flash fiction, it does achieve one of the tasks that Edgar Allan Poe sees as critical in horror fiction. It creates a single emotional effect (“The Philosophy of Composition”). Of course, Poe believes that a story must accomplish more than the creation of a single, unified effect. It must have a plot, for example, as all of his own tales certainly have. To produce an effect, of fear or disgust or horror or terror or any other emotion suitable to horror fiction, all the elements of the tale must work together to lead to and maximize the effect with which the story ends, and these other elements include, among them, a plot.

A couple of the criticisms that Mark Twain directed at James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales can be said of Shadowed: “A a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere, and “the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there” (“Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses”). Shadowed is a handsome, well-executed vignette, but it is not a short story, even of the length of a flash fiction narrative. It may entertain for a minute or two, but it cannot truly satisfy anyone who takes his or her horror—or his or her drama—seriously.