Demonic Aspects of Demon Art

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Okay, I admit it: I have never seen a demon.

Not a real one, not a demon in the flesh, as it were.

I know a couple of people who have seen demons--or claim that they have, at any rate. Their statements are somewhat like those who claim to have seen extraterrestrial spaceships: they tend to contradict one another. Of course, “seem” is the key word here. Perhaps they are not contradictory at all. There may be enough demons to warrant varying descriptions of them. In all probability, one would think, there would be as much variety, at least, among the infernal hordes as there are among any other creatures. I mean, who would believe that such a creature as a starfish could be real, if one didn’t know that they actually exist? Or a jellyfish? Or a chameleon? Each of these animals seems highly unlikely, and, certainly, they are all quite different in appearance and characteristics, yet they all exist. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life, in nature as in anything else, demons, one might conclude, included.

In any case, what I’m more concerned with in this post are the aspects of demons--the characteristics that make the, well, demonic--that is, terrible, horrible, and just plain scary. As usual, one can discover quite a bit by simply taking a gander at artists’ conceptions of these infernal fiends, seeking, where possible, to identify similarities that suggest generalizations and differences which suggest differentiae.

The first thing I notice, in perusing pictures of fallen angels, is that most of them have human--or humanoid--faces. They have eyes, noses, ears, mouths--the usual--but these features are not typical of the ones a person would see in the mirror--well, hopefully not. For one thing, the complexion is likely to be of a most unusual color--yellow, red, green, perhaps--which is, of course, nothing like any skin tone that one is likely any time soon to encounter among human beings. Their features are also likely to be deformed in some way. They may have no irises, for example, the whole of their eyes being a glutinous white, or their pupils may be elongated and elliptical, like those of a serpent’s eyes. Some demons’ eyes actually glow like hot coals, if artists’ conceptions of the infernal folk are reliable guides. Demons’ ears may taper to points like the ears of a goat. Their teeth may include one or more sets of fangs. Their tongues may be forked like a snake’s tongue.

Besides the deformity of facial features, demons also sometimes come equipped, as it were, with attributes borrowed from animals: horns, scales, tails, cloven hooves, claws, that sort of thing. Those who have wings don’t, as a rule, have feathery pinions, but leathery, bat-like appendages. A few artists depict demons, usually of the female sort, with snakelike, Gorgon curls. The ancient Greeks’ satyrs (fauns in ancient Roman mythology) served as models for the more traditional type of demon familiar to many.

From Wolfman’s Gallery

However, more imaginative artists, including Hieronymus Bosch, H. R. Giger, and Javier Gil have rendered demons with more individuality and grotesquery.

Bosch’s demons tend to be anthropomorphic birds and beasts, often armed with weapons, or strange mixtures of several animals, hybrids of his fevered imagination. His The Temptation of St. Anthony and The Garden of Earthly Delights showcase some of Bosch’s more bizarre concepts of demonic creatures, each of which has a symbolic character that is now, alas, largely forgotten. In the vision of hell that is part of the Garden triptych, Bosch includes a demon--perhaps Satan himself, seated upon a chair that is a combination of throne and toilet. The demon, which wears an upside-down cauldron for a miter, and clerical garb, but has a transparent, insect-like abdomen, which projects downward, through the throne-toiler, devours men alive, defecating them into a round cistern below its seat. Not far from this demon of apostasy, there is a fiend whose hindquarters alone are shown, its upper body hidden in the cannibalistic demon’s flowing sash. It exhibits its buttocks to a naked woman who is seated against one of the legs of the popish demon’s throne-toilet. Instead of flesh, however, the kneeling demon’s posterior is a mirror in which the woman’s face is reflected. Straddled by the mirror-bottomed demon, whose legs end in antlers or barren tree branches, the seated woman is gripped from behind by an ass-headed fiend. A toad, symbolic of sexual lust, rests above her breasts. Her besetting sin appears to be vanity or, as psychologists would characterize her personality disorder today, narcissism.

Hieronymus Bosh, The Garden of Earthly Delights

Better known for his extraterrestrials (Alien, Species), H. R. Giger has also offered his own highly imaginative take on a ancient, albeit not particularly well understood, demon known as Baphomet. In his painting, a nude white woman--white not in the sense of Caucasian, but literally white, both of hair and of flesh--is suspended before a wheel, above and behind a bust of Baphomet, below whose head, upon the pillar which it tops are the heads of entwined serpents (or maybe birds with long necks; it’s hard to say which). The nude woman wears an inverted cross about her neck and brandishes, one in each hand, a pair of sharp-pointed objects that resemble the ends of a demon’s horns. Mounted upon the wheel, and facing in, toward her, are a series of hypodermic syringes whose needles appear to penetrate her outer thighs. The Baphomet head seems half dead: its ears are at half-mast, so to speak, its whiskers look wilted, and its eyes are half-closed, one showing only its whites, the other an iris that is rolling upward, into the skull. In lieu of a necklace, a hinge or metal plate resembling the end of a belt is fastened to the neck of the pillar, a buckle seeming to fasten it in place. The goat-head’s beard is tightly braided, one lock extending into a tail-like strand that ends in an arrowhead shape.

Two long, curving horns rise from the demon’s head, a third, smaller, straight horn ending in a bony crown, between them. The long horns frame the nude woman, and the crown atop the third horn rises between the woman’s spread thighs, occupying the space at which her sex would appear, were it not so obstructed. In viewing the placement of this decidedly phallic horn, one gets the impression that penetration is occurring, although it is not: the horn is in front, not inside, the woman’s sex. She seems both to be crucified and to float. Above her, in place of INRI, the acronym for the Latin phrase “Jesus Nazareth King Jews,” is the Roman numeral “XV.” There is no indication as to what the number signifies. It seems clear, however, that the nude woman is a demonic, probably satanic, priestess, possibly a temple prostitute, who worships the devil, mocking the sacred work of Christ by the inverted cross she wears as her necklace.

Although some moviegoers might not make the connection, supposing that the appearance of the beautiful woman who turns into an ugly old hag in Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of Stephen King’s The Shining is just another of Jack Torrance’s many hallucinations and is, as such, a manifestation of his madness, the temptress is a modern-day example of an ancient demon, the succubus, a female demon that was believed to have sex with men, usually in their sleep. (The male counterpart is the incubus.)

H. R. Giger, Baphomet

As I observe in my “Sex and Horror” series, sex, as it is depicted in horror fiction, is typically of a perverted sort that is intended to defy God’s commandment to humanity (through his directive to Adam and Eve) to “be fruitful and multiply” in order to “replenish the earth” with future generations of the human species. Anything that is not reproductive (and, by definition, therefore, heterosexual) is sinful, mainstream theologians argue. Indeed, non-reproductive sex between heterosexuals is also sinful, such thinkers contend. Javier Gil’s demonic art (i. e., his work which features demonic figures) typically portrays just such sexual activity--activity that is of a non-reproductive character, including orgies, homosexual unions, bestiality, and assorted perverse behavior. Most of his works of erotica which include demonic revelers are too pornographic for display in Chillers and Thrillers, but I offer the following picture as a milder representation of Gil’s demonic art.

Javier Gil, Untitled

What may we conclude from our examination of demons as they appear in artists’ conceptions of them? They resemble us, but they represent the worst aspects of ourselves, or of humanity: unbridled animality, sin, moral and sexual perversion, disobedience to God, an elevation of the fleshly aspects of human existence above the spiritual elements of human nature, blasphemous and sacrilegious communications, false religions or religious doctrines, and of a concern for pleasure without regard for propriety (or sanctity). These are the demonic aspects of human nature, reflected in artistic conceptions of demons as personifications of such impulses, conditions, and conduct. Writers of horror and fantasy fiction can take a clue or two from their more visual counterparts concerning what is evil and how it may be represented. (The article, “Demons,” in the online edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia has some interesting insights into the subject matter, too, especially concerning the positive and negative, or good and “sinister” senses of meaning that the word had in the original Greek usage!)

Renewal

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Like any other artist, the writer faces the challenge of keeping his or her writing fresh. How to make the tenth or the twentieth or the fiftieth novel, short story, or screenplay interesting to increasingly jaded readers or moviegoers, especially when faced with a myriad media, thousands of narratives and dramas, and a handful of plot possibilities, that is the question.

And it is this question that I will explore in this post.

Adopt a fresh perspective. Look at your art through the eyes of another artist. That’s what the makers of Alien did, inviting a painter and sculptor, H. R. Giger, to create the images upon which the film’s extraterrestrial predator is based. The result? Giger’s contribution pumped new life into the then-faltering science fiction-horror genre, making it exciting again. (And don’t some of George Lucas’ Star Wars aliens look a bit like the demons in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights?)

Offer something for everyone. This is the Dean Koontz approach to writing. His novels contain not only horror or science fiction, but also adventure, romance, mystery, and fantasy--something for everyone.

Get inside the characters’ heads. It’s not all about blood and guts and things that go bump in the night--or, at least, it shouldn’t be. Let your readers or audience know your characters--enough to love, hate, or sympathize with them--and the thrills and chills will skyrocket when danger threatens. (A good time to get inside their heads is when they’re alone or performing mundane tasks. In fact, a character should never be alone--even when he or she is alone--because he or she should be thinking and remembering and anticipating things that have happened and things that are likely to come, placing him- or herself, of course, in the center of these things.) Stephen King is especially adept at characterization, as his sales suggest.

Add a symbolic level of meaning. A story that is exhausted at one reading is usually one that doesn’t delve below the surface; in other words, it’s literal throughout, with nary the suggestion of meaning beyond the here and the now, which is universal, lasting, and, well, poetic. My post concerning The Descent offers a good example of a symbolic film.

Mix it up. Alfred Hitchcock said that a story is 85 percent chase, but the object of the chase changes. Sometimes, the good guys chase the bad guys (or the monsters) or vice-versa, but the guy (or the gal) can chase the gal (or the guy); a quest for a rare or precious artifact or relic can occur; a detective can seek clues among red herrings as he or she seeks to solve a mystery; a husband (or wife) can pursue a villain who’s kidnapped a wife (or husband)--or a child. There is only one limit to the types of chase a story can feature--the writer’s own imagination.

Introduce the unfamiliar. Maybe it’s the dreamscape inside a sleeper’s mind, or a virtual reality world, or a lost world, or a land that time forgot, or the hallucinatory consciousness of a psychotic patient, or the aesthetic theory of a sociopath, or the neighborhood (now long gone) in which you or your ancestors grew up, or. . . again, the possibilities are endless. (The unfamiliar can be informational, too: the habits of spiders, the anatomy of the marine life of one’s choice, the habitat of an extraterrestrial being, the physics of subatomic particles). Each in its own way, A Nightmare on Elm Street and King Kong employ this technique, both to great effect.

Alter reality. We take things for granted, believing that such-and-such a thing means this and nothing else and that our view of the world is more-or-less correct. Upset the metaphysical, the ontological, the epistemological, the ethical, or some other applecart; terror (and horror) may well ensue, as it does, for example, in 1408.

Adapt to a new environment. Create an imaginary world full of danger. Then, toss your protagonist (and a handful--or a horde--of other characters) into this dangerous environment so that they must adapt and survive or die. It’s evolution all over again, but in a completely different world or environment. Harry Harrison’s Deathworld Trilogy is an example of this approach.

Correct wrong assumptions. Base part of the story upon the incorrect assumptions that a character or a group of characters make concerning the significance of a person, place, or thing and then, when the time is right, redirect the story by having a character or a group of characters learn the correct meaning of this person, place, or thing. A whole series of false assumptions and corrected interpretations could advance the storyline and keep the plot interesting and fresh for readers.

In reading this post, one might think, the examples don’t show anything new. That’s true, but only because they are examples of novels and films that have already been done. You have to apply the principles I identify in your own way in order to freshen your fiction, just as the writers and works I cite did when they applied these principles. When all is said and done, the world around us (and inside us) is the source of innovation (and inspiration), but you and you alone must be the source of originality.

Quick Tip: Futurological Predictions as Grist for the Mill

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

It is impossible to predict what shape horror fiction will take in the future. As Soren Kierkegaard points out, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” The same is true of fiction.

Nevertheless, there are some indications that the horror fiction of the future may address some of the concerns of the futurologist. As the science, or study, of the future, futurology attempts to discern future trends by studying present patterns and causes. Global warming, it might be argued, is an example of futurological thinking. At the heart of futurology are statistics and probability theory, but history, economics, mathematics, and most of the sciences also play key roles in efforts to discern possible and probable future events and to devise possible and probable future scenarios. As one article summarizes the science, “Future Studies is often summarized as being concerned with ‘three P’s and a W,’ or possible, probable, and preferable futures, plus wildcards, which are low probability but high impact events (positive or negative), should they occur” (“Futurology,” Wikipedia).

Of course, such a characterization is simplistic, as futurology also depends upon a nexus of other subordinate, often interrelated, disciplines and approaches, including anticipatory thinking protocols, systems thinking, causal layered analysis, environmental screening, the scenario method, the Delphi method, future history, monitoring, backcasting, back-view mirror analysis, cross-impact analysis, futures workshops, failure mode and effects analysis, futures biographies, futures wheels, relevance trees, simulation and modeling, social network analysis, systems engineering, trend analysis, morphological analysis, and technology forecasting.

The literary equivalents to futuristic societies are, perhaps, the dystopias and utopias of science fiction. In horror fiction, extrapolating from current, known scientific knowledge and theoretical understandings to possible or probable future states of affairs is also a way to anticipate the monsters to come. Some suppose that H. R. Giger’s biomechanical art and the short stories of Ray Bradbury which marry technology and art, such as “The Veldt,” point the direction to at least one likely future topic for horror fiction: mankind’s ambiguous and troubled relationship with the works of his own hands (and mind).

Needless to say, the very concept of futurology is itself very controversial.

Besides, fiction benefits from being fiction; it doesn’t have to be about actual, or real, situations; by nature, it is made up, invented, pretended, even when it is based upon actual events. However, an awareness of the predictions made by futurologists can certainly provide grist for the always-ravenous mill of the creative writer’s imagination.

The Hyperfeminine Monster: What Does She Look Like?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Some hypermasculine fictional characters are good guys (of a sort, at least), among whose ranks we may count The Incredible Hulk and Wolverine or, on a slightly more realistic level, James Bond or Dirty Harry. More often, however, especially in horror fiction, such characters tend to be the heavies, the Predators and the Xenomorphs or, on the slightly more realistic level of the espionage and the police dramas, the Odd Jobs and the Scorpios. In real-life, the hypermasculine good guy might be a cowboy, a policeman, a soldier, or a mercenary, and the hypermasculine bad guy might be a gunfighter, a sociopath, an enemy commando, or an outlaw biker. Whether comic book super villain, horror story monster, or police drama bad guy, the hypermasculine character is fairly familiar, but what does his counterpart, the hyperfeminine monster, look like, and how does she act? Hyperfeminine characters exhibit exaggeration of feminine qualities. Typically, they stroke the male ego, are passive, naïve, innocent, flirty, graceful, nurturing, and accepting, even, sometimes, of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. They want to be seen as all-woman women, and they are drawn to hypermasculine men (men who exaggerate masculine traits). If the aliens of Predator and Alien represent horror fiction’s image of the hypermasculine monster, does Sil, of Species (1995), represent the female equivalent, the hyperfeminine monster, or are we talking something more along the lines of another extraterrestrial creature, the Blob? “Sil” is the name given to a female alien-human hybrid produced by scientists, using instructions transmitted to them from the alien species, by splicing human and alien DNA together. When she reaches adolescence in only three months, breaking free of her confinement, the scientists view her as a potential menace, and the government seeks to hunt her down and destroy her before she can mate with a man or men. Able to revert to her alien form at will, Sil is extremely strong, agile, and intelligent. She also has incredible regenerative abilities. She seeks a mate, killing two men, the first because he is a diabetic and, therefore, unworthy of her, the second because the couple are interrupted as they’re about to, uh, couple. Disguised, she does mate with one of the scientists in the hunting party, killing him when he recognizes her. Ultimately, she and her offspring are killed in a cave. (The monstrous Sil was created by H. R. Giger, the same superb biomechanical artist who designed the xenomorph that appears in Alien and its sequels.) Although in her human guise, Sil is beautiful (Michelle Williams plays her as an adolescent, and Natasha Henstridge portrays her as an adult) and she is adept at turning men’s heads (both literally and figuratively), Sil seems to have too many traits that are traditionally categorized as masculine (or, indeed, as hypermasculine) to qualify as a hyperfeminine monster: she is aggressive, physically powerful, and violent. Although she becomes a mother, she doesn’t appear to be the nurturing type, and she most definitely is not at all concerned with stroking the male ego, is not passive, is not naïve, is not innocent, is flirty only in a clumsy fashion, and is anything but accepting of others’ flaws. It’s hard to imagine any female creature that is less likely to tolerate physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. In fact, if anything, she is the predator and the abuser. A more recent movie, Teeth (2007), may offer us the image of the hyperfeminine monster. The premise seems promising: Dawn O’Keefe, a young woman, has teeth in her vagina. She’s certainly able to defend herself: when a new acquaintance refuses to take no for an answer, forcing himself upon her in a cave after a quick swim, she--or her vagina dentata (vagina with teeth)--bites off the offensive offender’s penis, and she flees the scene of the crime, leaving him to bleed to death. After researching the topic of the vagina dentata, Dawn visits her gynecologist to see whether her condition qualifies. When the doctor, pretending to examine her, molests Dawn, she--or her vagina--responds, biting off his fingers. Later, learning that her classmate Ryan has bet that he can seduce Dawn, her vagina dentata bites off his penis. She recalls an earlier victim of sorts: her stepbrother, who molested her when she was younger. It wasn’t with her mouth, as she had remembered until now, that she’d bitten his finger at the time; it was with her vaginal teeth. She leaves home on her bicycle, but, when it has a flat tire, she accepts a ride with a male driver. He locks the car’s doors when she tries to get out at a gas station, and intimates that he wants to have sex with her. Dawn responds with a sinister smile. Both aggressive and violent, Dawn isn’t really a predator as such, attacking only those who have or would molest or otherwise harm her, so it seems difficult to imagine her as a hyperfeminine monster. Maybe the much earlier movie, The Blob (1958), offers a better idea of the hyperfeminine. Although the alien’s sex, if it has one, is not identified in the story, it does seem to have some traits that are traditionally identified as feminine, and it seems extreme in its exercise of these qualities. An alien, the Blob is a formless creature resembling a colossal ameba. Able to envelope its prey, incorporating animals and human beings into its jelly-like mass, it is repelled by cold temperatures, and the military dispatches it to the arctic after it is frozen in carbon dioxide, where it remains until the movie’s sequel, Beware! The Blob (1972). In the latter film, Chester, a construction worker who is helping to lay the Alaska oil pipeline, brings home a mysterious, jelly-like substance. When it thaws on his kitchen countertop, it is hungry, after being frozen for fourteen years, and appeases its appetite by devouring increasingly bigger prey: a fly, a kitten, Chester’s wife, and Chester himself. Afterward, the monster attacks and eats hippies, police, a barber and his customer, homeless people, a Scout master, bowlers, skaters, and even chickens, before it is frozen inside the ice skating rink. The 1988 movie is a remake of the original, rather than another sequel. The Blob is aggressive (in a somewhat passive manner) and, in its own way, violent, which are attributes that are traditionally associated with males. However, its ability to envelop its prey; its passive-aggressive nature; its aversion to cold (i. e., its preference for warmth, which, symbolically, might signify a desire for sociable contact, if not affection; its open acceptance of all; and its womblike “smothering” of others are qualities that are traditionally linked to females. It seems, then, that the Blob is more hyperfeminine than either Sil or Dawn O’Keefe and, for the present, at any rate, earns the title of horror fiction’s most nearly hyperfeminine monster.

Buber, Bosch, Giger, et. al.: The Face in the Mirror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

H. R. Giger created the artwork upon which Alien’s xenomorphs are based. He also created the bizarre furniture--his chairs, for example, resemble the skeletal abdomens of things that might have been human beings, in their better days--which was featured in nightclubs, mostly in Europe, known as “Giger bars.”

He also created a large body of art--some sculpture, but mostly paintings--using , among other instruments, airbrushes. His work is of the type known as “biomechanical,” fusing the human and the mechanical into something that is both and neither. In most cases, the fusions involve females engaged in bizarre sexual behavior with machines or, less often, machine-men.

He’s mostly a sci fi artist, but his art also contains many horrific elements. To view it is to be disturbed, because his art is, well, disturbing. However, it has value beyond the merely entertaining and (in its own way) aesthetic. His paintings, in particular, can be interpreted as cautionary tales, told in imagery, rather than in words.

The Jewish theologian Martin Buber, in I and Thou, describes two ways by which a person may orient him- or herself to others. One may see the other as a fellow subjectivity, a “thou,” or one may regard all others as being inanimate objects, mere things, or “its.” The former way of relating to others allows love and the many emotions, good and bad, that flow from interpersonal relationships, whereas the latter way permits only a controlling situation in which others are simply means to an end, to be used and discarded at will by the only “thou” there is--oneself. Giger’s art shows the ultimate result of the “I-it” relationship, which reduces people to objects while dehumanizing the “I” who regards everyone else as merely an “it.”

Many of Giger’s painting involve sex of some sort of another, albeit seldom of a reproductive nature. However, there is never any intimacy or love in any of these acts. His cyborgs, mechanical and perfunctory, engage in sex simply for sex’s sake. Mostly, they are emotionless, although they occasionally express lust and rage. Often, the sex seems to involve rape--but, horribly enough, one cannot always be quite certain. The woman-as-machine appears to be being assaulted, suggesting that, despite her “biomechanical” character, she is not quite yet purely an object. Her partial humanity makes her situation even more horrible. Were she not still partially human, the paintings would still be weird, even, somehow, blasphemous, but it would be difficult to say that they are “horrible,” for there would be no violation of the human in them anymore if the woman and the machine were completely and truly fused. There is, still, despite the Industrial Revolution and the abuses of the military-industrial complex, a ghost in the machine, and it is this dualism of the spiritual and the material that makes Giger’s art horrific. In a completely materialistic universe, horror would not be possible, as Giger’s art suggests. In a way--in fact, precisely in this way--Giger’s art is like that of Hieronymus Bosch.

Indeed, some of Bosch’s paintings even depict the merger of man and machine, or the human and the mechanical. However, more of the demons that appear in Bosch’s work are strange hybrids of a human-animal mixture. Bosch lived before the Industrial Revolution provided a more or less systematic and elaborate framework for the framing of human-machine metaphors, so, in his day, people--particularly, sinners--were regarded more as bestial than as mechanical. In Giger’s time--which is to say, our time--the demonic is often seen as being more mechanical than bestial. The same impulse is at work in both metaphors, however. Man becomes demonic by becoming both other than and less than human. An animal-man is no longer a man, just as a machine-man (or, in Giger’s work, a machine-woman) is no longer a man.

C. S. Lewis cautions us that, every day, the choices we make and the actions we take make us a bit more like an angel or a little more like a devil, as the case may be, and that, in this manner, slowly and surely, we are creating the self that we shall be for eternity. Giger’s work, like Bosch’s before his, suggests something of the same thing, except that Giger’s art uses the machine in place of the animal or the demon to warn us of yet another lower form that we may take in denying the spiritual aspects both of ourselves, the “I,” and of the other, the “thou.”

Science fiction and horror writers have, in cruder fashion, perhaps, often told the same sort of cautionary tale. Whereas, in Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary conceives, bears, and finally delivers Satan’s child, in Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed, the protagonist is impregnated by a supercomputer that attains artificial intelligence. In The Terminator, militant machines have taken over, and only a time-traveling cyborg (a half-man, half-machine) can save humans from the world to come. In these cautionary tales (and many others), there’s a common threat, and this threat is the horror against which we are warned. As God created man in his image, so, too, does man create things in his own likeness.

The mechanical humans of Giger’s art are no less human than is Frankenstein’s monster, and the infant born of the Demon Seed’s protagonist is as much the child of humanity as Rosemary’s baby. We are in all things, because we project ourselves into all things, and we have created much of the world in which we live, including, to some degree, ourselves. Whenever, in doing so, we are content to be not only other but also less than we are, we are the monster in the looking-glass. That’s the theme of Buber, of Bosch, of Giger, and of the science fiction and horror fiction in which human beings are only too happy (and miserable) to accept a lesser status in creation than that with which they were created.

Imagining the Monster, Part II

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

We saw, in Part I of “Imagining the Monster,” how H. R. Giger’s design of the extraterrestrial creature in the movie Alien and its sequels uses several strategies to make the creature, sometimes called a xenomorph, especially frightening. The monster is horrifying, in part, because:

• It’s different from anything we’ve seen before.
• It’s an incongruous synthesis of various creatures, unsettling in themselves.
• It’s shown in great detail.
• It’s abilities, like its appearance, is an incongruous synthesis of various other creatures’ capabilities.
• Its life cycle parodies human reproduction processes.

Writers of horror stories can employ some of these same principles in designing the monsters that are to appear in their narratives. For example, we can use other organisms’ senses to envision how the monster experiences its environment--how it sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches.

Let’s take the lowly housefly, for example. It sees the world very differently than people do. According to “The Compound Eye,” a fly’s eye is compound, consisting of thousands of clusters of photoreceptor cells and pigment cells, complete with lens and cornea, known as ommatidia. In effect, each cluster is a miniature eye. Each eye sends a single "picture element" to the fly’s brain. The fly sees a "mosaic image" made up of "a pattern of light and dark dots like the halftone illustrations" in comic books or "newspaper illustrations." The fly’s eyes are excellent "motion detectors": one after another, in succession, the eyes "turn on and off" as the fly tracks moving objects. The resulting "flicker effect" enables the fly to see moving objects more easily than stationary ones. If your monster has a compound eye, it will see much as the housefly sees. Describing what the monster sees will make it seem strange to your reader, increasing its fright factor.

According to “Amazing Animal Senses,“ bats use their radar sense (echolocation) to locate prey (and obstacles), but they can also discern other animals’ body heat from a distance of 16 centimeters. The same article supplies a wealth of other information about insects' and animals' astonishing senses that can help horror writers create eerie and disturbing monsters. Describing how a monster “sees” heat, probably as patterns of red, orange, yellow, white, and blue or green splotches, will make the creature appear strange to readers and, therefore, more frightening. Butterflies taste with their feet; if your monster does likewise, it will be bizarre and disturbing. Not only do honeybees have compound eyes consisting of 5,500 ommatidia each, but they are also equipped with an iron oxide ring inside their abdomens that enables them to detect magnetic fields, which they use to navigate. Bees also taste with chemo receptors (essentially, taste buds) on their jaws, forelegs, and antennae. If your monster’s vision is sharp enough to see prey at a distance of 15,000 feet, it’s as sharp-eyed as the vulture. Chameleon’s eyes (like those of the seahorse) move independently of one another, allowing the lizard to see in two directions at the same time. Catfish can taste about 100 times better than humans. Spiders don’t just have eight legs; many of them have eight eyes as well, enabling them to see much more than people. We could go on and on, but the point is that nature shows us how to create monstrous monsters: simply describe what they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. The result will scare readers half to death.

Alternatively, feel free to create monsters that have no parallel in nature, such as Giger’s xenomorph. Scientists (and science fiction and horror writers) have done just this, speculating as to how organisms might have evolved in adaptation to environments very different than Earth’s. As “Alternative biochemistry” points out, some of their speculations replace the life-supporting carbon atom with the silicon atom, the nitrogen atom, the phosphorous atom, or with such surprising elements as arsenic, chlorine, and sulfur, and have posited ammonia, hydrogen fluoride, methanol, and other chemicals as alternative solvents to water, and, as “Extraterrestrial life” observes, within our own solar system, besides Earth, Saturn, Titan, Venus, Jupiter, Europa, and comets have been proposed as potential habitats for alien life forms such as ammonia-based, floating animals and various types of bacterial or microbial life. The National Geographic’s Internet article “Flying Whales, Other Aliens Theorized by Scientists” explains why scientists believe that life is likely on other planets; their concepts include winged, lizard-like “caped stalkers flying through a pagoda forest.” If you want help in creating your monster, you might refer to the SETI Institute’s primer on how to create imaginary extraterrestrial life, “How Might Life Evolve on Other Worlds.” It includes helpful tips and a handy, dandy chart by which to keep track of the creature’s features, including (and these are the actual labels used in the primer):

• Kind of skin
• Number of openings
• Long or other
• Segments
• Appendages
• Hard parts
• Hard outside parts
• Size
• Feeding cells
• Moving around
• Sensing vibrations
• Chemical senses
• Number of eyes
• Eating
• Plant eater
• Predator
• Defensive structures
• Poison as a defense
• Defensive behaviors
• Reproduction
• Sexual reproduction
• Mating
• Babies

Creators can use a dice as a stand-in for nature, fate, or God to determine, for example, body type, shape, dimensions, and features.

Of course, the giant ameba-like monster in The Blob is always a possibility as well. Simple, but effective.

Sources Cited:

“The Compound Eye”
“Amazing Animal Senses”
“Alternative biochemistry”
“Extraterrestrial life”
“Flying Whales, Other Aliens Theorized by Scientists”
“How Might Life Evolve on Other Worlds”

Imagining the Monster, Part I

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Monsters represent that which is unnatural, that which is aberrant and abhorrent. As such, they may symbolize conditions, situations, ideas, or other realities that a society--or humanity as a whole--finds repulsive. Not only do monsters have souls, as it were--the realities that they symbolize--but they also have bodies--the physical forms that writers give them.

John Keats wrote, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter. . . .”

Many writers and critics agree that the same principle is true of monsters. That which we do not see is often much more terrifying than that which we do see. What we don’t see, we must imagine, and our imaginations are much abler to frighten us than things we see. We may defend ourselves from something visible or at least know which way to flee from it. It’s impossible to protect ourselves or to escape from something we cannot see. Moreover, we want to know our enemy. We believe, rightly or wrongly, that being able to confront our foe may help us to discover its weakness. It’s possible, for example, that the Cyclops had limited peripheral vision; therefore, he might be blindsided. If we can see the werewolf, we can shoot it with a silver bullet. Zombies may be frightening, unseen, but when, seen, we realize how slowly they shamble, and we have hope that we may defeat them. Not seeing that which threatens us makes it, in our minds, more frightening.

Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “bomb theory” to explain how suspense differs from shock or “surprise.” In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained his view:

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene [emphasis added]. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.

The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Something similar is true with respect to monsters. When we hear them, but don’t see them; when we hear of them, but don’t see them; when we view the carnage they leave behind them, but don’t see them, suspense builds. The monster becomes increasingly horrible. We build them up in our minds until they are horrible beyond words, horrible beyond depiction. That’s why, often, when we do see the monster, it’s usually disappointing. Remember when, toward the end of It, Stephen King finally lets his protagonists come face to face with the terrible shape shifter that has terrified them (and us) for hundreds of pages, and we learn that its true form resembles nothing more sinister than a gigantic spider? Talk about a letdown! The scene very nearly destroys the whole novel. We imagined nightmarish visions; we are given a spider. (The same is true of the monstrous Shelob, the gigantic spider in The Lord of the Rings.)

It’s better not to show, than to reveal, the monster at the heart of the story. Nevertheless, it’s usually shown at some point near the end of the story, in words in the novel and in images in the movie. Again, usually, it disappoints.

However, there are a few occasions during which the monster, even revealed, manages to terrify--and to delight. An example is the alien in Alien. Based upon paintings by H. R. Giger, who is himself a master of the macabre, the extraterrestrial antagonist that destroys Lt. Ripley’s crew is a truly terrifying specimen of the monstrous. It behooves us to ask ourselves why.

The answer is fairly straightforward. Giger’s monster terrifies because it is alien. It’s unlike anything we’ve encountered, but, at the same time, it suggests many things we do know, all of which are unsettling. It’s part insect, sort of, and part crustacean, kind of, and something mechanical, maybe, with a little worm, or dragon, thrown in, it seems. It may even be part machine. It’s also--dare we say it?--somewhat humanoid. It’s a synthesis of incongruous combinations that cross categories, which, if you’ve read the post on “The Horror of the Incongruous,” you’ll recognize as horrible in itself. It’s also horribly detailed. Giger shows us its every horrifying feature: sharp teeth, elongated dragon’s head, banded ribs, armor-like crustacean exoskeleton, a second mouth inside the primary mouth, an armor-penetrating tongue, fused phalanges, acidic blood and saliva. It’s a walking weapons platform, a total arsenal, and, lizard-like, it can run along walls or ceilings as easily as along floors, and it likes to ambush unsuspecting victims by attacking them from behind. Temperature extremes don’t bother it, and it can survive in a vacuum. Its exoskeletons fully contains its body heat, so it can’t be picked up by heat sensors. In short, this monster is an all-in-one package of terror that's virtually undefeatable. It's the monster-version of the Swiss army knife, the shape shifter given one polymorphous form.

The monster's life cycle is horrifying, too, as it represents a parody of human conception, pregnancy, and gestation. The species’ queen lays an egg that produces a parasitic facehugger. The facehugger attacks a victim, attaching itself to his or her face, and, introducing a tubular proboscis into the victim’s esophagus, implants an alien embryo within the recipient’s chest. Whether the host is male or female doesn’t matter; after accepting some of its host’s characteristic features--bipedalism, for example--the parasitic embryo emerges, ripping its way through its host’s abdomen in a parody of the birth process. The whole conception-pregnancy-gestation process makes women interchangeable with men as mothers, suggests that human reproduction is a parasitic process, and makes birth an act of violence. Understandably, feminists have detected a good deal of misogyny and sexism in the Alien monster. For this reason, as well as those of its alien appearance and abilities, the monster is both fascinating and truly monstrous.

What makes the Alien monster so monstrous? Let’s recap:

• It’s alien from anything we’ve seen before.


• It’s an incongruous synthesis of various creatures, unsettling in themselves.


• It’s shown in great detail.


• Its abilities, like its appearance, is an incongruous synthesis of various other creatures’ capabilities.


• Its life cycle parodies human reproduction processes.
  

Giger’s monster suggests some basic principles that can be used to create other horrifying monsters, which we will take up “Imagining the Monster, Part II,” to be posted later.