Showing posts with label Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of Physiological Needs

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


The last of the fifteen basic needs Jib Fowles identifies in Mass Advertising as Social Forecast are the set of physiological needs, such as eating, sleeping, and drinking. (Although these needs include the need for sex, Fowles treats sex separately.)


In restaurants' advertisements, Fowles observes, “The art of photographing food and drink is so advanced . . . the crab meat in the Red Lobster restaurant ads can start us salivating, the Quarterpounder can almost be smelled, the liquor in the glass glows invitingly imbibe, these ads scream.”

Horror fiction is quite that obsessed with depicting food and drink, and the fare which this genre's short stories, novels, and movies features, which includes such delicacies as human flesh and blood, isn't nearly as delectable as crab meat and beef.


Horror often obtains its effects by perverting the normal order of things. By depicting substances that society prohibits people from eating or drinking as food or beverages, horror fiction generates fear and disgust. A reader or moviegoer is not apt to fear eating beef or pork and vegetables or drinking wine, milk, or a soft drink, because society recognizes and accepts these items as legitimate foods (with the exception of vegans and vegetarians, for whom such products, regarded as food or drink, might well be regarded with horror).


Although cannibalism has been practiced in extreme situations by members technologically advanced societies, as during the ill-fated Donner expedition, and until relatively recent times by certain tribes, in general, the consumption of human flesh and blood is not only taboo but also regarded as abhorrent. Consequently, describing or depicting cannibal tribes or families indulging in this practice evokes horror among readers or viewers. Indeed, horror movies involving cannibalism have been roundly censored or banned outright by numerous countries. One in particular, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was banned at one time or another in Iceland, New Zealand, and Singapore.


Nevertheless, cannibalism has been featured in over 330 films, many of them in the horror genre, including, most recently, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) and the Wrong Turn series of films (2003-2014).


Vampires thrive on blood, often imbibing it directly from the wounds their fangs open in the necks of their human prey. The undead are a staple among horror story villains, appearing in such novels as John William Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), Varney the Vampire (1847), Alexandre Dumas's The Pale Lady (1849), Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot (1975), Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), Whitley Strieber's The Hunger (1981), Paul Wilson's The Keep (1981), Robert McCammon's They Thirst (1981), John Skipp and Craig Spector's The Light at the End (1986), Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls (1992), and many others. In addition, such heavyweights as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Christabel [1816]) and Lord Byron (The Giaour [1813]) penned narrative poems featuring vampires, and nearly fifty series of novels concerning vampires have been published.

In horror fiction, the appeal of physiological needs can also be perverted by the manner in which such foods are produced and the cost—in the coin of moral decadence, social degeneration, physical suffering, and emotional trauma—of producing them. Here are a couple of examples.


Soylent Green (1973) takes place in the wake of worldwide ecological decline, overpopulation, and unemployment. People rely on Soylent Green, green wafers produced from “high-energy plankton” harvested from the ocean. When Detective Frank Thorn of the New York Police Department investigates the murder of his friend, Police Analyst Solomon “Sol” Roth, he discovers that the wafers are no longer made from plankton, but from human corpses. At the end of the film, having been wounded during a fight with Sol's killer, the police analyst's bodyguard, tab Fielding, and others, as he is being taken away on a stretcher, Thorn cries, “Soylent Green is people!”


The Stuff (1985), part science fiction, part satire, and part horror film, is based on director Larry Cohen's original story, which, he says, was inspired by his distaste for “the consumerism and corporate greed found in our country and the damaging products that were being sold.” In particular, he says, he was concerned about both “foods being pulled off the market because they were hazardous to people’s health” and by “the sheer volume of junk food we consume every day.” In the movie, a delicious, no-calorie, addictive white substance pours out of the ground. Miners discover it and market it, and American consumers can't get enough of The Stuff. Unfortunately, the substance is alive, and it's a parasite. Taking over its hosts' brains, it reduces them to a zombie-like state and consumes them from within. At the end of the film, The Stuff's owners are forced to eat their product, as FBI agent David “Mo” Rutherford asks, “Are you eating it, or is it eating you?


Horror novels and movies have also appealed to the need for sleep. The movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Stephen King's novel Insomnia (1994) are two memorable examples.


Adapted from Jack Finney's 1954 science fiction novel The Body Snatchers, the 1956 half-science fiction, half-horror movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, features extraterrestrial seed pods that duplicate and replace humans while the victims sleep. The “invasion” spreads from town to town, until Dr. Hill, a psychiatrist, alerts authorities, who seek to contain the invasion. 



According to film critic Leonard Maltin, critics generally regard the movie as an allegory for the U. S. Senate's hearings on communism under Senator Joseph McCarthy during the late 1940s and 1950s. According to this view, the sleep during which the invaders act could symbolize unawareness of or indifference to dangerous social and political realities or blindness to one's own paranoia about dehumanizing social and political forces more powerful than oneself.


In Insomnia, retiree Ralph Roberts develops insomnia. Sleeping less and less each night, he begins to see auras around people and “little bald doctors,” becoming convinced that the “doctors” actually exist, albeit in another dimension. In this alternate universe, two cosmic patterns, The Purpose and The Random govern affairs, the “doctors” working for The Purpose to murder people when “their time” to die is at hand. With Ed Deepneau as his agent, The Crimson King, an inhabitant of the other dimension, seeks to disrupt the equilibrium between The Purpose and The Random. Roberts, recruited by The Purpose, battles Deepneau. Amid the details of the confused and confusing plot, King targets anti-abortion protesters. The novel is pretty much another of King's many chaotic messes, and it's hard to understand how the book was nominated for a 1994 Bram Stoker Award (or maybe not; see my series of posts on the award.) In King's novel, sleep—or maybe it's sleep deprivation—becomes something like an altered state of consciousness.

Physiological needs have long supplied horror authors and filmmakers with a number of topics related to food, drink, and sleep, and it's likely that this set of needs will continue to do so, long into the future.

Saturday, July 28, 2018

The Horror of Hybrid Creatures

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) remake starring Donald Sutherland takes an eerie turn when a dog with a man's face makes its—his?—appearance on the screen. Offhand, I don't remember what accounts for this strange human-bestial hybrid, but, according to a synopsis of the film, “Matthew and Elizabeth are exposed as human when” Elizabeth screams “upon seeing a mutant dog with a human face, the result of . . . . a mutagenic effect” which caused the assimilation of “both Harry and the dog into a composite organism.”



Such special effects were relatively new at the time, and the human-canine “composite organism” looked especially bizarre on film. Of course, such hybrids have a long history. Ancient mythology, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, and otherwise, frequently includes such creatures as the sirens (bird women and, later, fish women), lamias (snake men and women), harpies (women with eagles' wings), gorgons (women with snakes for hair), satyrs (goat men), centaurs (horse men), sphinxes (lions with human heads), and many others.



Some hybrids consist of human bodies with animal heads (the jackal-headed Anubis, the cat-headed Bastet, the elephant-headed Ganesha, the frog-headed Hequet, the falcon-headed Horus and Monthu, the ram-headed Khnum, the cobra-headed Meretseger, the crocodile-headed Sobek, the ibis-headed Thoth, and the boar-headed Varaha, to name but a few).

Other hybrids are anthropomorphic creatures with added animal parts, including the wings of birds (angels), insects (fairies), or bats (the dragon Hatuibwari); birds' legs (Lilitu) dogs' legs (Adlet), or other animals' legs; and cows' horns (Hathor) or stags' antlers Pashupati). To their anthropomorphic forms, some hybrids add even more animal parts, as many as three, four, five, or even more, from diverse species. For example, the Japanese Baku has an elephant's head, a rhinoceros's eyes, a tiger's legs, a bear's body, and an ox's tail.


One reason such creatures are horrific is that they represent exceptions to the taxonomy, or classification system, scientists use to classify organisms. For scientists (and the vast majority of laypersons), there is a clear-cut demarcation, or boundary line, between human beings (the only extant members of the subtribe Hominina) and non-human animals. When such boundaries are crossed, as they are, or would be, with human-animal hybrids, not only confusion results, but so does the idea that humans are somehow superior to “lesser” (non-human) animals. To insist on a difference between human beings and non-human animals is to maintain the superiority of the former over the latter. If humans are nothing more than an animal, every non-human animal is equal to humans in status and importance. There can be no hierarchy, such as that which was established by medieval Christianity's doctrine of the divinely established “great chain of being,” the basis, like God's decree, in Genesis 1:26, that “man” should “have dominion” over the earth and its fauna:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.


Rather than being the image of God, and “the crown of creation,” humans would be just another member of the animal kingdom.

The taboo against bestiality is probably intended to safeguard the qualitative difference between humans and nonhuman animals. The fact that, although not universal, this taboo is widely in effect across the globe, with offenders subject to death or incarceration in some cases, suggests how insistent the separation between the categories of human and nonhuman continue to be. In horror fiction, it is the violation of this separation, the boundary between human and nonhuman animals that the violation represents, that is horrific, which is why the dog-faced hybrid in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is eerie, even today, despite the less-than-spectacular (by today's standards) special effects that produced it.



Other movies (and novels) that mix both science fiction and horror, as they do man (or woman) and nonhuman animals, include H. G. Wells's novel 1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau, the 1932 movie Island of Lost Souls, the 1986 movie The Fly, the 2009 film Splice, and the 2001 movie Dagon.


Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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