Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Aggress

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, we all have the need to aggress, or to be aggressive. He attributes this need to the pent-up frustrations and tensions of everyday life. Typically, people repress the impulse to act aggressively, as society frowns upon eruptions of violence. We are taught to use our words, rather than our fists (or knives or guns). For advertisers, appeals to the need to aggress can backfire, Fowles warns, causing potential consumers to “turn against what is being sold.” Therefore, advertisements often substitute gestures (a raised middle finger, sarcastic “gibes,” or the insistence of getting “the last word in”).

Horror movie directors don't need to be quite as sensitive to alienating their audiences, although even they are not granted total license. In the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere, Cannibal Holocaust was banned for its extreme violence. The UK and other countries have also banned The Human Centipede, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Cemator, Peeping Tom (aka Le Voyeur), Friday the 13^th, Dead and Buried, The House on the Edge of the Park, The Devils, Just Before Dawn, Antichrist, Nekromantic, I Spit on Your Grave, Saw VI, Hell of the Living Dead, The Return of the Living Dead, Halloween, Land of the Dead, and Evil Dead. Although some of these films were banned for legal reasons (e. g., obscenity), religious (e. g., blasphemy), or political reasons (e. g., unflattering depictions of a particular regime), most were banned because of the extreme violence of their contents. In particular, the slasher film is often cited by feminists and others as misogynistic, sexist, and chauvinistic, since the victims are mostly, if not exclusively, women and the serial killer is almost always a male who kills his prey using a knife or other “phallic” weapon.

On the other side of the coin, critics who defend even extreme violence in cinema and other forms of fiction, such as novels, contend that such displays or descriptions of violence provide an emotional outlet for the impulse to injure or kill, helping people to vent these antisocial and dangerous emotions. Aristotle is one of the earliest critics to argue a similar point in his Poetics's theory that drama promotes catharsis.

Reading horror novels or watching horror movies has been shown to cause physiological responses, such as an increase in respiration and heartbeat, muscle tension, elevated cortisol levels (cortisol is the 'stress hormone”), increased eye movement, a “spike: in adrenaline levels, and a release of dopamine. Most likely, these responses are associated with the fight-or-flight impulse. If we believe that we can eliminate a perceived threat, we will fight; otherwise, we will take flight. Our physiological responses to fear energize and otherwise equip us to take either action.

In a psychological and aesthetic context, some believe that these physiological responses may be a reason that readers and audiences enjoy being frightened. At the same time, theorists believe, readers and audiences are secure in the knowledge that the events unfolding on the page or the screen are purely imaginary, so there is no existential threat to them.

In any case, it seems clear that the appeal of horror fiction lies, in part to its appeal to the need to aggress that everyone feels but, fortunately, few act upon and fewer still to the degree shown in the most violent horror films or described in the pages of the most ferocious horror novels.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Guidance

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles (and psychologist Henry Murray), the need for guidance is universal; everyone experiences it, male and female, young and old—everyone. In promoting their clients' products, advertisements use this basic need, one of the fifteen identified by Fowles, to appeal to potential customers. Since these needs are universal, they pop up, quite frequently, in fiction of all types, including that of the horror genre.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, guidance is provided by two major sources: Buffy's high school's library, a repository of a surprising number of books concerning the paranormal, supernatural, and occult, and her mentor, the Watcher Rupert Giles, himself a human repository of all things metaphysical and mystical. Although the Hellmouth, rather than the Sunnydale High School library, is the plot generator for much of the series, the library's books are often the means of explaining, if not always understanding, the threats the protagonist and her friends face each week.

In Supernatural, the plot generator, the notebook of demon hunters Sam and Dean Winchester's father, John, is also the source of the series's appeal to the need for guidance. Often absent, as he pursues demons and other things that go bump in the night on his own, John later sacrifices his life on behalf of Sam and is killed by the greatest adversary among the demons and other supernatural entities he's hunted. However, his notebook remains a source of knowledge about such threats, often not only describing their origin and nature, but also explaining how to eliminate them. After John's death, his friend, Bobby Singer, himself an experienced demon hunter in his own right, steps in, occasionally, as another source of guidance for the Winchester brothers.

As D. H. Lawrence suggests in his poem “The Snake,” one's culture and education are also “voices” that provide guidance. However, the guidance they provide may not always serve one as well as might be supposed. Such guidance may insist that natural and unconscious sources of wisdom and experience be “killed” as mysterious and potentially dangerous forces (represented, in Lawrence's poem, by the snake). Religion, mythology, philosophy, literature, and, more recently, some forms of psychology, such as Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, are often suggested (although not in “The Snake”) as means of ascertaining, interpreting, and applying such mystical or metaphysical wisdom. The key is that the irrational or the natural must be interpreted in rational terms, often by a trusted intermediary, such as a priest, a philosopher, a poet, or a psychoanalyst. Often, this is the task assigned, in fantasy, to the source of guidance upon which the characters depend.

In horror fiction that includes a science fiction context, the source of guidance is likely to be scientists or researchers. This situation is especially true in regard to the science fiction-horror movies of the 1950s, such as Them!, The Thing from Another World, The Giant Behemoth, The Trollenberg Terror (also known as The Crawling Eye), and The Monolith Monsters, to name a few.

In Them! myrmecologists dispatched by the U. S. Department of Agriculture determine that the giant ants attacking people near Alamagordo, new Mexico, are mutants produced by atomic bomb radiation.

The thing from another world, a biped, appears to be an animal, but scientists examining the tissue from one of its severed arms reveal that the organism is actually a plant.

Scientists determine that the “behemoth” that ravages the greater London metropolitan area was spawned, as it were, by radiation resulting from atomic testing (a major theme of these films) and provide guidance concerning how to kill the creature: subject it to even more radiation to expedite its demise (the creature, the scientists have found, is dying from radiation poisoning).

An astronomer at the Trollenberg observatory explains that mysterious deaths in the vicinity may be connected to an immobile, radioactive cloud hanging over the south face of Switzerland's Mount Trollenberg. Although the cloud, which later moves and splits into four smaller versions of itself, isn't explained in the movie, film critic Leonard Maltin reveals that it's a cloaking device of sorts, which conceals the film's true menaces, “alien invaders.”

After discovering a catatonic girl alive beneath the rubble of her family's farmhouse, doctors determine that she is slowly turning to stone. If the source of her contagion can be discovered, they may be able to save her life. A professor identifies a sample of the stone as having come from a meteorite. The stone is found to have the property of draining silicon from anything it touches. In humans, silicon maintains tissue flexibility. Without it, the girl's body is turning to stone, so she is injected with the element. Researchers discover that the salt in the solution administered to the girl stopped the stone from extracting silicon from her tissues, so a dam is dynamited, allowing local salt flats to be flooded, thereby saving the day for humanity.

Whether the source of guidance is mystical or scientific, horror fiction, whether on the page or the sound stage, often appeals to the need for guidance universal among all human beings. Like other appeals to the fifteen basic needs identified by Fowles, the need for guidance is one of interest to all readers and audiences.

Horror Fiction: The Need to Nurture

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Jib Fowles, adults, male and female alike, have a need to nurture children, animals, and other helpless creatures. In discussing this need, psychologist Henry Murray refers to feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing such dependents.

Horror fiction, like advertising, often taps this basic need, either by showing its neglect or by perverting it. In addition, such fiction frequently depicts the nurture of children or pets as a way to set up the later reversal of such care when a villain disrupts or destroys familial or relationships or relationships based upon friendships or, indeed, kills family members or friends.

In the film Rosemary's Baby (1968), based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel of the same name, Rosemary Woodhouse is raped by Satan after her neighbors, a cult of Satanists, drug her. She believes that her vision of having been raped by the devil was a delusion and that her husband, Guy, is the true father.

After her baby is born, she is told that the child died, but she refuses to believe this and discovers the infant son in her her satanic neighbors' apartment, surrounded by the their fellow members of their cult. She is asked to accept the child as her own, and, reluctantly, she does so, rocking the baby's cradle as she smiles.

This plot involves the need to nurture, a drive so strong, especially when it is combined with the maternal instinct, the movie implies, that it can overcome even the fear and disgust that having delivered a son of Satan inspires. No matter what level of nurture Rosemary provides to her son, the child will not fare well; according to the Bible, her son, the Antichrist, or “the beast from the earth,”will be defeated and cast into hell, wherein he will suffer eternal torment (Rev. 19:19-20).

The plot addresses two questions: who (or whom) is to be nurtured and why?

Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption, which originally appeared in his 1982 collection, Different Seasons, presents, as its subtitle suggests, a perversion of the need to nurture. Having discovered that an elderly German immigrant, Arthur Denker, is a Nazi war criminal, Kurt Dussander, a teenage boy, Todd Bowden, threatens to expose him if Dussander does not recount the atrocities that Dussander committed during the Holocaust.

The need to nurture is perverted in two ways: it is forced upon the nurturer, rather than freely given by him, and it involves teaching about atrocities rather than virtues. It also results in catastrophes, as, separately, Todd and Dussander murder homeless vagrants and Todd shoots a rifle at motorists on a freeway before he is killed by authorities.

King's 1977 novel The Shining also involves the need to nurture, this time addressing it negatively, by denying it to five-year-old Danny Torrance. His father, Jack, an alcoholic subject to fits of rage, broke his son's arm and was fired from his teaching position after assaulting a student. After accepting the position of caretaker of the vast, remote Overlook Hotel, Jack is possessed and, under the influence of a former caretaker's ghost, driven to murder his wife, Wendy, and Danny. 

King acknowledges that his own alcoholism and his anger and frustration concerning his own children's behavior was an inspiration for Jack's character. He also insists that Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel, the 1980 movie The Shining, departed from his novel's theme of a family's “disintegration” and objected to Kubrick's suggesting that Jack is influenced from within, by his own psychological demons, rather than externally, by the ghosts of the haunted hotel.

Scottish broadcast journalist Laura Miller takes issue with King's criticism of Kubrick, pointing out that, in King's novel, Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family, whereas, “in Kubrick’s The Shining, the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a choice.”

King's Point of View

King's Novel	King's Criticism
Theme = family's “disintegration”	Film departs from novel's theme
Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences	Film suggests Jack's own psychological demons cause his downfall

Miller's Criticism of King's Point of View

King's Novel	Kubrick's Film
Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family	Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences
Domestic violence results from Jack's own choices	Domestic violence occurs

In short, Miller argues that King's novel is psychological, rather than theological, in its identification of the cause of the domestic abuse Jack commits, whereas Kubrick's film suggests that Jack's behavior, including his domestic abuse, results from supernatural influences—the opposite of King's own point of view and basis of his criticism of Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel.

King's criticism of Kubrick's film has been inconsistent, with King first damning and later praising the movie. In one comment, he attributes the filmmaker's sometimes “flat” scenes to a failure of imagination and religious faith:

. . . a visceral skeptic [concerning the existence of the supernatural] just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked instead for the evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others. What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little . . . .

Critic Mark Browning suggests the opposite is true: King “feels too much and thinks too little.”

King's criticism of Kubrick and Miller's and Browning's criticism of King's criticism of Kubrick seem to suggest that romanticism tends to promote an emotional and psychological view of the problem of evil, such as King's, while a rationalistic outlook tends to advance a rational and theological or idealistic perspective regarding the existence of evil, such as Kubrick's.

If nothing else, the controversy between King's perceptions of Kubrick's movie and Kubrick's own point of view concerning his film suggest that stories that involve the need to nurture can address much larger issues, such as the romanticism, rationalism, and the nature of both evil and ultimate reality.

King approaches the need to nurture from a different perspective in It.

Not only do many of his adolescent characters lack a nurturing home environment, but one of them in particular, Beverly Marsh, is abused both by her father Alvin, and, later, her husband, Tom Rogan, among other, previous romantic partners. As an eleven-year-old girl, she is a member, with six of male friends of the same age, of the Losers' Club.

The parents of another member, Bill Denbrough, treat him with cold indifference following the death of his younger brother. His stuttering subjects him to the bullying of his classmates.

Benjamin Harrison, another member, is obese, which makes him a target of the same school bullies who torment and attack the other “Losers.” 

Edward Kaspbrak is a victim of “smother love” and his mother's Munchhausen syndrome by proxy; he also suffers psychosomatic asthma. 

Michael Hanion, another “Loser,” is African-American; he is persecuted by bully Henry Bowers because of a feud Bowers's father had with Hanion's father.

Bowers also persecutes Stanley Uris, who's a “Loser” by virtue of his Jewish faith.

As Fowles points out, advertisements can allude to the need to nurture by suggesting its absence. In fiction, children who are portrayed as being in need of feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing are naturally sympathetic to readers, who hope such characters will get the care they need.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Affiliation

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King's novels are prime examples of horror fiction that appeals to readers' need for affiliation. Many of his books primarily concern an individual child (Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Christine) or a group of individuals, often children (It) who've been rejected by their peers. (Sometimes, as in Under the Dome, 'Salem's Lot, Desperation, and The Regulators, the group consists of both adult and adolescent members.) His recurring theme seems to be that, in humanity's struggles against evil, brotherly love saves the day. When such love is absent, as in Carrie, the ultimate result is catastrophic; when present, as in most of King's novels, the “good guys” triumph.

According to Jib Fowles, whether a person feels included in or excluded by his or her social peers, advertisements which appeal to the need for affiliation are effective. In the former case, an advertisement's “images of companionship are compensation for what Americans privately lack”; in the latter instance, these images are affirmations of their fellowship with others. The same, it would seem, is apt to be true of fiction's portrayal of affiliated characters or the lack thereof in such instances as that of Carrie White.

Affiliation is more complex than it may seem. Quoting psychologist Henry Murray, Fowles writes:

. . . the need for affiliation consists of 24 desires “to draw near and enjoyably cooperate or reciprocate with another; to please and win affection of another; to adhere and remain loyal to a friend.” The manifestations of this motive can be segmented into several different types of affiliation, beginning with romance.

In King's novels, there is little romance; he tends to focus on cooperation, reciprocation, and loyalty, which is more relevant to the adolescent characters typical of his fiction. Even when adults play a relatively important part, as they do in such novels as Desperation, 'Salem's Lot, Under the Dome, and others, there is usually little or no romance between them. His families tend to be dysfunctional, as in Carrie, The Shining, Under the Dome, It, and others. King's main approach to employing the need for affiliation in his novels is friendship. 
 

Dean Koontz's theme is the same as King's: against evil, brotherly love will save the day. Unlike King, however, Koontz populates his fiction mostly with adults. When children are present, they're usually in the charge of an adult, rather than acting on their own, as King's more autonomous adolescents typically are. At least insofar as his earlier work is concerned (I stopped reading Koontz when he trotted out his Odd Thomas series), an alpha male and a damsel in distress are brought together through dangerous circumstances that appear, at first, to stem from different origins but are revealed to have sprung from the same cause, often the malevolent motives of a powerful cabal, government organization, or sociopathic serial killer (Chase, Whispers, The Eyes of Darkness, Midnight, The Good Guy).

Whether through friendships among children rejected by their peers or romance between a couple whom shared dangers unite against a common foe, the fiction of both King and Koontz, respectively, tap the need for affiliation Fowles identities as one of the fifteen such 'basic needs” that unite and motivate people everywhere. These writers' use of this appeal is one of the reasons their fiction is probably routinely on bestsellers' lists.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Sex

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As we saw in the last post (the first in this series), Jib Fowles identifies 15 basic appeals used in advertising. These same appeals, we argue, are frequently employed in horror fiction; indeed, their presence in horror novels and movies accounts for much of the appeal of these types of fiction.

In this post, we'll take a look at the appeal to readers' or viewers' need for sex. The fulfillment of the “needs for,” as opposed to the “needs to” on Fowles's list, require the presence or participation of another person or persons besides oneself. While it is possible to satisfy oneself sexually, by masturbation or other means, to find true sexual fulfillment, one requires a partner (or, some might contend, partners), whether of the male, the female, both, or another gender.

In horror, the need for sex characteristically involves perversion. Since all communication is reducible to seven basic questions, the forms of sexual perversion about which horror writers may write take seven possible types of forms. (A type, as we're using it, means a sexual behavioral set identifiable by shared characteristics.) These types of perversion (i. e., a deviation, corruption, or distortion of the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing) can be subsumed under these questions:

Who?

What?

When?

Where?

How?

Why?

How many? or How much?

We can further refine these questions by associating each of them with specific referents:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)

Let's add a couple more rows, identifying an example of a horror novel or movie that perverts human sexuality by deviating from, corrupting, or distorting the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing involved in sexual behavior:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time, occasion, or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)
Demon Seed (1973 novel; 1977 film)	The Exorcist (1973)	Maleus Maleficarum (1487)*	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])	Alien (1979)	Rosemary's Baby (1967 novel; 1968 film)	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])
A computer becomes a woman's sexual partner.	Regan MacNeil, the possessed girl, masturbates with a crucifix.	A demon, having assumed a female form, spends so long in intercourse with her victim that she absolutely drains him of semen and he thereafter dies.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.	Parasitic pregnancy ends in the fetus's bursting through the human host's abdomen.	After being raped by a demon, Rosemary Wood-house conceives a demonic child.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.

As the above table shows, the same movie may contain two (or more) of these types of sexual perversion: The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils]) contains orgies involving many individuals participating simultaneously in various sex acts; it also takes place in a convent. Likewise, these types of perversions can vary in how they are represented.

For example, a perverse location need not be a geographical place or an architectural space (a convent); it could be an anatomical site, as in Teeth (2008), in which a young woman discovers that she has two sets of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her vagina. Other possible variations? One's partner could be a poltergeist, as in The Entity (1982) (Who?); human corpses, as in the necrophilia scenes in the novel Under the Dome (2009) (What?); or a man transformed into metal kills his girlfriend after his penis becomes a power drill, as in Tetsuo:The Iron Man (1989) (How?).

Writers are limited pretty much only by their imaginations, their sense of morality, their personal taste, and the law of the land. Publishing houses will print and distribute just about anything that promises to make a buck. It seems unlikely, though, that the majority of readers or viewers are likely to have a need for extreme types of sex, even when it occurs in horror stories.

* Although the Malleus Maleficarum is a book—a manual for prosecuting witchcraft trials—rather than a novel or a movie, it contains supposed accounts of demonic sex, one of which suggests such a long-lasting (and fatal) encounter between a succubus and “her” victim, a hermit, that the hermit was completely drained of his semen:

When he [the hermit] was done and had arisen, the demon said to him, “behold what you have done, for I am not a girl or a woman but a demon,” and at once he disappeared from view, while the hermit remained absolutely astonished. And because the demon, with his great power, had withdrawn a very great quantity of semen, the hermit was permanently dried up, so that he died at the end of a month's time.

One can imagine the use of this description of demonic sexual activity as the basis for a terrifying sex scene in a horror novel or movie!

Note: For you may also want to read my post “Note: You may want to read “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the nature of Sin.”

The 15 basic Appeals of Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L.Pullman

Jib Fowles helped thousands of people better understand how advertisements, print and otherwise, manipulate viewers using fifteen basic appeals to various desires, emotions, and needs. He characterized five of these needs as “needs to,” eight others are “needs for.” Generally speaking, people can satisfy “needs to” on their own, but they require the participation or, at least, the presence of others to fulfill “needs for.”

Fowles identifies these “needs to”:

The need to aggress.

The need to escape.

The need to feel safe.

The need to nurture.

The need to satisfy curiosity.

The “needs for” are:

The need for aesthetic sensations.

The need for affiliation.

The need for attention.

The need for autonomy.

The need to dominate.

The need for guidance.

The need for prominence.

The need for sex.

The fifteenth basic need is a group, the physiological needs, which include the needs for food, drink, sleep, and so forth.

His essay explains in detail each of these needs and provides several examples of each type of appeal advertisements make in promoting their products.

The same fifteen basic needs make horror novels, short stories, and movies appealing to their readers and viewers. Let's take a look at these needs, in regard to horror novels and movies, in the same order in which Fowles himself discusses these needs in relation to the appeal of advertisements, as we cut back and forth between the two analyses.

* * *

1. The Need for Sex

Only a small percentage of ads appeal to sex, because such an appeal can overwhelm the product being advertised. As Fowles says, “it is too blaring and tends to obliterate product information. Nudity in advertising has the effect of reducing brand recall.” In other words, sex and nudity are distracting, and they are more memorable than the product they supposedly promote.

Whether or not an ad containing nudity or sexual imagery actually evokes the need for sex depends on the context of the nudity or sexual images. Such an ad in Playboy magazine, aimed at men, may be an appeal to the need for sex, but one featuring a scantily dressed young woman and aimed at other young women is more likely an appeal to the need for attention.

2. The Need for Affiliation

The need for affiliation is the need to belong, to be part of a group. In a positive approach, such ads often show a person surrounded by friends or family members whose affection and loyalty are valued. Ads may also appeal to the need for affiliation by taking a negative approach and showing it as absent or as threatened” “If we don't use Scope, we'll have the 'Ugh!' Morning Breath' that causes the male and female models [in the ad] to avert their faces [from one another].” Ads also show the solutions to such problems—the products featured in the ads.

There are “several types of affiliation”: romance, courtship (dating), family togetherness, and friendship. The AT&T telephone ad that encouraged people to “reach out and touch someone” appeals to the need for affiliation.

3. The Need to Nurture.

The need to nurture is the need “to take care of small, defenseless creatures,” such as children and pets. Taking care of children and pets can involve feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, healing, and guiding them. Both men and women have the need to nurture.

4. The Need for Guidance

The need for guidance is the opposite of the need to nurture. These pitches are made by celebrities; fantasy figures (the Green Giant, Betty Crocker, Mr. Goodwrench); authority figures, real and imagined (“When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen”); or icons of “tradition or custom” or of “American history.” Kool-Aid appeals to the need for guidance through tradition, stating, “You loved it [Kool-Aid] as a kid. You trust it as a mother.”

5. The Need to Aggress

Everyone has the need to behave aggressively, to aggress. Ads that appeal to this need must be careful, in doing so, not to alienate consumers so that they do not turn “public opinion . . . against what is being sold.” Jack-in-the-Box offended customers by destroying the company's mascot, the Jack-in-the-box, until the violence was “toned down.”

6. The Need to Achieve

Ads that appeal to this need evoke the need to excel, to “accomplish something difficult” by overcoming “obstacles . . . . surpass others,” and “attain a high standard.” Athletes are often featured in such ads. However, ads may create their own “role models,” as Dewar's Scotch ads do in their profiles of successful people.

Ads based on the need to achieve often use superlatives: “best,” first,” “finest,” to suggest the “need to succeed.” Ads for sales and bargains also belong in this category, because they suggest that one has seized “an opportunity” and come “out ahead of others.”

7. The Need to Dominate

Fowles sees the need to dominate as a “craving to be powerful—perhaps omnipotent.” This need, he suggests, can be associated with “the need to . . . control one's environment' and a desire for “clout.”

Like the other needs, this one is universal, as applicable to women as it is to men.

8. The Need for Prominence.

This need, says Fowles, is related to “the need to be admired and respected, to enjoy prestige and high social status.” Wealth does not have to symbolize prominence, as Fowles points out by referencing the American Express advertisement, in which 'we learn that the prominent person is not so prominent without his American Express card.”

9. The Need for Attention.

Distinguishing the need for attention form the need for prominence, Fowles points out that the former concerns the need to be “looked up to”; the latter, to “the need to be looked at.” he cites a Brooke Shields advertisement in which the actress wears Calvin Klein jeans not so that men will pursue her, but so that she will stand out from other young women.

10. The Need for Autonomy

We tend to want to do things our own way, to be independent and to set our own tasks, according to our own agendas. “ The focus here is upon the independence and integrity of the individual,” Fowles says, and it is opposite to the need for guidance.

11. The Need to Escape.

“Escape” can be actual, literal escape or to figuratively and emotionally escape from the responsibilities and routines of everyday life. The latter type of escape is motivated by a search for pleasure and the freedom to do as we please. The need to escape can include other people besides oneself; a group can escape together as easily as a solitary individual.

12. The Need to Feel Safe

It's only natural to want to feel safe, and advertisements can appeal to this need directly, by showing models who are safe, or indirectly, by showing models who are in danger, because, even when we're at risk, we feel the need to be safe. Product durability often plays upon this need, as do references to natural ingredients.

13. The Need for Aesthetic Sensations.

“Aesthetic” refers to persons, places, or things that are beautiful or otherwise bring pleasure. Everyone has a need to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch beautiful objects, visit beautiful places, meet beautiful people, and dine on delicious food. Anything that satisfies the need for aesthetic sensations can be used to make this type of appeal.

14. The Need to Satisfy Curiosity.

This need involves “a need for information” and addresses people's natural sense of curiosity. In advertisements, Fowles says, “ Trivia, percentages, observations counter to conventional wisdom . . . all help [to] sell products,” and “any advertisement in a question-and-answer format is strumming this need.”

15. Physiological Needs.

Physiological needs are the needs of the body: food, drink, and sleep, among them. Many food advertisements make this basic appeal.

Styles

Fowles also identifies three “styles” that many advertisements employ to influence “the way a basic appeal is presented”: humor, celebrity endorsements, and “time imagery.”

Although humor can backfire, overwhelming the advertisement's message or offending people, “softer appeals” using a humorous approach can be effective.

Celebrity endorsements can backfire when celebrities behave obnoxiously or offend people, but this approach can work well; it allows famous men and women to “introduce” a sponsor's product, using one or more of the basic appeals, such as the need for guidance, the need to achieve, the need for aesthetic sensations, the need for affiliation, and the need to escape.

Time imagery can supply advertisers with historical heroes, traditions, and artwork, appealing to such needs as those for achievement, guidance, aesthetic sensations, affiliation, and escape. Nostalgia, the fond remembrance of times past, is an example of a time imagery approach.

* * *

How does Fowles's analysis pertain to horror fiction? We offer examples in upcoming posts.