Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Aesthetic Sensations

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, almost every advertisement has “an undeniable aesthetic component.” Often, the appeal to the need for aesthetic sensations is accomplished through visual means, through “photography or filming or drawing,” Fowles notes, but adds that every other aspect of the advertisement is also carefully chosen to contribute to the overall effect, including the type and the layout.

Edgar Allan Poe, in a different context, argues something similar. To create a singular, unified effect, or emotional payoff, Poe writes in “The Philosophy of Composition,” the author of a narrative literary work must direct every element of the composition toward the story's conclusion. Character, plot, setting, style, theme—all must contribute to the story's effect, so that its conclusion appears to be the inevitable outcome of all that has preceded it. There is beauty in such a deliberate and thoroughly consistent, precise series of causes and effects, Poe implies.

Poe also had something to say about the aesthetics of literary art. For him, not only beauty, but also ugliness, could be a source of pleasure. As Kevin J. Hayes notes, in The Annotated Poe, the author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, argues that “Poe . . . built the grotesque into his critical theory. Beauty and deformity could be combined in original ways to create art” (8).

Since ancient times, philosophers have struggled to define and clarify the concept of beauty. Aesthetics, as a discipline, was born neither of literature nor of advertising; it is one of the five branches of philosophy, the others of which are epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and ontology. The article “Aesthetics” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that the term “may be defined narrowly as the theory of beauty, or more broadly as that together with the philosophy of art.” Some of the features and problems of aesthetics with which philosophers have dealt and with which they continue to deal are such “aesthetic concepts” as beauty and sublimity; “aesthetic value” in which such characteristics as symmetry, uniformity, and intensity, truth or “aptness,” universality or “partiality,” and knowledge or “non-cognitivism” come under consideration; the role of the audience in determining the constituents of the aesthetic experience; and the elements of “aesthetic attitudes” (e. g., “disinterested attention” and the degree of “distance” between the aesthetic object and its audience); the creators' “intentions” as artists and how their experiences may have contributed to their creations of art.

One of the more interesting matters of controversy concerning the aesthetics of art discussed in “Aesthetics” is perhaps the section concerning “Definitions of Art”:

Up to the “de-definition” period [beginning about the middle of the twentieth century, with the work of Morris Weitz], definitions of art fell broadly into three types, relating to representation, expression, and form. The dominance of representation as a central concept in art lasted from before Plato’s time to around the end of the eighteenth century. Of course, representational art is still to be found to this day, but it is no longer pre-eminent in the way it once was. Plato first formulated the idea by saying that art is mimesis, and, for instance, Bateaux in the eighteenth century followed him, when saying: “Poetry exists only by imitation. It is the same thing with painting, dance and music; nothing is real in their works, everything is imagined, painted, copied, artificial. It is what makes their essential character as opposed to nature.”

With the rise of the Romantic Movement, circa 1800-1850, “the concept of expression became more prominent,” and, in “the twentieth century, the main focus shifted towards abstraction and the appreciation of form,” but “response theories of art were particularly popular during the Logical Positivist period in philosophy, that is, around the 1920s and 1930s,” when “Science was . . . contrasted sharply with Poetry, . . . the former being supposedly concerned with our rational mind, the latter with our irrational emotions.” More recently, communication theorists, emphasizing audience, artwork, and artist, focused on the transmission of “aesthetic emotion” between artist and audience by way of the artist's work, often employing the analogy of art as “a form of language” with a syntax and grammar of its own (“Aesthetics”).

Finally, the “Aesthetics” article considers the nature of art objects themselves. The discussion distinguishes tokens, or examples, of objects and types of objects. In the alphabetical sequence “ABACDEC,” for instance, there are seven tokens and five types. “Realizations” of ideas for art objects are tokens; “but ideas are types.” An artist creates tokens, but “particulars are made” from a “recipe” provided by the artist. For example, a choreographer creates a dance, but the dancer makes it; an architect creates a blueprint; a builder makes the house; a script-writer creates a script; actors make the film. In the same way, Leonardo created Mona Lisa, but print makers make it (in the form of prints). This line of thought, however, takes no account of the artist's community and the social context in which he or she works:

. . . The major difficulty with this kind of theory is that any novelty has to be judged externally in terms of the artist’s social place amongst other workers in the field, as Jack Glickman has shown. Certainly, if it is to be an original idea, the artist cannot know beforehand what the outcome of the creative process will be. But others might have had the same idea before, and if the outcome was known already, then the idea thought up was not original in the appropriate sense. Thus the artist will not be credited with ownership in such cases. Creation is not a process, but a public achievement: it is a matter of breaking the tape ahead of others in a certain race.

 

Several of my own short stories, as collected in volume one and volume two of Sinister Stories: Tales of the Fantastic, Marvelous, and Uncanny, illustrate some of the concerns of aestheticians.

Today, the Western world's concept of feminine beauty is being challenged as ethnocentric and racist in its emphases upon characteristics typical of Caucasian women. However, some of the attributes singled out as beautiful in regard to the feminine face can be ascribed to women of any race. Symmetry, uniformity, and intensity, for example, can be applied to women across the globe. The question then becomes whether women whose features lack such qualities to one degree or another are more or less beautiful (or ugly). Another way to examine the issue is to ask whether a woman must “fit” the socially accepted or traditional idea of beauty in order to be beautiful.

“A Complete Makeover” examines these questions. Aging star Penelope Sweet is losing her fan base. She's receives fewer and fewer calls from her agent, Louie, as her popularity fades. Lately, she was asked to “star” in a commercial—about a wrinkle crème. Insulted, she'd turned it down, as she had Louie's suggestion that she revitalize her career by accepting nude roles. Now, Louie was advising her to submit to plastic surgery. After distressing news from her accountant concerning her precarious financial situation, Penelope reconsiders her agent's advice and decides “a little nip and tick couldn’t hurt.” Although Penelope decides to have “a complete makeover,” her luck doesn't change until she contacts her friend Guido, who's “connected” to the “Chicago mob” and asks him for “a favor.” This story shows the influence that traditional concepts of feminine beauty have on the American consumer—in this case, moviegoers—and the people—in this case, an actress—who provide aesthetic sensations associated with beauty. Penelope's career was built upon her beauty as much as her talent, it seems, and, as her beauty fades with age, her career suffers to the point that she is at risk of losing everything for which she's worked. It is only by obtaining “a favor” from a mobster that she may make a comeback.

In different ways, in both “A Complete Makeover” and “The Engine of Pain,” people (i. e., fictional characters) become art objects. Dehumanized and objectified, they are exhibited as if they were nothing more than mannequins in museum or art displays. In the latter story, a tour guide for The Museum of Cruel and Unusual Punishments offers Les, a visitor, a “private tour” of a closed wing after the museum closes and the other visitors have left. He's astonished and disturbed to find that several of the mannequins seem more than just life-like: the wax “skin” of one feels like human flesh, and the wig of another feels like human hair. Sharon tells Les she's a sadist, and he's surprised to find himself following her commands. He lies upon a slab, and she secures him in place with leather straps. She then inserts a balloon into his urethra, inflating it as she tells him, “The pain will get worse and worse . . . until you want to die. Scream all you like. No one will hear you.” When Les asks why she selected him, she explains,

“All day, I’ve looked for the perfect mannequin for this exhibit, and you were it. Young, handsome, virile―a real stud. You’ll make a great mannequin. James Dean said it best―die young and leave a good-looking corpse. That’s just what I have planned for you, except I prefer to think of my corpses as mannequins.”

In “Engine of Pain,” people are reduced to museum “mannequins”; in “The Art of the Avant-garde,” photographer Jerry Mason keeps the interests of his voyeuristic BDSM clients in mind as he photographs Betty Burke, a beautiful model, insisting that she lie inside a coffin on a mortuary set. He closes the lid on her and locks it, allowing her to expire as he shoots photographs of her through the custom-made coffin's glass lid. Later, her death verified and her corpse matched to the model who appears in his photographs, Jerry will make a fortune from “the world’s first and only snuff products.” As he confides to her corpse, “To the BSDM crowd who will buy the calendar, no art is more avant-garde than snuff pictures.”

Both stories' victims are types, or examples, of the idea of a dehumanized and objectified person, human beings reduced to objects of art. (In Poe's fiction and poetry, this type recurs, possibly because Poe regarded “the death of a beautiful woman as unquestionably the most poetical topic [or idea] in the world.”)

Another way to think of the relationship of type to idea is to consider the former an example of the definition of a term, and the definition, or meaning, of the word as constituting an idea. For example, if “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground” defines the idea of a tree, specific types of this definition are its examples: apples, beeches, chestnuts, dogwoods, elms, figs, gingkos, hickories, and so forth.

Horror arises when a type seems to contradict the idea that the type supposedly exemplifies. The Euglena is a type (i. e., an example) of this notion, or idea, that taxonomic contradictions horrify us. The microscopic organism has chloroplasts, which enable it to photosynthesize, as a plant does. At the same time, however, it can move under its own power, thanks to its flagellum, and it can obtain nourishment by consuming other organisms, as an animal does. It has abilities of both plants and animals, which defies the once-neat kingdoms of Plantae and Animalia. It is both part plant and animal, yet, at the same time, neither fully plant nor animal. As the seventh edition of Biology, edited by Eldra P. Solomon, Linda R. Berg, and Diana W. Martin, points out, the Euglena “has been classified at various time as in the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom” because its peculiar abilities don't fully match those of other specimens in either kingdom.

True, the microscopic Euglena itself doesn't necessarily horrify us, but that's not my claim; my assertion is that the idea of taxonomic contradictions horrifies us. That's not to say that, under the right set of conditions, a creature similar to the Euglena might well horrify us in and of itself, as a type, rather than as an idea. Were we to meet DC Comics's Swamp Thing or Marvel Comics's Man-Thing face to face, it's exceedingly likely that we would be horrified, and what are they but gigantic Euglenas who are smarter than your average swamp lily? It is just this manipulation of forms, this combination of existing materials in new ways that Poe regarded as the basis of creativity and may be the reason he believed that the aesthetics of art should include not only the concept of beautiful, but that of “deformity' as well.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Feel Safe

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the basic needs to which advertisements often appeal, according to communications professor Jib Fowles, is the need to feel safe. “We naturally want to do whatever it takes to stave off threats to our well-being, and to our families,'” he points out. Like many of the other basic needs, this one, involving the “instinct of self-preservation,” can take several forms. Advertisements based upon this appeal may address concerns about financial security, product durability, and personal health. Of course, the need to feel safe is also one of horror fiction's primary appeals.

But, if we read carefully what Fowles has written, we see that he speaks (or writes) not of the need to be safe, but of the need to feel safe. There is quite a difference between the two. In reality, no matter how much we may prepare, there is no way to be 100 percent safe 100 percent of the time—or any time at all. Even as I am writing this or you are reading this, one or both of us could be struck down by anything from a stray bullet to a falling meteorite or an errant bolt of lightning.

More mundane causes of death and destruction are always at hand, too, such as bacteria, viruses, and plagues. The real world may not throw vampires and werewolves at us, and we probably don't really need to worry about voodoo and magic, but, even without such monsters and forces, ours is a truly dangerous world at all times.

One reason we forget about the dangers that abound is that we have erected fairly reliable defenses against many of them. We employ military and police forces; meteorologists and astronomers watch the skies; scientists and researchers, as well as doctors and nurses (and the good folk at the Centers for Disease Control), wage war against dangerous microbes. Firefighters and emergency medical technicians rescue us from infernos and repair the injuries we suffer from car crashes. I could go on (and on), but I think we'd all agree that, as a society, we've done a good job of shoring up our defenses.

 

English: Vampire killing kit at Mercer Museum, PA.

Русский: Набор для убийства вампиров (Музей Мерсера, Пенсильвания, США)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vampire_killing_kit_(Mercer_Museum).jpg

Generally, that's as true in horror fiction as it is in life (or in life as we like to imagine it, at least). In horror fiction, there are remedies against vampires (crucifixes, garlic, holy water, and wooden stakes) and werewolves (silver bullets). If witches practice black magic, other sorcerers defend against their hexes with white magic: Dormammu may exist, but so does Dr. Strange. No matter the type or the power of evil, there is a more powerful force for good.

An early movie, part science fiction and part horror, offers one of the most memorable examples of the appeal to the need to feel safe. Released in 1933, King Kong shows us that, whether among island natives or due to the technology of the early 20^th century, there were means of not only feeling safe, but of being safe against a 30-foot-tall gorilla.

On Skull Island, the villagers erected a tall, sturdy wall (think of Fowles's observations about product durability) to keep Kong out of their village, and, to placate him, they periodically provide a sacrifice for him. (It seems the wall protects them from Kong, but, as viewers soon discover, the perception of safety is unfounded. Still, the wall makes the natives feel safe.)

When actress Ann Darrow is abducted by the big ape, she's rescued by the intrepid crew of the Venture, who manage, at the cost of the lives of several of their number, to best both a Stegosaurus and a Brontosaurus before rescuing Ann. (To be fair, Kong also does his share to protect Ann, killing both a Tyrannosaurus and a Pteranodon, before pursuing Ann's rescuers back through the jungle to the villager's compound).

Empowered by his feelings for Ann, perhaps, Kong breaks through the gate in the wall surrounding the village, but he is brought down with a gas bomb hurled at him by filmmaker Carl Denham. Technology to the rescue!

In New York City, Kong escapes from a Broadway theater, where Denham has put him on display as “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” Ann is present, but, removed to a room on an upper floor of a hotel, she is safe from the beast—or so everyone believes.

Kong climbs the exterior of the building, seizing Ann, and flees, wrecking havoc along the way. He seeks high ground, as it were, by scaling the Empire State Building, where, technology to the rescue again, he is killed by gunfire from attacking airplanes.

Denham remarks, “It was Beauty killed the Beast.” In fact, however, the audience's need to feel safe is likely the reason that Kong succumbs to the defenses humanity has erected against the various kinds of potential calamity.

King Kong fails to destroy humanity (although he directly or indirectly kills his fair share of us). Like many threats, he is an external one. Edgar Allan Poe made the internal monster, the psychotic killer, a popular villain of horror fiction, who remains a force with which to reckoned as much today as he or she was in Poe's time. For such villains, Psycho (1960) is probably the quintessential horror film.

Norman Bates, who, like Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, is based upon grave robber and murderer Ed Gein, manages an out-of the-way motel. He lives with his mother, who finds women to be contemptible, sordid creatures and wants her son to have nothing to do with them. When Norman is attracted to Marion Crane, a secretary who absconds with her employer's money, Mother swings into action, wielding a knife as Marion showers in her room at the Bates Motel.

Mother is Norman's alter ego, as it turns out, and, when he is arrested, Mother is no longer a threat. Unfortunately, by then, “she” has killed both Marion and Private investigator Milton Arbogast, who comes to the motel (and visits Norman's house, which overlooks the motor lodge), seeking Marion after she goes on the lam.

At the end of the movie, a psychiatrist reassures the audience that, although Norman is certainly frightening and dangerous, his particular problem—he has an alternate personality—is not a mystery, but a known and understood condition. Although Mother is now in complete control of Norman, he can be confined and treated. Psychiatry, aided by the criminal justice system, can protect the public. Knowledge confers the power needed to prevent Mother from ever harming anyone again. It is not technology, this time, but epistemology (and a prison or a mental institution) that comes to the rescue of society.

Indeed, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the holy book of psychology and psychiatry, has charted the depths of this condition; the signs and symptoms are well established, although the causes and the means of treatment of the disorder are not (yet) as well defined. Nevertheless, the DSM-5's clinical language, like its claims of knowledge and understanding, are enough, perhaps, to calm the fears of those who want to feel safe.

Psychology and psychiatry may not be as certain as medicine, but they're better than nothing. Maybe. Without them, we'd have about as much protection from the menace of mad killers as Prince Prospero and his guests enjoyed in Poe's short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” and, as we may recall, their walled abbey, their desperate drinking, their wild dancing, and their fevered merriment did not stand between them and their demise, courtesy of The Red Death.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal to the Need to Escape

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In advertisements, the need to escape, Jib Fowles informs the readers of Mass Advertising as Social Forecast, is often figurative, referring to the need to get away from it all for a bit of rest and relaxation. For this reason, the need to escape is often associated with pleasure, and it need not be “solitary.” Two or more people can “escape together into the mountaintops” or to a resort, or a couple may escape on a romantic getaway designed for just the two of them.

Of course, an escape can be literal, too. One can seek to escape from physical danger or incarceration. The type of escape in horror fiction may start with the former type of escape, as it does in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), and turn into the latter type of escape, or it may begin with a trapped or imprisoned character seeking to escape from his or her confines, as in Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), Hide and Seek (2005), or the series of Saw (2004-present) movies. In horror, after all, the theme is loss. In the case of horror fiction that appeals to the need for escape, escape is difficult or impossible, and it is likely to be denied altogether, although, in rare cases, escape may be permitted.

“The Pit and the Pendulum”: Poe's short story was inspired by his reading of an account of Napoleon Bonaparte's general, Antoine Charles Louis, Comte de Lasalle's, visit to the Palace of the Inquisition in Toledo, Spain, after his entry into the city. As Kevin J. Hayes points out in The Annotated Poe, Poe alters the sequence of events as they were reported in his source, “Anecdote towards the History of the Spanish Inquisition,” having the general arrive after his own story's protagonist has been sentenced to death, so that the Inquisition's enemy can rescue the condemned prisoner just before he is killed, thereby preserving his narrative's “tension and terror.” Poe's story is a relatively rare example of a protagonist who escapes his horrific fate, thanks to the intervention of another.

Hide and Seek: After the suicide of his wife, Allison, psychologist David Callaway takes his nine-year-old daughter Emily to upstate New York, hoping the change of scenery will help Emily recover from the loss of her mother. Instead, Emily is placed in extreme danger: David has developed dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality disorder. He now has both his own personality and that of the murderous “Charlie,” who emerged to murder Allison after David witnessed her being unfaithful to him during a New year's Eve party. He himself has blocked the memory of Charlie's murder of Allison and truly believes she drowned herself in their bathroom.

When David discovers he has never unpacked the boxes in the study of the house he is renting, despite having been in the room on multiple previous occasions, he realizes he has another personality. By now, he has killed again, having pushed a local woman, Elizabeth, from his daughter's bedroom window, and he kills a third time when the local sheriff questions him about Elizabeth's disappearance. His family friend, Dr. Katherine Carson, also a psychologist, pays a visit, but David shoves her down the basement stairs, where she sees the sheriff's body. David then initiates a game of hide and seek with Emily, who escapes from her bedroom, and hides in the cave in which she first encountered Charlie.

Taking the sheriff's firearm, Katherine forces her way out of the basement and discovers David hunting for Emily. After Emily distracts David, Katherine shoots him, thereby rescuing Emily. The movie provides four alternate endings. In the first, which is used in the version of the film shown to United States audiences, Emily, living with Katherine, seems well adjusted, despite the horrific trauma she has suffered. However, when she leaves the table, where she has been drawing while eating her breakfast, to accompany Katherine to school, the camera shows that she has drawn herself with two heads, suggesting that, like her father, Emily has developed multiple personality disorder, in which case she may have escaped her ordeal physically, but she has not escaped the experience mentally. In another possible ending,

Emily's drawing of herself shows her with only one head, implying that she does not have multiple personality disorder.

Like the ending shown to U. S. Audiences, alternates three, four, and five suggest that Emily has developed multiple personality disorder.

The third ending shows Emily in a bedroom. As Katherine tucks her in, she assures Emily that she loves her. As Katherine leaves the room, Emily asks her to leave the light on, but Katherine says she cannot do so. She shuts the door, which contains a screened window, and locks it from outside, revealing the bedroom's location as that of a psychiatric hospital. Emily gets out of bed, starts to count, and enters the bedroom closet, and grins at her reflection in the mirror.

The fourth alternate ending is identical to the third, except that, in this version, Emily does not count.

The fifth possibility starts the same way as the third, but the bedroom is in Emily's new home, not in a psychiatric ward. After Katherine tucks Emily into bed and reassures her that she loves her, Emily gets out of bed to play Hide and Seek with her reflection.

Although one of the five endings suggests that Emily has escaped, both physically and psychologically, from her father's murder of her mother and two other adults and his attempted murder of her, the existence of the four alternative endings imply that she is psychologically damaged and may well have developed multiple personality disorder. If, on the basis alone of the number of possible endings, we calculate the odds that Emily did, in fact, psychologically escape her ordeal, her chance of having done so is only twenty percent—not very good odds.

I Still Know What You Did last Summer: After Julie James accompanies her friends to an island resort, the holiday retreat loses power as a hurricane advances toward the island. Later, their only remaining means of communication, a two-way radio, is destroyed, and they are left alone with a killer, a fisherman named Ben whom Julie and some of her friends had thrown into a lake last summer. They'd thought they'd killed him when their vehicle, the driver of which was drunk, struck him on a mountain road.

One by one, Julie's friends are killed. Only three survive: Julie, her boyfriend Ray, who joined the party late, after evading an earlier attempt on his life, and Karla, Julie's Boston roommate. The Coast Guard rescues them, and Julie marries Ray. While he brushes his teeth, the bathroom door is shut and locked. Julie, seated on the bed in their bedroom, sees Ben under the bed. She screams, as he grabs her with the hook that replaces a long-lost limb, and she is hauled beneath the bed, her fate remaining a mystery.

Did Julie escape her past? Although she goes to the island retreat hoping to forget the painful memories and nightmares associated with her participation in the events of last summer, Julie encounters Ben again, as she and her friends are stalked, and Ben kills several of them. Julie is almost killed herself, but Ray rescues her. The Coast Guard takes them back to the mainland, and they escape the island and the hurricane.

Although she seeks happiness, marrying Ray, Julie is captured again at the end of the movie by her nemesis, and her husband and protector is locked in the bathroom. Audience members are not shown Julie's fate, but it seems she may not have escaped her past, after all. A year after he was left to die in the lake, Ben has returned to avenge himself, and he kills again, as he had a year ago. Now that he has captured Julie, it seems unlikely she will escape the doggedly persistent serial killer.

Saw series: The Saw series of horror movies focus on the lengths to which captive men and women will go to escape. “John Kramer, also called the 'Jigsaw Killer' or simply 'Jigsaw' . . . . was introduced briefly in Saw and developed in more detail in Saw II. Rather than killing his victims outright, Jigsaw traps them in situations that he calls 'tests' or 'games' to test their will to live through physical or psychological torture and believes if they survive, they will be rehabilitated.”

Ordered to kill his fellow prisoner, Adam Stanheight, by six o'clock or have his wife and daughter killed instead, Dr. Lawrence Gordon saws off his own foot to escape. After cauterizing his wound with a steam pipe, Gordon leaves Stanheight in a bathroom as he goes to save his family and obtain assistance for Stanheight, and Kramer makes Gordon his apprentice as a sort of perverse reward for having survived the test. In Saw III, flashbacks reveal that another of Gordon's apprentices, Amanda Young, kidnapped Stanheight and murdered him to put him out of his misery.

Other sequels subject other victims to a variety of other mechanical traps invented by Kramer. Kramer carves out a jigsaw-shape of flesh from subjects who failed to escape his tests to show that they lacked the “survival instinct,” a practice which led the media to refer to him as the “Jigsaw Killer.” To date, there are eight movies in the series.

Due to its gory effects, the Saw series has been severely criticized, with detractors referring to it as “torture porn.” The series certainly appeals to the need for escape in an extreme fashion, and it's not for everyone. It does suggest that the “survival instinct” is such, in some individuals, at least, that a captive subjected to physical and psychological torment will do anything to escape, but it also shows that others will not. Gordon, for example, cuts off his own foot rather than killing Stanheight and then seeks help for the man he was ordered to kill.

It appears that Kramer admires Gordon's courage, if not his altruism, because he “rewards” the doctor for defying the command he was given and finding an alternative way to escape without sacrificing either Stanheight or his own family. Perhaps it was Gordon's intelligence, as much as his courage, that Kramer admired. In any case, the fact that Kramer would “reward” Gordon shows that, despite his own cruelty and monstrous capacity for evil, there remains the ability, at least, to appreciate certain attributes of human nature that transcend those of base instincts.

It's not surprising that the horror genre would include appeals to the need to escape. What may surprise is its examination of the effects of callous behavior on surviving victims. These effects include the development of mental disorders; lifelong guilt, fear, distrust, and misery; and death, but, on occasion, they also reflect courage, compassion, and a regard for others that's greater than one's own need to escape. Horror fiction is about loss, but, as horrific as its losses are, they are not always complete, and there is the chance that victims may not only survive, but eventually live at least a semblance of normal life.

But first, of course, they have to escape.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Autonomy

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

The need for autonomy is the need for personal independence, the need to direct one's own path, the need to take charge of one's own life, the need to be in charge of one's own destiny. As with the other fourteen “basic needs” Jib Fowles addresses in Mass Advertising as Social Forecast, advertisers (or horror writers) can appeal to the need for autonomy either by showing characters who are autonomous or “by invoking the loss of independence or self-regard.”

Probably one of the clearest examples horror fiction's tapping into readers' need for autonomy is Stephen King's first novel, Carrie (1974). It recounts the difficult childhood of adolescent Carietta (“Carrie”) White. Her mother, Margaret, is a fanatical Christian fundamentalist who projects her own personal and sexual insecurities onto her daughter, referring to Carrie's breasts as “dirty pillows” and suggesting Carrie is a slut because of her interest in boys. Margaret says Carrie is a hell-bound sinner certain to be damned if she doesn't watch her ways and reinforces her own dictates as to her own dictates with physical abuse. At school, Carrie, who is unpopular, is often treated cruelly and with contempt.

The onset of menstruation is a terrifying to Carrie, who is unprepared for its occurrence, her mother having taught her nothing about puberty and its effects. Her classmates taunt her, throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her in the communal shower following physical education class, when Carrie begins to menstruate, shouting at her to “plug it up!”

King says he based Carrie on two schoolgirls he knew during his high school years:

One was a timid epileptic with a voice that always gurgled with phlegm. Her fundamentalist mother kept a life-size crucifix in the living room, and it was clear to King that the thought of it followed her down the halls.

The second girl was a loner who wore the same outfit every day, which drew cruel taunts.

King says he wondered what it was like for the first girl to grow up in a home like hers.

Without parental guidance and ostracized by her classmates as a social pariah, Carrie has no guidance (one of Fowles's fifteen “basic needs”), but she has enough courage to attempt to escape her mother's domineering influence and her schoolmates' cruelty as she attempts to establish autonomy, especially after she discovers she possesses telekinetic abilities.

When one of her tormentors repents of her cruel treatment of Carrie, asking her boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to escort Carrie to the prom, Carrie is overjoyed, despite her mother's insistence that going to the dance is a sinful “carnal” act, and she makes herself a red velvet dress. Margaret is afraid of her daughter, convinced that Carrie's telekinetic abilities prove that she is a witch. (Witchcraft, Margaret contends, runs in the family, appearing in every other generation.)

At first, things seem to go well at the prom, until one of Carrie's tormentors, Chris Hargensen, arranges with her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, to pour pigs' blood on Carrie and her date. In the process, Tommy is killed.

Humiliated, Carrie then launches her revenge, locking the students in the room, electrocuting several of them, and incinerating the rest. On her way home, she destroys much of her hometown, snapping power lines and destroying gas pumps to cause massive explosions.

At home, Margaret, believing her daughter to be possessed by the devil, attempts to stab Carrie to death, by Carrie thwarts her mother by stopping Margaret's heart. (in the film adaptation, Carrie kills Margaret by piercing her with knives in a parody of the crucifixion of Christ.) Thereafter, as she makes her way to the roadhouse at which she was conceived (according to Margaret, as the result of “marital rape”), Billy and Chris attempt to run over her with Billy's car, but she crashes their vehicle, killing her would-be murderers. Carrie dies of the mortal wound inflicted by her mother.

Sixteen-year-old Carrie, despite her mother's abusive treatment of her and her classmates' cruelty, attempts to gain independence, defying her mother as she adopts her own values and beliefs and to find acceptance at school by attending the prom with a popular boy. She also exchanges her drab attire for the red velvet dress she made especially for the occasion, a coming-out affair of sorts for the troubled teen. Despite Carrie's lack of parental guidance, the insecurities and fears her psychotic mother attempts to project onto her, and her schoolmates' ostracism and torment of her, Carrie sees that life is to be embraced, not feared, and she courageously attempts to exercise autonomy as she takes charge of herself and her own life.

King suggests that, despite such courage—and despite the paranormal powers Carrie possesses—his protagonist's efforts are in vain because several other “basic needs” have not been met, such as the need for affiliation, the need for nurture, and the need for guidance. Without the fulfillment of these needs, she is unable to satisfy the need for autonomy. By denying Carrie the fulfillment of her need for autonomy, King endorses the importance not only of this need but the others which support it.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Prominence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, we all need to feel “admired and respected, to enjoy prestige and high social status.” Such a need is represented by “distinction” and by being of high social rank. Although prominence may not include wealth, a prominent person is apt to be perceived as “classy.” In short, to be prominent is to stand out from the crowd.

In horror fiction, which characters stand out and why?

The heroes of horror stories seldom come readily to mind, but the villains are memorable:

Movie or Novel	Villain	Hero
A Nightmare on Elm Street (movie)	Freddy Krueger	Nancy Thompson
Desperation (novel)	Tak	David Carver
Frankenstein (novel)	Monster	Dr. Victor Frankenstein
Halloween (movie)	Michael Myers	Laurie Strode
Paradise Lost (poem)	Satan	God
Psycho (movie)	Norman Bates	Lila Crane and Sam Loomis
The Silence of the Lambs (movie)	Hannibal Lecter	Clarice Starling

Horror stories belong to the villains, even though they are often overcome by the hero or heroes at the end of the novel or movie in which they are featured. The villains make things happen; the heroes, until the end (and sometimes even then) mostly react. This observation applies to literature as old as John Milton's Paradise Lost, for which, both William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley contend, Satan is the true hero of the epic, a point of view I address in my urban fantasy novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt. The protagonist, Raven Westbrook, a turncoat witch, is discussing God's seeming indifference to the evils she and her rescuer, government agent Lloyd Edwards:

“One of the things I remember about reading the poem . . . is that the accepted criticism of the day regarded Satan as the true hero of the poem. He was made unforgettable, these critic claimed, while God was given such short shrift that he was, at best, a marginal character.”

“That's the way it seems today, too, sometimes. God keeps a low profile.”

“I said God seemed all the more impressive to me because he didn't appear directly in the epic. Readers heard allusions of God, in the dialogue of other, lesser characters, but God himself, as you put it, seemed to keep a low profile, as if he himself needn't deign to confront the evil that Satan represented.”

Raven considered his words. “Wow. I get that. What did the professor say?”

Lloyd chuckled. “I don't think he knew what to say, really. He didn't expect any thinking outside the box of received criticism. He admitted the possibility of such a point of view and, without endorsing it, moved on to the next point.”

Why do horror villains typically stand out more than the heroes who defeat them? One reason seems to be that they represent behavior, or even a way of life, that, fortunately, is alien to most of us. As a rule, we don't; stalk and kill young people who are sexually active; we cannot possess other people; we don't create monsters in scientific laboratories; we're not out to kill our sisters; we don't challenge the rule of God; we don't mount and stuff our dead mothers or kill in their names; we're not so wise to the ways of the criminal mind that we can instruct FBI agents as to how to hunt serial killers. Characters who can and do accomplish such diabolical feats are fascinating to us.

On a deeper level, characters the likes of Freddy Kruger, Tak, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Satan, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter allow us, vicariously, to see life through their eyes, to become them, in our imaginations, for a time, doing what they do. Except for sociopaths, readers and moviegoers have the capacities to empathize and sympathize, to walk a mile in another person's shoes, to get inside someone else's head, to identify with even the most vile and disgusting, heartless, cruel, and evil villains without, we hope, becoming them ourselves, although Friedrich Nietzsche, suggested we may endanger ourselves by such actions: “when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Memorable villains are Evil, with a capital “E.” There is nothing, or very little, they will not do in the interests of obtaining their own goals, whether they seek another victim, victory of God, the creation of life itself, or escape from themselves through their adoption of another personality. Because of the magnitude of their evil, as it is represented in the horrible deeds they commit, they stand out.

Finally, there is at least one other reason that such characters attain prominence: their hubris, or excessive pride, the extreme arrogance which results from their unwarranted self-regard and the self-egoistic centering of the universe upon themselves. All that matters to them are their own desires. They who are merely men (or, far less often, women) would be gods. This is the basic motivation of all bigger-than-life villains. It is the sin of Adam and Eve. As Satan tells the first couple, concerning God's prohibition of their eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God had but the fruit of the tree off limits because “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). It is the sin that leads to Lucifer's downfall:

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:/ I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High./ Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14:14-16).

It is the sin, too, of Freddy Kruger, Tak, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Satan, Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and the other prominent villains of horror fiction. It may also the sin of such actual villains as Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Ghadafi, and other serial killers and dictators. Herein lies the true horror and terror of the most prominent villains, both of fiction and of history.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Dominate

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

All of us feel the need to dominate others, Jib Fowles notes. Advertisements, he says, appeal to this universal “basic need.” The desire for “clout,” this need is characterized by “the craving to be powerful—perhaps omnipotent”—and it may take the form of a desire to “dominate and control one's environment.”

Although Fowles doesn't mention these other forms specifically, it seems that the “basic need” to dominate would also occur in such endeavors as those involving social, personal, economic, governmental, and technological ends, to name but a few.

Horror fiction, like other genres of literature, often appeals to the need to dominate.

In one of Stephen King's novels, Gerald's Game (1992), men sexually dominate a woman; in another, Misery (1987), a woman physically dominates a man.

Gerald's Game: After Jessie tells her dominant husband, lawyer Gerald Burlingame, she does not want to engage in another session of bondage and discipline with him, he persists, climbing atop her after handcuffing her to the bed, despite her protests. She kicks him, he falls onto the floor, has a heart attack, and dies. Alone in the remote cabin to which they have repaired, and shackled to the bed, Jessie begins to hallucinate, seeing a figure she calls “Space Cowboy” and hearing voices, each a different aspect of herself that she's repressed. The voices help her to better understand her past as a victim of paternal sexual abuse and her present as a wife who is more valued as a trophy than as a human being who's an equal partner in marriage. She has settled for Gerald, despite his emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of her, because he is financially secure. After several attempts at escape, she finally frees herself of the handcuffs by cutting away enough of the skin on one wrist to lubricate her skin with her blood. She pushes the bed to the bureau, retrieving a key with which to unlock the cuffs and free her other hand. However, the blood loss she has suffered causes her to lose consciousness, and, upon awakening, she imagines she is being pursued by the Space Cowboy and wrecks her car. Later, as Jessie is recovering, a nurse tells her that the Space Cowboy is actually a necrophiliac killer, Raymond Andrew Joubert, who was passing through Maine when he came upon her cabin.

A victim of her father, her husband, and a serial killer and necrophile, all of whom abused and dominated her for their own sexual and sadistic purposes, Jessie is a survivor because she is willing to do whatever it takes—repress horrific memories of her past to the extent that she becomes three personalities, rather than one; kill her husband; and evade a killer who had apparently left her to die in the cabin so he could return to have sex with her corpse.

Misery: Romance novelist Paul Sheldon wrecks his car during a blizzard and is rescued by his “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who lives in a remote house in the mountains. Angry that Sheldon has killed his heroine, Misery Chastain, in the last book of the series, Annie keeps him prisoner, demanding he resurrect Misery in a sequel, Misery's Return. He discovers she's a serial killer but isn't aware that she plans to kill them both after reading Misery's Return. After Sheldon finishes his manuscript, he sets it ablaze. (In fact, however, the manuscript is merely a counterfeit of the actual document.) He and Annie struggle until Annie collapses after falling and striking her head on the mantelpiece in his bedroom. The next day, he gets the attention of state police who are seeking her in connection with a trooper she'd killed earlier. At first, they cannot find her body, but it is later discovered in the barn. She'd made her way there to get a chainsaw with which to kill Paul, but died from the injuries she'd sustained in their fight. Paul publishes Misery's Return, before working on a literary novel, planning to launch a new career as a serious author.

The ordeal through which Sheldon goes, suffering emotional and physical abuse at the hands of his psychotic “biggest fan,” is not only a testament to his courage, perseverance, and will to survive, but they are also the reasons that he is able to endure the torment to which he is subjected, escapes, and emerges alive, more or less in one piece. His tenacity also allows him to overcome the alcoholism that plagues him and the writer's block he suffers as a result of his ordeal. By showing the traits of character and will that Sheldon requires to come back from the brutal abuse of a dominant personality, King suggests the way forward for actual individuals who have experienced similar barbarity.

As Fowles observes, dominance doesn't have to be sexual or depend on relationships between men and women. In William Golding's The Lord of the Flies (1954), a novel King says he wishes he'd written, the need to dominate is expressed socially.

Economic dominance occurs in Bentley Little's The Store (1998). A national chain of big-box department stores has virtually taken over the brick-and-mortar retail world. The Store is everywhere. Its ever-expanding growth wipes out mom-and-pop stores, most franchises, and any vendors and suppliers who don't want to meet its terms. Stocking anything anyone could ever want to buy, and selling merchandise at discount prices, The Store is quickly becoming the only place to shop. Its benefits—a huge inventory, low prices, thousands of locations, employment for an army of workers, and taxes to local, state, and federal governments, are as numerous as its operations are vast. However, there's a downside to The Store—and, like its benefits, its negative effects are tremendous.

The Store: Juniper, Arizona, wants The Store, so officials offer tax breaks and other incentives to entice its executives to build one in its community. From the beginning, there are indications that The Store may not be the blessing local politicians believe it will be: dead animals—and a human corpse—at the construction site, black vehicles delivering mysterious merchandise in the middle of the night, and The Store's taking over of the town. Bill Davis senses trouble, and he's uneasy when his daughters become employees of The Store. Night Managers terrorize the staff. Employees disappear. Bizarre merchandise, including a line of dildos and other sex toys, show up on the shelves. Through its economic power, The Store runs roughshod over the lives of employees, customers, townspeople, politicians, vendors, suppliers, and other businesses. Just who is The Store's CEO, Newman, and what does he want to accomplish through his domination of the town—and of the nation?

Sometimes, we forget the true power of money, thinking of power in physical terms, as brute strength, weapons, or military force. However, economics is the basis of every enterprise, especially in capitalistic countries, and its potential for evil, like its potential for good, is tremendous. How is such economic clout to be resisted and overcome? How are individuals, families, communities, and nations to survive against such a powerful economic threat to their autonomy, safety, welfare, and liberty? The need to achieve through economic dominance, Little reminds his readers, is a force to be reckoned with.

Dean Koontz's The Taking(2004) depicts attempt to dominate the environment. 

The Taking: After a torrential downfall of semen-scented rain, a mysterious slime appears overnight, coating buildings, streets, trees, lawns, bushes, and the rest of the landscape. The small town in which Neil and Molly Sloan reside is isolated from the rest of the world as telephone, radio, television, and Internet service fail. The Sloans gather a group of their neighbors. Some among them believe the apocalypse is upon them. The truth is that an advance team of alien scientists have arrived, and they're reverse-terraforming the earth to make it habitable for them in preparation for a massive invasion.

By showing the effects on the environment through the lens of an alien invasion, Koontz provides a fresh look at the effects of pollution and energy waste that societies are inflicting on their own planet, offering an ironic portrayal of some of the effects that continuous neglect and abuse of the planet could have on Earth and its inhabitants, including human beings themselves. It's a harrowing story condemning the dominance of the environment that is underway today, as it has been for generations. 

The story is made all the more unsettling, indeed horrible, because of the actual use of pesticides to control weeds and defoliants to denude vast acreages of plants. 

Developed in the 1970s by Monsanto, Roundup, a “glyphosate-based pesticide,” is today used in more than 160 countries, on a variety of crops, despite controversy concerning whether the product is a carcinogen. 

During the Vietnam War, the United States military used Agent Orange to strip the foliage from “3,100,000 hectares (31,000 km²; 12,000 sq mi)” of forest, in the process exposing millions of Vietnamese people and thousands of U. S. military personnel to the agent, which has been linked to a variety of cancers. The “herbicidal warfare” operations occurred from 1961 to 1971, but their effects continue to cause health problems to the Vietnamese people and to Vietnam veterans. 

Whether the intent has been to protect crops by controlling pests or to defoliate forests during “herbicidal warfare” operations, chemical attempts to dominate the environment have had effects even more chilling than those of which Koontz writes in The Taking, because, unlike his novel's horrors, those that resulted from the use of pesticides and defoliants are real, not imaginary. 

Both King's and Koontz's novels also chronicle the results of attempts by the federal government to dominate society. King's Firestarter (1980) and Koontz's Watchers (1987) depict how ruthless the United States government can be in its quest to use science and technology as instruments of government dominance.

Firestarter: “Charlie” McGee develops telekinesis and the ability to “push,” or make hypnotic suggestions using the power of thought, after her father, Andy, participated as a subject in a clandestine government experiment. Over time, Charlie's powers become enormously powerful. She and Andy are hunted by government agents, including an assassin known as Rainbird, after they escape from the government laboratory, “the Shop.” Eventually, they escape to a cabin in Vermont, but they are subsequently captured and taken to a secret location in northern Virginia. Using their powers, they escape again, destroying the government facility, although Andy is killed. Charlie informs a national publication of her experiences.

Watchers: Travis Cornell, formerly of the Delta Force, stumbles upon a golden retriever and a hulking creature, the outsider, which have escaped from a top-secret government laboratory. The latter is pursuing the former, in an attempt to kill the canine. Because of the retriever's extremely high intelligence, Cornell names the animal “Einstein,” and he and the dog save a woman, Nora Devon, from a sexual predator. They become a trio, pursued by the Outsider, federal agents, and a Russian operative, Vince Nasco, who wants to kill the scientists involved in the experiments that produced Einstein and the Outsider and capture the dog to sell.

What makes these novels truly terrifying is that they address issues that have actually occurred in similar government experiments in which the human rights of test subjects were wantonly violated with impunity. In 1953, during MKUltra, the Central Intelligence Agency administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to Frank Olson, an army biologist, without his knowledge or consent. As a result, he leaped to his death.

For forty years, from 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Six-hundred-and-twenty-two poor black men, supposedly receiving free medical care, were monitored without being treated for the disease, despite the proof that penicillin could cure them. None of the participants in the study were notified that treatment was being withheld, and none of them consented to the withholding of treatment. Forty of their wives contracted the disease, and nineteen children were born with congenital syphilis.

During Operation Top Hat (1953), the United States Army Chemical Corps deliberately “exposed personnel” to biological and chemical warfare agents, including phosgene, a suffocant; blister agents; and nerve agents, so decontamination methods could be tested.

James Patterson's novel Humans, Bow Down (2017), written with Emily Raymond, focuses upon technological dominance, as do the films the Terminator (1984-present) franchise, Demon Seed (1973), and many others.

Humans,Bow Down: In a war between humans and smart robots, which occurred some time ago, robots were the victors. Now, as the title of the novel suggests, humans have been subjugated to their conquerors. Whenever a robot leader appears, humans are ordered to “bow down,” showing their submission to their dominant masters. When a small band of humans dares to defy their mechanical overlords, there is hope that humans may regain their freedom, but liberty will not come cheaply, if at all.

Terminator: In the future, smart robots rule the Earth, and humans live minimal lives in filth, discomfort, and poverty, until John, the son of Sarah Connor, leads his fellow humans in a war against their brutal conquerors. To prevent this event from happening, the robots send one of their own, The Terminator, into the past to kill Sarah before she can conceive him. However, Sarah is not alone: her son also sends a soldier of the resistance back through time to protect her.

Demon Seed: Dean Koontz's 1973 novel, which was adapted to the big screen under the same title (1977), features Proteus, an artificially intelligent, state-of-the-art computer that plans to impregnate Susan, a wealthy divorcee whose home is controlled by a computer system. After commandeering Susan's home computer system, Proteus imprisons her in her home, in effect putting her under house arrest, and uses hypnosis and subliminal perception on her, interacting physically with her by using “pseudopod” tentacles that Proteus designs and constructs in the nearby university that houses “him.” From their union, a monstrous human-hybrid creature results, their “child,” with which Susan must do battle. 

Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been used to dominate workers and consumers, the economies of both domestic and foreign markets, military forces, politicians, and, indeed, entire political systems. It is only now becoming possible, some believe, for technology to dominate individuals in personal ways, such as by enslaving them or transforming their sex lives through the use of “sexbots” (robots designed as surrogate sex partners). If this proves to be the case, such visions as those presented in Humans,Bow Down, Terminator, and Demon Seed may be closer to realization than many might imagine. 

Although horror and science fiction are both forms of fantasy, writers of each genre have made some fairly horrific speculations about the abuses that stem from the need to dominate others and the environment.

In the past, it seems, more authors were likely to be optimistic about the future effects of present-day personal, social, economic, governmental, and technological efforts to dominate the world. After experiencing such horrors as two world wars, the medical experiments of Josef Mengele, the gassing of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis, the effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and such covert operations by American organizations against their own citizens, as carried out during the Vietnam War, the MKUltra project, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, and Operation Top Hat (to mention only a few), contemporary authors do not seem to share such an optimistic view of the need to dominate, as Gerald's Game, Misery, The Store, The Taking, Firestarter, Watchers, Humans, Bow Down, Terminator, and Demon Seed unanimously suggest.

The need to dominate may be universal among all individuals, but that doesn't mean its practice will necessarily produce beneficial outcomes.