Calling the Shots

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another clip from Halloween includes a wide shot:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Literary Critic Offers Some Tips for Writing Powerful Horror Stories, Part II

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Shock Value; How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (2011), Jason Zinoman offers some insights concerning John Carpenter's 1978 film Halloween.

Jason Zinoman

The movie is an example of what I refer to as an invasion movie, which I define as the invasion of an idyllic community by a corrupting, external evil (think, as a prototype, The Garden of Eden): “Halloween begins,” Zinoman writes, “with a decidedly normal, safe environment, an idyllic middle-class suburb” (178). During the course of the movie, this “familiar” setting and its “ordinary” character “turns into something ambiguous, confusing, and repulsive,” as “middle-class suburbia is [shown to be] the home of unexplainable evil” (208). However, the suburbs is not the only familiar and ordinary environment in such movies; others include “the beach, the hospital, the bedroom, the prom, the highway,” and “right next door” (208).

At the beginning of the movie, the camera views the action from the perspective of “the predator,” as the audience sees what the invisible intruder sees, but the point of view then alternates back and forth, between “the predator” and the “victim” (180). To differentiate the audience from the killer, the director, John Carpenter, shows them the killer's “knife,” which “reminds us that our perspective,” as members of the audience, “is not the same as that of the killer” (180).

Zinoman provides a couple of theories as to why female characters are more often victimized (and killed) than are their male counterparts, including the greater perceived vulnerability of female characters and the established tradition of the presence of a damsel in distress.

“The pleasures of horror are more masochistic than sadistic,” he claims (181), which may be another reason for the tendency of horror movies to feature female characters as their victims. By identifying with the film's victims, rather than with its predator, the audience vicariously becomes victims themselves; if they are males, it would seem (although Zinoman does not say this) that they are also, to some extent, feminized, seeing female surrogates of themselves as vulnerable, weak, ineffective, and helpless. However, viewers, male and female alike, presumably, would also learn, through the survival of the so-called Final Girl, that young women can also be survivors, provided that they possess the personality traits it takes to go toe-to-toe with a monster and win.

Zinoman seems more interested in the nature (or lack thereof) of modern monsters than he does in the implied feminization of male audience members. He contrasts monsters past with monsters present. The former, he suggests, was “a stand-in for some anxiety, political, social, or cultural,” but the latter represent something else entirely.

For example, Zinoman contends, “[Michael] Myers doesn't represent anything . . . Myers doesn't represent the cold calculus of scientific progress or a religious conception of evil” (181), the two sources, traditionally, that are used to explain the monstrous. In the past, the monster has usually been a freak of nature (giant ants or a hostile extraterrestrial life form) (or a freak of the scientific lab [Frankenstein's monster or Mr. Hyde] or a freak, as it were, of the supernatural [the devil or a vampire).

The “New Horror” that was spawned by the likes of Dan O'Bannon, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin, and others, on the other hand, is the face of nothingness. Myers is “defined,” Zinoman says, by “the absence of meaning”; it is “by emptying out all the details from the character [that] Carpenter” creates a monster that contains nothing, a monster of the void, who acts without meaning, without purpose, and “has no motive” (182-183).

Although Zinoman often provides food for thought, he is, at times, a bit Emersonian in his tantalizing vagueness and fails to follow up on some of his intriguing insights, such as the effects of sadism as a perspective and, indeed, a technique of the cinema and his insight that the presence of female characters as victims may tend to feminize male members of the audience. Both ideas are stimulating and rich in possibilities, but they are largely undeveloped. Nevertheless, after Shock Value, readers won't be the same moviegoers they were before they encountered Zinoman's highly interesting and suggestive study of “New Horror.”

A Literary Critic Offers Some Tips for Writing Powerful Horror Stories

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, Jason Zinoman offers some interesting, although rather dated, observations: the book was published in 2011. Many of his observations could serve as guidelines to apprentices who are interested in writing a horror novel (or movie).

Jason Zinoman

For instance, Zinoman, in discussing Rosemary's Baby, points out that the film is “about issues that people could relate to—the nervousness of entering the real estate market; struggling in a faltering, sexless marriage; and the yearning, desperate search for fame (11-12). In fact, he says, the movie is “about the perils of domesticity” (14).

In addition, Zinoman declares, Roman Polanski “made the movie strictly from Rosemary's perspective and maintained that it must always be possible for “all the supernatural elements on it to be a series of coincidences” (21), so that “the suspense hinges on finding out whether the bizarre things happening . . . are real or the product of delusion” (21).

Throughout Shock Value, Zinoman insists that the cause of the bizarre incidents is best left unexplained and emphasizes the unseen, offstage incident as preferable to the seen, onstage incident in maintaining suspense. In fact, “in addition to the virtue of the unknown, the setting of an indistinct mood, and . . . rooting the magical or supernatural in a palpable realism” are “powerful ideas” (63).

Initially, horror movies were viewed as providing the audience with a catharsis (76), which 'assumes the audience identifies with the victims,” but Alfred Hitchcock helped to revolutionize this accepted view of the nature of horror films when he put “the audience on side of the killer in Psycho and repeatedly in the position of the voyeur.”

This twist causes the audience to identify “with killers,” rather than with their victims. As a result, it has been argued, this shift in perspective no longer allowed a catharsis for viewers; instead, it allowed “audiences to express their repressed sinful thoughts through the monster” (77). The monster became a surrogate scapegoat upon whom viewers could project their own lusts for violence, blood, murder, and mayhem. The movies, once masochistic, became sadistic (77).

Due to his upbringing in a home in which a strict evangelical faith was practiced, Wes Craven was more sensitive to “the allure of self-sacrifice” than many other filmmakers, Zinoman suggests. Craven understood that churchgoers went to church “not merely” to escape “pain,” but also to heroically “confront it,” which provided them a sense of “triumph” over evil (77). A horror movie could provide the same sort of experience, vicariously, for “a secular audience looking for the pleasure of masochism” (77).

Zinoman cites several films that accomplish just this task. Writing of The Last House on the Left, he states:

In a godless world without redemption [this film] . . . includes no struggle with faith. instead, senseless evil inspires just more senseless evil, adding up to a nihilism that invites no happy endings (79).

Religion and horror are alike, the author suggests: both induce feelings of “awe” as people are “shocked by their own helplessness,” but religion and horror differ by how they handle people's experience of awe: “religion helps you cope with this feeling. Horror exploits it” (92)

From Zinoman's observations, we can derive these story-writing tips:

• Make sure that the readers (or audience) can relate to the “issues” with which the story is concerned.
• Tell the story (or film the movie) from the main character's point of view.
• Maintain the possibility of both a natural and a supernatural explanation for the “bizarre” incidents that occur in the story.
• If a story is intended to evoke readers' or viewers' masochistic interests, focus on the main character's point of view; if the story is meant to arouse readers' or viewers' sadistic impulses, focus on the monster's perspective.
• After challenging the protagonist's faith, a religious story is apt to restore it through self-sacrifice that leads to redemption; a secular story is likely to end in nihilism, represented by anarchy and chaos.
• Whether a story is religious or secular in nature, it should maintain the possibility of either a natural interpretation or a supernatural explanation.

Zinoman also has some intriguing insights concerning John Carpenter's Halloween, but we'll save them for a future post.

Horror, Past and Present

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Jib Fowles, professor emeritus of communications at the University of Houston, three “stylistic features” influence the presentation of the fifteen “basic needs” he identifies in Mass Advertising as Social Forecast: “humor . . . celebrities . . . [and] time imagery, past and future.” History, traditions, and nostalgia, he says, are rich sources of such imagery, often tying in with such basic needs as the need to achieve, the need for guidance, the need for aesthetic sensations, and the need for guidance. This post discusses the use of past and future imagery in horror fiction.

Typically, imagery of the past and future are featured, mainly for two reasons.

Certain horror stories fit a five-part plot paradigm:

1. A relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting is explored.
2. A series of bizarre incidents occur.
3. The protagonist learns the cause of these incidents.
4. Armed with this knowledge, he or she eliminates the source of the bizarre incidents.
5. The status quo returns.

In presenting images of the past and future, the relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting of the present is explored. Stephen King adopts this approach in 'Salem's Lot, as readers follow a newspaper delivery boy through the town as he negotiates his route, the narrator offering comments upon the residents of the community. Not only does this approach describe the normal routines of everyday life in 'Salem's Lot, but it also allows King to introduce both his novel's setting and a good number of the characters who will appear in his story.

In motion pictures, novels, and short stories alike, as opposed to the still images which occur in print advertisements, time is fluid, rather than static. The present is always becoming the past, just as the future is always slipping into the present and then into the past. In movies, time is a stream, not a puddle.

In 'Salem's Lot, as the action is described, the scene occurs in the present, but, of course, as the story progresses, this opening scene has occurred in the past.

In addition to using past-future imagery to show the relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting of the present, horror fiction also often uses imagery of the past and the future to imply cause-and-effect relationships between present and past events. This use of such imagery is widespread in horror novels and movies, as it is in every other narrative and dramatic genre.

Pyscho starts with imagery of the present, as the audience is introduced to Marion Crane, who, having absconded with her employer's money, is forced by a downpour to rent a room at the out-of-the-way Bates Motel. She attracts the attention of motel keeper Norman Bates, which arouses his mother's ire, and she stabs Crane to death as the motel guest takes a shower in her room. Bates cleans up the murder scene and disposes of Crane's body.

In a future scene, near the end of the movie, the audience learns that, in the past (i. e., before the events shown in the movie), Bates developed a split personality as a result of his mother's psychotic emotional manipulation of her son. She'd projected her own sexual insecurities onto her Bates, whom she punishes, even after her death, as a personality whom he's internalized to the point of dressing, speaking, and acting as she did, as, in his mind, he becomes her. In a sense, it's she who committed Crane's murder (and that of a detective investigating Crane's disappearance); Bates covers up “her' crimes, an accessory after the fact.

Although psychologists continue to debate the true nature of Bates's mental illness (as though he were a real person), the murderer upon whom he is based, Ed Gein, was described, by the psychologists and psychiatrists who examined Gein, as a “schizophrenic” and a “sexual psychopath” who suffered from an 'abnormally magnified attachment to his mother.” After his arrest, Gein was ruled “legally insane” and spent the rest of his life in mental institutions, first Wisconsin's Central State Hospital and then the Mendota Mental Institute in Madison.

Michael Myers, the “Shape” in the Halloween film franchise, is psychotic as well, claiming to hear voices which command him to “hate people.” He dreams of centuries-old incidents that took place during the Celtic feast of Samhain, during which “a disfigured fifteen-year-old boy named Enda who, after being rejected by his true love Deirdre, brutally murdered her . . . on what would later be called Halloween night.”

In the original movie's opening scene, as present events unfold, Myers murders his older sister, Judith, while she has sex with her boyfriend, Danny, instead of babysitting Michael.

Later, (i. e., in the future) his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, seems to believe that Michael is a sociopath full of “evil”:

I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left: no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this . . . six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and . . . the blackest eyes—the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply . . . evil.

The odd “diagnosis,” part psychological, part theological, and grounded in a strange mix of social science and religion, captures Loomis's own inability to account for the boy's murderous ways. In the case of Myers, the psychiatric expert, reviewing his patient's past, seems unable, in the present, to explain the nature or origin of Myers's psychopathology.

Some of the moviemakers associated with the franchise seem to have understood Myers better than Dr. Loomis. Daniel Farrands, who wrote The Curse of Michael Myers, regards the character as a sexually repressed, incestuous “deviant” who, in having killed Judith and in killing other women who resemble his older sister, seeks to murder her again and again. However, unable to stop at this point, because of Myers's seeming ability to return from the dead, Farrands also describes Myers as somehow “supernatural.”

Rob Zombie focused on the development of Myers's psychopathic personality disorder, including the boy's penchant for torturing animals, one of the three factors, according to psychiatrist J. M. Macdonald, indicate violent tendencies which could be related to repeated criminal offenses, such as serial murder. (The other two factors are arson and bedwetting, or enuresis.) When two or all three factors appear, Macdonald considers them to indicate such violent tendencies. However, Macdonald's theory is controversial, some researchers suggesting it is more indicative of past parental neglect or abuse, and John Carpenter, who created the Halloween franchise, directing the original, 1978 film.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the science fiction and horror genres were sometimes combined as gigantic insects, animals, monsters, or aliens threatened the earth. Scientists were the true heroes of these movies, because it was their knowledge that empowered the protagonists to hunt down and destroy or otherwise neutralize the menaces. In these movies, the present typically showed the predatory or invasive creatures' attacks. As the stories unfolded, however, these present moments became past incidents, as the “new” present showed how scientists discovered the origin or nature of the threat and the means to eliminate it. Armed with this knowledge, the movies' protagonists then defeated the attackers and saved the planet.

One example of such a film is The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. At the outset of the film, the audience learns that an experimental explosion of an atomic bomb north of the Arctic Circle has awakened a 200-foot-long carnivore, the Rhedosaurus. Scientists later speculate (i. e., in a subsequent, “future” scene) that the animal, moving south along the Canadian-US eastern seaboard, is returning to the site at which fossils of its species were first located. Army troops' attempts to kill the beast are ineffective, although a rocket burns a hole through the predator's throat, causing it to retreat into the ocean. During its flight into the sea, its blood infects the population of New York City with a deadly disease. Unable to kill the dinosaur with an explosion or by fire, without further spreading its disease, the military fires a radioactive isotope into its wound, and the poisoned Rhedosaurus dies.

The use of imagery of the past and present appeals to several of the basic needs Fowles identifies, including the need to satisfy curiosity, the need to escape, the need to feel safe, and the need for guidance. It seems highly likely that such appeals attract horror movie audiences and horror novel readers as much they do consumers who peruse the print advertisements in which these same appeals are evoked.