Monsters: A(lpha) to Z(eta)

copyright 2013 by Gary L. Pullman

Traditionally, monsters in horror movies have been coded as masculine; indeed, many are male. Once upon a time, among men, there were alpha males, on one hand, and, on the other, everyone else.

Sociologists are fond of pointing out that men tend to organize themselves into hierarchies with an alpha male as top dog, whereas women tend to organize themselves into a more communal, or familial, decentralized group wherein power is not passed down but is, rather, shared. Sometimes, situations are best handled by the top-dog, top-down approach; other times, situations are better handled by the partnership approach.

However, recently, types of masculinity have been re-conceived, with more categories allowing for greater and more meaningful representation of the several, varied types of masculinity. Now, in addition to the alpha male, there are not only beta males (the alpha male's lieutenants), but also

• delta males (the everyman)
• gamma males (no, the Incredible Hulk is not included; gammas are flattering sycophants)
• lambda males (gay guys)
• sigma males (lone wolves, who would be alphas had early trauma not caused them to channel their masculinity toward the survival of the fittest—themselves)
• omega males (immature, irresponsible losers), and
• zeta males (men who insist upon the right to determine their own identities as males, whatever such an identity may prove to be).

Such types are exemplified by such characters as pretty much any ever played by John Wayne, by Star Trek's Captain James T. Kirk, and by Superman (alpha males); by superhero sidekicks, such as Batman's Robin theBoy Wonder, Flash's Kid Flash, Captain America's BuckyBarnes, or Green Arrow's Speedy (beta males); by Peter Parker and by Clark Kent (as opposed to Spider-man and Superman, respectively) (delta males); by Toad (of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) and by Othello's Iago (gamma males); by Lamar Latrell (lambda male); by Dirty Harry, by the Deathwish series' Paul Kersey, by the X-Men's Wolverine, and by Cool Hand Luke's Lucas Jackson (omega males); and by The Crying Game's Dil, by Porky's Tim Cavanaugh, and, to a large degree, by The Crying Game's Fergus (zeta males).

Since, as we have observed, monsters in horror movies have been coded as masculine and many, indeed, are male, these fantastic creatures can be classified in the same terms, as alpha, beta, delta, gamma, lambda, sigma, omega, and zeta:

Alpha monsters are the dominant (and, often, domineering) leaders of their kind. The Sayer of the Law (The Island of Dr. Moreau), Skull Island's King Kong, and Big Daddy, the zombie leader in Land of the Dead, qualify as examples of the alpha monster. The alpha monster's lieutenants, or sidekicks, are beta monsters, whose ranks include television's Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Spike, the former protege to Angel, and, indeed, Angel himself, when he was a lieutenant for the Master. Amilyn, the toady to the vampire lord Lothos in the original Buffy movie, and Igor, the sycophantic assistant to Victor Frankenstein, are delta monsters. Homosexual monsters are few and far between, but, according to some accounts, Psycho's Norman Bates may fill the bill, as may Count Dracula and, in a transgender sort of way, Sleepaway Camp's Angela Baker. (One might add most of the characters played by Vincent Price, too, perhaps.) There are many sigma monsters, because monsters, as outcasts, typically live and work alone; some examples are Beowulf's Grendel, The Creature of the Black Lagoon's Gill-man, the Predator (in The Predator), and the Yeti (in The Abominable Snowman). Monsters who insist upon defining their own manhood—or, rather, their own monstrosity—include, in a sense, the shape-shifting It of Stephen King's novel of the same name and Dr. Otto Octavius ("Doctor Octopus"), the sometime-villain in Spider-man 2.

Clearly, not all monsters are alike, any more than all men are alike. The significance of these differences in monstrosity can suggest a variety of possibilities, but addressing them must, alas, wait for another time which is yet to come. . . .

Monsters of the New Depression

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

If critics are right about the times in which we live spawning the monsters who inhabit our waking nightmares, the horror stories which appear both in print and on film, then, considering the economic downturn in which we (and the rest of the world) find ourselves, which is of a near-Depression magnitude and promises to get even worse (the CEO of Walmart predicts runaway inflation in June, 2011), we can look to the 1930s for an idea as to what form the monsters of the near future may assume.

The Great Depression began in 1929 and lasted about ten years. The current one began about 2008 and has lasted, to date, about two years. Although politicians promise us that things will get better, largely because of the measures that the administrations of George W. Bush, in its final hours, and Barack Obama have taken, economists and other pundits are not so sure. Many experts advise us to fasten our seatbelts and hold on tightly, for we’re in for a long and extremely bumpy ride.

Many of the movie monsters of the 1930s are those which, today, we call “classic”: Dracula, Frankenstein’s “creature,” the mummy, freaks, King Kong,

Many of these movies were filmed in exotic lands (Transylvania, Egypt, Skull Island) that took moviegoers away, for an hour and a half or so, from their real-life, real-world troubles and immersed them in faraway fantasy worlds in which the struggle was not with the woeful economy but with celluloid menaces that, in the end, were almost always routed or destroyed.

The monsters, however, were also symbolic, almost subliminal, manifestations of the existential crises that audiences faced.

Dracula sucked blood, as the Depression drained one’s economic lifeblood.

Frankenstein, a mad scientist, was a stand-in of sorts, perhaps, for the economists, or financial wizards, who manipulated the nation, trying to revive the dying people as Frankenstein tried to bring to life an assortment of dead body parts. The economist had had about as much success, in the public’s eyes, as the fictional scientist, creating, instead of a revived and healthy financial people, a deformed and hideous parody of a prosperous citizenry.

The Tutankhamen Exhibition toured the world during the years of the Great Depression. According to the lore of the mummy, the Egyptologists who desecrated the tomb and stole the remains of the adolescent pharaoh brought down upon themselves an ancient curse. Brought back to life by the accidental recitation of a spell, the mummy seeks the reincarnation of his true love, but is, instead, reduced to ashes, the way that filmgoers’ hopes for a reunion with their once-economically secure lives were reduced to ashes by the failed economy.

Compared to the pre-Depression days of the Roaring Twenties, when life was (or, in retrospect, at least, seemed to have been) easy, with money in plentiful supply and booze flowing through speakeasies, the grim, poverty-ridden environment of the Depression seemed unreal or surreal, and men and women saw themselves as “freaks,” deformed in body and soul, in heart and mind, by the severely depressed economy. Chaos seemed to reign, within and without, as if they were human oddities who lived lives as bleak and shadowy and pathetic as those of the unfortunate “freaks” exhibited by carnival sideshows.

King Kong embodied a long-lost--indeed, a prehistoric--past never known to human beings other than the natives of Skull Island, where the great ape lived among dinosaurs in a land that time had forgotten. Spawned as much, perhaps, by Darwinian evolutionary theory as by hard times, the beast, nevertheless, was hunted down by filmmaker Carl Denham during the Depression, a point made more clear, perhaps in the 2005 remake directed by Peter Jackson. The hard times in which the characters live motivate them to take risks that, in better days, they might have passed on. Denham hopes the documentary he plans to film concerning the mysterious Skull Island will avert bankruptcy (as the 1933 film did for RKO Radio Pictures), and his ingénue Ann Darrow accompanies him on his quest because, an out-of-work aspiring actress, she has been forced to seek her sustenance among street vendors, stealing apples from their carts. Unfortunately, Denham’s scheme fails, as so many business ventures during the decade of the Great Depression failed, and his, Darrow’s, and his other associates’ financial welfare is left in doubt at the film’s end, as King Kong, shot full of holes by the nation’s fledgling Air Force, lies dead in the streets of new York City, having fallen from his precarious perch atop the Empire State Building, a symbol of the towering success of capitalism and democracy.

Other movie monsters of the 1930s include Mr. Hyde, of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), the ghoul, the invisible man, the werewolf, the daughters of both Dracula and the devil, and the bride of Frankenstein’s creature.

The specific faces and forms of the horrors beings spawned by the contemporary economic depression are unlikely to be identical to those spawned by the Great Depression of the 1930s, but, if the Great Depression’s celluloid creatures exemplify the types of monsters we may expect to meet--parasitic bloodsuckers, cadaverous creatures, the walking dead, grotesquely deformed “freaks,” and primordial beasts--we are in for a rough time of it, to be sure!

Background: The Key to Interpreting Foreground

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Bats’ wings, horns, talons, tails, reptilian shapes, scales, tentacles, multiple mouths equipped with jaws full of jagged teeth, compound eyes, flies, worms, skeletons, corpses, mummies, skeletons, skulls, distortions of face and figure, conical heads, skin masks, blood, viscera, anthropomorphic trees, birds, hybrid life forms, living statues, men and women walking on air, eyes embedded in tree trunks, Santa with an axe, ghost children, bloody tears, alien babies, strangers at the window, vast spaces, disembodied body parts--these are but some of the images one finds in art associated with the horror genre. The fear of the animal within, of the predator, of the grave and the secrets it holds, of deformity, of a confusion of cognitive categories and loss of sense, of madness, of love and trust betrayed, of the strange, of dislocation and dismemberment, of suffering and death--these are the terrors upon which such images are based.

If the foreground is the text, more or less clearly expressed, albeit, usually, in metaphor, the background is the subtext. The background is the whisper that provides the context by which the spoken (foreground) is to be interpreted, and, in artwork related to the horror genre, the background often hints at night and darkness, at the distance of stars, at clouds and fog, at alien worlds, at disorientation, at devastation, at decomposition and putrefaction, at fragmentation, at mystification, at torture, at suffering, at passion, at destruction, and at hostility.

According to Trevor Whittock, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue, in Metaphors We Live By, “against the view that experiences and objects have inherent properties and are understood solely in terms of those properties. . . [that] inherent properties only in part account for how we comprehend things. Just as important is [the fact that] our concepts, and consequently our experience, are structured in terms of metaphors” (Metaphor and Film, 114-115). By comparing the new and unfamiliar with the known, people seek to understand better that which is strange or novel. Often, the creation of metaphors and analogies are means of doing so.

I assert that something similar to this process can occur in the contemplation of a drawing or a painting. The foreground is the overt (known), the background the covert (unknown), half of a complete statement, or vision, that, to be understood must be considered in light of its complementary counterpart. Some of the clearest, or more obvious, examples of the background’s importance to interpreting a work of art’s foreground are seen in the work of fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, whose paintings often adorn science fiction and fantasy paperback novels, but which also frequently exhibit horrific imagery.



In one such painting, a warrior dressed vaguely in the manner of a Viking rushes toward a nubile, nude young maiden who is about to be sacrificed upon a stone altar by a cloaked figure holding a large knife. An alligator, but with wavering tentacles attached to its reptilian tail, lies at the base of the short flight of stone steps that leads to the altar. The background is peopled, as it were, with dark shapes comprised of huge bat-like wings, fanged human faces, lupine ears, and brawny arms, one or more (it is difficult to tell, for the background is dark, and the figures which occupy it are little more than shadows) seize the pale, white corpse of another nude woman who, it appears, was the victim of an earlier sacrifice. Above the heroic warrior, parallel bands of shadow descend, as if they are the dark outlines of a monstrous hand reaching for the would-be rescuer. The background suggests a hellish or demonic cult and, perhaps, the evil god whom the cultists worship and who are about to sacrifice the female victim, thereby offering a key to interpreting the overall image, or scene, that the painting, as a whole, depicts.

In another of Frazetta’s paintings, Queen Kong, a gigantic blonde stands astride the Empire State Building, New York City stretched out below her, circled by attacking biplanes. In her right hand, she holds a miniature version of King Kong. The sky is blue-gray, shot through with wisps of red-orange clouds that resemble used bandages. Obviously, the painting is a spoof upon King Kong, with the roles of the ape and the human object of his simian affections reversed; the background (the city streets below the skyscraper, in particular) helps to establish the context that makes this humorous work intelligible.

A final example should suffice to clarify my point that a painting’s background is--or can be (and probably should be)--an important contextual clue to the interpretation of its foreground. In this picture, Barbarian, a warrior stands atop a heap of rubble, a nude woman lying at his feet. The palm of his left hand rests upon the hilt of his sword, the blade of which thrusts into the pile of debris. A closer look at the rubble reveals it to be not only a heap of earth, but one which is strewn with skulls, spines, severed arms, a battleaxe, and what might be a spear. Symbolically, the warrior stands upon the bones and corpses of enemies whom he has bested in battle, an interpretation which seems to be borne out by the delicate images of a huge skull and a cowl-shrouded death’s-head which are close to the same colors--tan, light brown, yellow, and orange--out of which they appear to swirl, perhaps as representations of the warrior’s memories of the evil forces whom he has, in past battles, slain. The yellow and orange colors rise, seeming to flicker, as if they are flames, perhaps suggesting the final fate of the vanquished, whom the victorious hero has dispatched to hell.

Writers can accomplish the same effects as Frazetta and other visual artists by writing descriptions of settings in which details comprise a contextual background which illuminates, on a more or less subliminal level, the significance of a scene’s “foreground” action or characters, thereby enriching their own work. By describing settings in such a way that the descriptions themselves tell a story, the writer can tell stories within stories, the former providing emotional, thematic, or narrative subtext for the latter.

Retake

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the things I enjoy reading about is how businesses solve problems. When the business involves storytelling, the reading is, for me, all the more interesting.

Consequently, reading about how Merian C. Cooper, the executive producer of Son of Kong (he had also produced King Kong, of course) was told that he had to limit himself to a budge to a budget of $250,000 (originally $238,000), solved the problem of making the movie on a shoestring, as it were, was fascinating.

What he did was to “scale the project back considerably,” Ray Morton recounts in King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. This scaling back required Cooper to revise “the script, condensing and simplifying all the way through,” so that some scenes were eliminated altogether and the film’s action sequences were combined or juxtaposed without the originally intended transitions. For example, Morton writes:

To save money on recreating the native village and the Great Wall, the scenes set in the village were eliminated--the natives would nor confront the landing party on the beach and refuse to allow them to come ashore, forcing them to row around the island looking for a landing spot. When Denham’s party finally did land, it would be right near the site of the temple, eliminating the need for any lengthy treks through the jungle. The remaining jungle and temple scenes were all consolidated so that they would take place in just two primary locations. . . (95).

Short story writers and novelists don’t face such restrictions, because they don’t have to film their stories. However, by imagining that they are forced, by the vagaries of the economy, the whims of studio executives, or other unanticipated problems, to make similar changes to their plots, settings, or cast of characters, such writers could learn (or hone) their skills in plot development, description, and characterization, which is always a good thing.

Imagine that you are plotting a story about a radio talk show host, while operating a metal detector, which he does as a hobby, finds an artifact in the Nevada desert. It is inscribed with odd characters. Suspecting that the piece may be worth a fortune (and that it may even be of an otherworldly origin), the man attempts to decipher the strange characters inscribed upon the relic. He is unable to find the characters in any of the sources he consults at a major university. Finally, he decides to copy them onto a sheet of paper and take the paper to an anthropologist at the same university. Unable to identify or decipher the characters, the anthropologist consults a linguist. The linguist is a consultant for a secret government project which is recording a history of an alien species in its own language--the strange characters on the artifact that the talk show host found--and the linguist alerts the government that the talk show host has discovered the object that was lost decades ago. The talk show host is taken for a ride by government agents who inform him that the government has confiscated the artifact and threaten him not to divulge anything about his discovery. After going into hiding, the talk show host tells everything to his audience during a show and promises to share the characters with the world in the hope that someone somewhere can decipher them and interpret the message on the artifact that the government has confiscated.

So far, so good, you think.

But, then, out of the blue, you are told that your story cannot feature either an alien species or the government. You have to shoot a retake, as it were, to provide another explanation for the mysterious characters.

Perhaps you come up with something like this: a radio talk show host, while operating a metal detector, which he does as a hobby, finds an artifact in the Nevada desert. It is inscribed with odd characters. Suspecting that the piece may be worth a fortune (and that it may even be of an otherworldly origin), the man attempts to decipher the strange characters inscribed upon the relic. He is unable to find the characters in any of the sources he consults at a major university. Finally, he decides to copy them onto a sheet of paper and take the paper to an anthropologist at the same university. Unable to identify or decipher the characters, the anthropologist consults a linguist. The linguist identifies the characters as belonging to a lost tribe of ancient mystics. Finally able to interpret the characters, the linguist says that they are the words to an incantation that supposedly summons The Nameless One, which he believes is the tribe’s guardian daemon. On his show, the radio talk show host recites the linguist’s “wild story” and reads the translated text aloud, joking that he hopes he hasn’t thereby summoned the tribal daemon.

You’d now have two explanations for the origin and significance of the characters. As a result, you can create a more sophisticated plot. For example, perhaps the linguist’s account of the artifact’s characters is a deliberate falsehood, told to deceive the talk show host as to the true origin and significance of the inscription, which is that it really is a history of an alien species, written in their own language, which the government wants to cover up. When he subsequently learns the truth, the host can then tell everything to his audience during a show and promise to share the characters with the world in the hope that someone somewhere can decipher them and interpret the message on the artifact that the government has confiscated.

By further tweaking the original storyline, you can add more twists to the plot. Maybe your imaginary studio executive says he wants the host to advertise the characters on billboards before he announces the truth bout his discovery on his radio show, and, in major market areas across the country, the strange symbols appear on billboards, without explanation (ore perhaps with the caption, “Curious? Listen to KXYZ radio’s Hot Talk.” At first, you may think the exec’s demand asinine, but what can you do but humor him. You revise your plot, incorporating the billboards. In the process, you must explain why the talk show host posted the message on billboards rather than just explain things on his radio show.

Maybe his show is local, but he wants a national audience. Maybe he wants to protect himself against possible reprisals by the government or the aliens (or both). Maybe he is trying, as it were, to smoke the extraterrestrials out of their hideout, wherever it may be.

In this manner, by forcing yourself to plot and revise, shooting “retakes,” as it were of scenes and acts that you’ve already filmed (that is, written), you may facilitate your creativity as a writer, develop less straightforward (and predictable) plots, heighten suspense, and compose more sophisticated and complex plots.

Stock Situations Useful to Horror Fiction

Copyright 2010 by Gary L.Pullman

Oral storytellers invented stock situations--sets of circumstances that could be used over and over again, perhaps with some tweaking, throughout a story or among different stories of the same cycle or genre. Many of these situations continue to be used by today’s storytellers. Some are especially fruitful for horror writers. In this post, I identify a few.

One of the earliest of these stock situations might be called the taming of the brute. The early part of The Epic of Gilgamesh recounts how a prostitute tamed the wild man Enkidu, who, after he was bested in single combat by Gilgamesh, became friends with the epic poem’s protagonist, accompanying him, much as Iolaus accompanied Hercules, on his feats of derring-do. The taming of the beast is the main plot of Beauty and the Beast, as it is of King Kong. More often, this storyline makes up only a part of the greater story, and it may be treated ironically. The scientist’s attempt to befriend the alien plant in The Thing, for example, not only endangers the other researchers at the arctic outpost that the creature attacks but is, as it turns out, the death of the scientist himself. (As I point out in a previous article, fairy tales, in general, form the basis of many horror stories; Stephen King himself points to Cinderella as having been, in part, the inspiration for his first novel, Carrie.)

The locked box (or locked room) situation is as old as the ancient Greek myth about Pandora and the story of Blackbeard the pirate. It was used recently in the movie Skeleton Key, starring Kate Hudson. Stories in which other objects--or, for that matter, persons or places--are forbidden are also examples of this stock situation.

The invaded community situation is as old as Beowulf, in which the Danes’ Heorot hall is invaded by the maraudering Grendel and Peter Benchley’s Jaws, in which a great white shark attacks swimmers off the coast of the beachfront town of Amity or even The Exorcist, in which the devil invades the MacNeil’s Georgetown residence and, indeed, Regan’s body. (Of course, the prototype of the invasion plot is Satan's invasion of Eden!)

In the ancient Greek myth that bears his name, Pygmalion attempted to create what he regarded as the perfect woman, an idea that Mary Shelley revised in her novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, in which Victor von Frankenstein attempts to create, if not the perfect man, at least a male human being fashioned of the body parts of various corpses, a stock situation put to a different use in the campy flick The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This same situation occurs, but with a female resuming the place of honor as the creation, in the movie Bride of Frankenstein, in which the scientist tries to honor his monster’s desire for a main squeeze and again in “Some Assembly Required,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which a younger brother tries to assemble a girlfriend for his once-dead older brother, whom he pieced together earlier. Likewise, the Buffy episode in which Warren Mears creates a robotic girlfriend, April, for himself. It might even be argued that the Arnold Schwarzenegger series of Terminator films make use of the man-made man or man-made woman stock situation that was introduced, perhaps, in the ancient Pandora myth.

The taming of the brute, the lost box or room, the invaded community, the man-made man or woman, and the man-made beast are all examples of stock situations which continue to be used (and reused) in horror fiction. By identifying the situations that recur in short stories, novels, and movies, you can add others to your list and, as a result, have a readymade source of storylines to adapt to your own storytelling purposes.

The Home and the Lair, or Heaven and Hell

Beowulf and his men prepare to ambush Grendel when he attacks Heorot.

There are only two ways for, or directions of, action: inner and outer, or to and from. Therefore, if, in a horror story, the monster is to be encountered, it must either come to the protagonist and the other characters or they must go to the monster. I like to think of these two means of egress, the coming to or the going forth, as having one’s home invaded by the monster or entering the monster’s lair. In thinking of the comings and goings of the characters (and, make no mistake about it, in horror fiction, the monster most definitely is a character--usually the antagonist) in these terms allows us to consider what writers, readers, critics, and other interested parties (including the monster itself, it may be) regard as “home” and what they regard as “lair.”

In Alien, Lieutenant Ripley and the others of her platoon enter the monster’s lair, which takes the form of a derelict spaceship in which the xenomorph has taken refuge. “Home,” on the other hand, is human civilization, as represented by a detachment of this civilization, in the form of Ripley and her crew.

In Psycho, Marion Crane enters the monster’s lair. This time, the den takes the form of the Bates’ Motel, where she checks in but she does not check out. The monster is, of course, Norman Bates. “Home” is the office and the relatively respectable, if not actually thrilling, life that Marion, an adulteress, left behind when she absconded with her employer’s money instead of depositing it in the company’s bank account as she’d been instructed (and trusted) to do.

In The Taking, a Dean Koontz novel, the monster invades the home, which is really the hometown of the protagonist, writer Molly Sloan. The monster--or monsters, actually, since they turn out, despite the alien disguises, to be Satan and his hellish horde--want their small town in the mountains, possibly because of its scenic location, and, presumably, the world, which they’ve begun to reverse terraform. Their den? The Inferno, of course.

Freddie Krueger comes from outside, to invade the dreams of the children of parents who’d banded together to burn him alive inside a building after they caught him molesting their kids. Although, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, we never see it, his lair must be somewhere dark and damp and slimy, like his mind.

In The Exorcist, the devil also enters from outside, trespassing upon the sanctity and the soul of young Regan MacNeil, whom he possesses so he can levitate her and fly her around her bedroom like a cheap propeller-driven airplane (the propeller being her head, which spins around in a complete circle, often while vomiting pea soup). It beats flying Delta, one must suppose. His den? The Inferno, of course. (Weren’t you paying attention when we mentioned The Taking?)

Carrie White, of Stephen King’s Carrie, is also a trespasser; she invades her high school, carrying with her all the guilt and shame that her mother, a religious fanatic, has been able to heap upon her during a pitiful adolescence in a den not so much of iniquity as insanity. For some teens, home is hell.

The outcast monster Grendel, of Beowulf fame, motivated by his jealousy at the Danish thanes’ fellowship, slips out of his lake, or marsh, to invade the Danes’ home turf, represented by King Hygelac’s court and the warrior’s mead hall, Heorot.

Carl Denham, Ann Darrow, and their entourage, motivated by greed, enter the monster’s lair, an island jungle (or a jungle island) inhabited by the gigantic ape King Kong.

One more example: Species. In this film, alien deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA for short) is mixed with human DNA in an attempt to create a teddy bear. Well, okay, actually the scientists are trying to create a docile alien-human hybrid, which is only a slightly less silly premise. Instead, they get Sil, whom the scientists’ military arm immediately try to squash or quash or something before she can mate with men and produce more and more of her kind. She has killer good looks, so the threat’s as real as if she were Pamela Anderson instead of a weirdo-alien-rapist-phallic woman-femme-fatale-monster-thing.

We could go on and on, but we’ve made out point. There is the home, and there is the lair. The home is invaded by the monster. The lair is entered by the human. (Since we are the humans, we enter, rather than “invade,” although the monster whose den we’ve “entered” most likely regards our trespass upon its domicile as an invasion, which is one reason that it fights.) This perspective, skewed in the favor of humans though it may be, sheds light on what we consider home (the near, the dear, and the familiar) and what we regard as the monster’s lair (far and worthless and bizarre): according to our brief survey, at least, HOME = civilization, the workplace, a respectable lifestyle, one’s hometown, peaceful night's sleep, high school, the king’s court or the mead hall (today, we’d be more inclined to call it a tavern), human society, and the LAIR = a derelict spaceship, a remote highway motel, an invaded town, nightmares, one’s own mind or home when it's invaded or headed by a nutcase parent, a swamp, a jungle island (or an island jungle), and the nightclubs in which the sexually desperate shake, shake, shake their booties. Sometimes, we don’t even know that our homes are our homes, valued and loved, until they’re threatened. If we survive, though, we are apt to appreciate them. . . for a time, at least.

Hell on Earth

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In previous posts, we argued that horror fiction is about the survival of loss and that the monsters it features are often metaphors for various real (i. e., existential) threats. We also suggested that, for many contemporary horror writers, the evils which threaten us today are apathy and indifference, whether personal, social, or cosmic in nature. Evil, these writers seem to agree, flourishes when good men do nothing. Stephen King seems to be the odd man out in suggesting that modern evil should be considered more a threat against one’s community, on whatever scale, than apathy or indifference per se.

Writers--especially horror writers--are always Dante, creating hells, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment. The modern hell results from the evils of apathy and indifference, from the loss, in other words, of altruism and self-sacrifice. We are the waylaid traveler in a world in which there are few, if any, good Samaritans.

In past times, the threats of loss with which society was faced--the monsters of the moment, as it were--were different. After World War II, Japan, with good reason, feared the atomic bomb, and Godzilla arose, a towering monster born of underwater nuclear waste, to terrorize Tokyo as Fat Man and Little Boy had terrorized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The monster represented the annihilation of the Japanese people, a sort of genocidal doom imposed by strangers from afar.

King Kong, if we are to believe Carl Denham, seems to represent the bestial component not of humanity as such, but of the male of the species, whom only female Beauty can tame. What is the giant ape but the uncivilized and the undomesticated, and, therefore, the hyper-masculine, male? He is masculinity unrestrained, a rampage of testosterone that has not, as yet, met its match in the humanizing effects of estrogen. Too large, to be sure, to be a rapist, Kong is nevertheless an abductor who, quite literally, carries Ann Darrow back to nature, a primitive world in which there is no law other than that of the survival of the fittest. It is only when, tempted, as it were, by Ann, that Kong is captured (emasculated) and taken to the concrete jungle that he is subdued, however temporarily, and, at last, killed. As Denham laments, “’Tis Beauty killed the Beast.” The lesson of this masterful cautionary tale is as simple as it is profound: The undomesticated male is a threat not only to the female but to society--indeed, to civilization--itself, and, if it cannot be tamed, it must be destroyed by the tribe.

Beowulf’s monster, Grendel, was an outcast. A descendent of Cain, who was sent into exile by God himself, Grendel envied the fellowship displayed by the Danish warriors who met over mead in their great hall, Heorot, for which reason he attacked and killed as many of their number as he could, until, at last, he himself was dispatched by the Geatish hero. Critics see him as representing the feuding principle which, like that among today’s street gangs, requires that an outrage, real or perceived, by one tribe against another, be avenged. The act of vengeance itself, of course, requires, in turn, another act of vengeance, ad infinitum, thereby threatening the social order that is the foundation of civilization. By defeating this principle, Beowulf introduced social stability and ended the threat to the status quo that continuous intertribal warfare, in the guise of the monster, represented.

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero overcomes the monster of his own--and of the rest of humanity’s--mortality. He does not defeat death itself, but the fear of it that immobilized his will and made life seem hardly worth the living. In other words, he learns to live with death, establishing the pagan alternative to Christian immortality: the name of the man of accomplishment, if not the man himself, will be remembered forever. To be forgotten is to be annihilated. However, the man of great accomplishment is apt to be memorialized both in stone monuments and in such poems as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, so his memory is assured, and he need not fear being forgotten; in this sense, he will live forever.

Epic narratives, by definition, deal with civilizations, nations, or societies. Other types of fiction may, also, but they need not do so. Often, other genres do not. Sometimes, the focus is finer. The group is more select, and the context is more contracted. For example, according to its creator, Joss Whedon, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is based upon the simple premise that high school is hell. It is a place that one is compelled to attend. The day progresses according to a predetermined structure that is imposed upon one by others. The setting is a more-or-less self-contained, self-sufficient environment--in sociological terms, a total institution. One is forced to participate in activities, such as physical education and geometry and English class assignments, that are abhorrent and painful, emotionally if not always physically. One is made to keep company with others whose presence one finds undesirable or even repulsive. Certain behaviors that one enjoys, whether chewing gum or making out with a member of the opposite sex, are discouraged or even forbidden, and the manner in which one would dress may be restricted or dictated by adults with no fashion sense. Pretty much everything one does is controlled by one’s keepers--the teachers and administrators--and even a visit to the rest room must be approved by someone else. High school students suffer not only a loss of freedom, but they also experience losses of autonomy, dignity, and individuality. Moreover, attempts are made to “socialize” them and to make them think in certain ways about certain things--in a sense, to brainwash them. Maybe, in many ways, high school is hell, as Whedon and others (Carrie’s director, Brian De Palma, for example) have suggested.

Buffy offers a convenient way of examining hell on earth, because it confines itself pretty much (for the first three of its seasons, anyway) to the microcosm of high school (and thereafter to the microcosm of college); because it ran for seven seasons before its demise; and because it frequently features a monster of the week, which supplies quite a bestiary of monsters, beastly, demonic, and otherwise, which suggests how horror writers are always Dante, creating hells, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment.

In “The Witch,” the third episode of season one, a high school cheerleader’s mother, who is also a witch, uses her magic to eliminate her daughter’s rivals so that she, the mother, can relive her glory days as a head cheerleader through her daughter, once the latter gains a spot on the squad. Although this plot may seem ludicrous, it has a real-life precedent in which a woman murdered the rivals of her daughter to ensure her win. The hell of high school, it seems, is home to abusive parents who, seeking to live vicariously through their children, represent real dangers to their offspring’s health and welfare.

“The Pack,” the sixth episode of the same season, examines the threats of peer pressure and mindless conformity to individuals’ personal integrity. Buffy Summers’ friend, Xander Harris, bitten by a hyena, becomes more and more feral and predatory, both socially and sexually, turning against his best friend Willow Rosenberg and his romantic interest, the Slayer herself. High school’s hell includes the demons of groupthink and the lockstep behavior that attends it.

The eighth episode of this season, “I Robot, You Jane,” takes on the dangers of the anonymous predators of Internet chat rooms: Willow meets a seemingly sweet suitor who is actually a demon that was released from the book in which its spirit was magically bound when the school’s librarian, Rupert Giles, orders the text to be scanned into the library’s electronic database and the demon escapes into cyberspace.

“Out of Sight, Out of Mind” shows the psychologically destructive effects of cliques who ignore all others but their own members: a girl who is ignored by students and teachers alike gradually becomes invisible and seeks to avenge herself upon her passive-aggressive tormentors before, defeated by Buffy, she finds a home, of sorts, with a covert government organization (most likely the Central Intelligence Agency) that performs espionage activities.

Other episodes in this and other seasons of the show provide plenty of other examples of the types of loss that high school students face and the types of monsters that threaten them with these losses. Many have to do with matters of identity, multiculturalism and cultural assimilation, sexism and chauvinism, attempts to avoid personal responsibility and duty, the effects of past deeds upon one’s present life, the consequences of refusing or being unable to repress instincts and primitive impulses, the emotional manipulation of others, unrestrained passion, child abuse, unresolved guilt, misogyny, adolescent behavior, social ostracism, service to others, and autonomy. In other words, high school hell, as it is depicted in this series for teens and young adults, is layered with personal, social, and political strata, much like the world of adults. The difference is that many of the concerns are adolescent. Adults, for the most part, have survived the losses associated with adolescence and have moved on to face other dragons. The new monsters are not necessarily bigger and more terrible (although some may be), but they’re different, for different ages, whether with respect to the individual or his or her society, nation, or culture, differ over time. In every age, however, the rejected and the exiled, the repressed and the banished, become the condemned, or the damned, and new hells are created, with or without various levels of iniquity and torment. The demons are the threats of loss; the effects that follow such losses make up the atmosphere of hell. In the hell that is high school, the blessed are the ones who, surviving these losses, ascend to new levels of knowledge and wisdom.

Of course, that’s just the hell of high school. Once writers realized that there is not one world, but worlds within worlds, the numbers and kinds of hell, like the number and types of demons, multiplied significantly. There is the hell of school, of the workplace, of the home, of the place of worship, of places of leisure, and some hells are not places at all, but states of existence, such as illness, or situations, such as a loveless marriage, or events, such as the death of a loved one. Truly, as Edgar Allan Poe observed, “misery is manifold.” Hell is on earth because, as Jean Paul Sartre points out, in No Exit, hell is other people. It is also ourselves. As John Milton observes, Satan carries hell within himself, for it is a state of mind in which he has alienated himself from God. The same is true of us as well.

One might say of this post what some critics said of Milton’s poem. Much has been said of hell, but little of heaven. That’s because, too often, we count our curses, so to speak, rather than our blessings, seeing the bad and ignoring the good. By identifying the hellish, we have, by implication, also identified its opposite, the heavenly, which is why, as we have argued in a previous post, horror fiction is a guide to the good life as well as a body of cautionary tales. Whatever we fear to lose, we value, and heaven is the realm wherein we have stored up the things we deem to be valuable beyond all else, very little of which, as it turns out, is comprised of physical or material objects.

Masters of the Macabre

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Genre fiction focuses upon the conveyance of one emotion. For science fiction, according to C. S. Lewis, the emotion is wonder, whereas, Edgar Allan Poe implies, horror fiction, as the genre’s name suggests, evokes horror. Why readers would want to be frightened out of their wits is taken up in another post, “Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear.” Other genres inspire other emotions, but this post is concerned simply with naming names--that is, with identifying authors who have written works of horror fiction. Many mined the mother lode of horror; others panned for the gold only once or twice. In every respect, though, each of the authors listed has written at least one satisfying poem, short story, novel, play, or motion picture that delves into fear, and, in this regard, may be considered a master of the macabre. When a writer has written many works in the genre, only his or her name is listed; when the author has written only one or two instances of the fiction of fear (or a truly seminal work* in the field), the title of the work is also listed. Some of the names on our roster are likely to surprise those for whom horror fiction is not one’s daily bread. We thought of listing the names chronologically, by sex, by the stature of the author’s literary reputation, by the volume of works that he or she wrote in the horror genre, and in various other ways, but decided, at last, upon an alphabetical listing.

• Adam, Richard, The Girl in a Swing
• Andrews, V. C.
• Anson, Jay, The Amityville Horror
• Barker, Clive
• Beaumont, Charles
• Benchley, Peter, Jaws
• Bierce, Ambrose
• Blackwood, Algernon

William Peter Blatty

• Blatty, William Peter, The Exorcist (seminal)
• Bloch, Robert, Psycho (seminal)

Robert Bloch

• Bradbury, Ray, Something Wicked This Way Comes
• Brandner, Gary, The Howling
• Brite, Poppy Z.
• Browning, Robert
• Campbell, Ramsey
• Clark, Mary Higgins
• Clegg, Douglas
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel (seminal)
• Dante, Alighieri, The Inferno
• De Felitta, Frank, Audrey Rose
• Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, “The Signalman”
• Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
• Du Maurier, Daphne, The Birds (seminal)
• Duncan, Lois, I Know What You Did Last Summer
• Eddy, Jr., C. M.
• Ehrlich, Max, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud
• Faulkner, William, “A Rose for Emily”
• Farris, John
• Finney, Jack, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Fowles, John, The Collector
• Gilbert, Stephen
• Golding, William, Lord of the Flies

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Hawthorne, Nathaniel (seminal)
• Irving, Washington, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
• Jackson, Shirley, The Haunting of Hill House (seminal), “The Lottery”
• Jacobs, W. W., “The Monkey’s Paw”
• James, Henry, “The Turn of the Screw”
• James, M. R.
• Kafka, Franz, The Metamorphosis
• Keene, Brian

Stephen King

• King, Stephen (seminal)
• Koontz, Dean (seminal)
• Laimo, Michael
• Le Fanu, Sheridan
• Levin, Ira, Rosemary’s Baby (seminal)
• Ligotti, Thomas
• Little, Bentley
• Lovecraft, H. P. (seminal)
• Machen, Arthur
• Marasco, Robert, Burnt Offerings
• Matheson, Richard
• McCammon, Robert
• Milton, John, Paradise Lost
• Oates, Joyce Carol

Flannery O'Connor

• O’Connor, Flannery (seminal)
• Onion, Oliver, “The Beckoning Fair One”
• Peck, Richard, Are You Alone in the House?
• Peretti, Frank E. (seminal)
• Perkins, Charlotte, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Pike, Christopher

Edgar Allan Poe

• Poe, Edgar Allan, Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque (seminal)
• Polidori, John William, The Vampyre
• Preston, Douglas and Lincoln Child
• Price, E. Hoffman
• Quinn, Seabury
• Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Rice, Anne
• Rollins, James
• Saul, John
• Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet (seminal)
• Shan, Darren

Mary Shelley

• Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (seminal)
• Simmons, Dan
• Smith, Clark Ashton

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (seminal)
• Stine, R. L.

Bram Stoker

• Stoker, Bram, Dracula (seminal)
• Straub, Peter
• Tem, Steve and Melanie
• Tryon, Thomas
• Twain, Mark, “A Ghost Story” (seminal)
• Van Vogt, A. E., “The Black Destroyer”
• Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Faust
• Wakefield, H. Russell
• Wallace, Edgar, King Kong (seminal)
• Walpole, Horace, The Castle or Otranto (seminal)

H. G. Wells

• Wells, H. G. (seminal)
• Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (seminal)
• Wilson, Colin
• Wordsworth, William, the “Lucy” poems
• Wyndham, John, The Village of the Damned (seminal)

* Although what one considers to be a "seminal work" is apt to be controversial, the term as it is used in this post is attributed to literary works that have had a lasting importance upon the horror genre or that proved innovative in having established a new direction for succeeding works in the same genre or in expanding its subject matter.

Scream Queens

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Sarah Michelle Gellar, I Know What You Did Last Summer

Horror films, like those of any other genre, produce characters unique to their genre, one of which is the so-called scream queen. Horror movies have resulted in the births, so to speak, of quite a few such characters, some of whom became famous actresses in mainstream films.

A scream queen may play the role of the victim, or she may appear as the main character, but, whichever role is her forte, she must play the role (or, sometimes, both roles) in several horror movies before she is entitled to wear the crown of the scream queen. Among the better known scream queens of late and contemporary times are Fay Wray, Elsa Lanchester, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

As a type of the stock character known as the damsel in distress, the scream queen often motivates males to protect and defend her, usually bringing them to harm. As the protagonist, she often gains the audience’s sympathy, heightening the suspense that is caused by the monster’s stalking, attacking, and injuring (before usually killing) her. She is usually the movie’s most emotive character as well, exhibiting, by her facial expressions, body language, and other non-verbal communication cues, how the audience should feel. In horror films, she will affect horror, of course, and terror, but she may also display such emotions as grief, remorse, romantic affection, love, and compassion. In some horror films, she is the monster’s romantic interest, covertly or overtly, as Fay Wray’s (and, later, Naomi Watts’) character, Ann Darrow, is to King Kong and as Julie Adams’ character, Kay Lawrence, is to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Some actresses, including Fay Wray, object to being labeled a “scream queen,” because they believe the term is patronizing and suggests limited acting ability. However, the fact that such a luminaries as Joan Crawford and Jaime Lee Curtis have had the label applied to them suggests that being designated as a “scream queen” does not necessarily imply such a limitation. Likewise, although many scream queens have appeared nude or partially nude in films, many others have not, so doffing one’s clothes is certainly not a prerequisite for the part.

Besides those already mentioned, among the better-known scream queens of the past and present are:

• Julie Adams
• Adrienne Barbeau
• Drew Barrymore
• Kate Beckinsale
• Neve Campbell
• Phoebe Cates
• Courtney Cox
• Joan Crawford
• Elisha Cuthbert
• Samantha Eggar
• Jennifer Love Hewitt
• Margot Kidder
• Natasha Kinski
• Elsa Lanchester
• Mercedes McNab

Elsa Lanchester, The Bride of Frankenstein

The so-called final girl can be considered a specialized type of scream queen. The sole survivor, she alone is left to tell the tale as to what befell the other victims of the paranormal, otherworldly, or supernatural force or entity. Often, she ends the story as well by outwitting the villain and bringing his, her, or its reign of terror to an end. The final girl is a character in such movies as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Professor Carol J. Clover of the University of California, Berkeley, originated the term, if not the concept, in her 1992 study, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

Jennifer Love Hewitt, I Know What You Did Last Summer

Joss Whedon, the creator of the movie and television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer inverted the stereotype of the scream-queen-as-damsel-in-distress, making his protagonist the one to triumph over the monster. Although she retains her femininity, Buffy Summers is something of a phallic woman, the wooden stake that she carries on her person (usually in her purse) symbolizing masculine power. As a feminist icon, she is not merely the equal of any man in terms of her physical strength, stamina, and fighting prowess, but she is actually superior to men in all these ways (and to many males who are, like her, gifted with supernatural powers, such as demons, vampires, warlocks, werewolves, zombies, and male monsters in general). As such, it is she who is called upon to save the world, and she rescues both damsels and men in distress.

Fay Wray, King Kong

Toppers

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman 

We all have our ideas as to which movies are the best of their kind, which is fine, of course, as long as we’re able to give some indication as to why we hold these views (or, if you prefer, prejudices). Here are my picks, awarded one (terrible!) to five (great!) skulls, and the reasons behind them: 10. Tremors: Giant, burrowing worms? It’s campy. It’s funny. It also has it’s moments of sheer fear. Three stars. 9. It: The Terror from Beyond Space: A hungry alien aboard a spaceship is never seen--until it’s too late. The monster earns this one three stars. 8. Invaders from Mars: Sure, it’s sci fi, but anyone who thinks it’s not also horror hasn’t seen it. When even one’s parents can become something else--something alien--we’re in nightmare land, for sure. Three stars. 7. Halloween: There’s Jamie Lee Curtis. There’s also Michael Myers. Sibling rivalry stalks the silver screen, drenching us in the blood of teen victims. When her brother’s one of the undead and he has a yen for fratricide, what’s a poor girl to do? You can almost feel that oh-so-phallic knife as it rips and tears the maidens’ tender flesh. Babysitting’s overrated, but, at four skulls, this movie’s not. 6. A Nightmare on Elm Street: Some wouldn’t rate it as high, but I love the premise, which allows even the stupidest incidents, because, after all, anything’s possible in a dream. This movie conveys an honest, usually realistic sense of what it’s like to be trapped inside one’s own nightmare, and Freddy Kreuger’s a hoot. The protagonist, Nancy, is fetching, too, in a girl-next-door sort of way. Four skulls don’t seem too many. 5. The Thing (original): Sci fi, sure, but with a subtext of horror that’s not always submerged. Imagine being trapped inside a remote arctic outpost, far from the crowd’s maddening strife, with a thawed-out shape-shifter out for blood--your blood--and you get just the faintest impression of the claustrophobic terror this flick unleashes. James Arness makes a pretty good Thing, too. Four skulls. 4. King Kong (original): The werewolf writ large (and transformed into a gorilla). Besides, it’s beauty who kills the beast, not the other way around. The remake starring Naomi Watts has better special effects, but the original, although a bit campy, is superb for its time. It deserves four stars. 3. Psycho: Dated? Sure. But the shower scene! The creepy mansion. The fleabag motel. Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Based, in part, at least, on America’s worst serial killer of all time, Ed Gein. These elements alone make this a great among horror movies and rates it five skulls. 2. The Exorcist: The special effects may not be quite so special anymore, but it’s hard to beat the plot. What parent hasn’t wondered, at least once, whether his or her child isn’t possessed by the devil? The revolving head and the pea soup vomit alone are worth a visit to the Georgetown residence where priests take on the adversary of God himself. Five skulls for sure! 1. Alien: Some might argue, quite reasonably, that this is really a sci fi pic. It is. But it’s also a horror movie, in a broader context, because of the spectacle of blood, guts, and gore. The constant escalation of suspense and outright terror also qualify this film as a horror movie. The monsters, based upon the artwork of H. R. Giger, don’t hurt, either. It’s definitely a pulse-pounder and worthy of five skulls.