Horror Again (and Again): Increasing Your Audience by Using Universal Themes

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Diogenes the Cynic observed that it is impossible to step twice into the same river. The writer Tom Wolfe said we can't go home again. George Santayana proclaimed that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A more colloquial expression of the same thought is “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Horror fiction tends to repeat itself.

In his Republic, Plato mentions the Ring of Gyges, an artifact the wearing of which is supposed to render one invisible. Invisibility, whether it is effected through a ring or by supposedly scientific means, has become a staple of both horror fiction and science fiction. Ambrose Bierce's “damned thing” is an invisible creature, just as H. G. Wells's invisible man is, well, an invisible man. More recently, invisibility is featured in The Invisible Man (2000), a combination science fiction-horror film “in which a woman believes she is being stalked by her abusive and wealthy boyfriend, even after his apparent suicide,” until she “deduces that he has acquired the ability to become invisible.”

A vast number of short stories, novels, and movies are based on the premise that human beings can be hunted like any other animal. One of the first stories of this type, if not, indeed, the original story, is Richard Cornell's 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” (aka “The Hounds of Zariff”), wherein “a big-game hunter from New York City . . . falls off a yacht and swims to what seems to be an abandoned and isolated island in the Caribbean [Sea], where he is hunted by a Russian aristocrat.” This same theme is reprised yet again in the 2020 movie The Hunt, in which twelve strangers are gathered as prey for a hunting party, and in the 2015 film Final Girl, in which a group of sadistic young men stalk a young woman through a forest, intent upon hunting her down and killing her.

The idea that the door to a locked room should not be opened (sometimes the opening of the door is explicitly forbidden) is as old, at least, as the story of Bluebeard, who allows his newlywed wife to open any door in his palace but one. When she defies his order, horror ensues. The idea of the forbidden room reappears in The Skeleton Key (2005). In this film, horror also results when Caroline opens the attic of the house in which she acts as a caregiver to Ben, an elderly bedridden gentleman who has suffered a stroke. Although she has not been expressly forbidden to open the attic, the fact that the skeleton key she is given does not open the attic's door suggests that Caroline is not intended to have access to it.

Many other examples can be given of horror movies that recycle themes that have already been used many times before. Of course, each time, the repetition changes some elements, omits others, adds still others, presents a new twist, or otherwise diverges at least a little from the stories that have used the same theme before it. Such changes keep the motif fresh (or, perhaps, seemingly fresh).

Why, besides convenience and obvious box office or sales appeal, do short stories, novels, and movies recycle past themes?

Advertising executive Jib Fowles offers one possible explanation. He wrote that advertisers typically appeal to one or more of fifteen basic needs that everyone has. Among these needs are the need to dominate. Invisibility confers the ability to manipulate and control other people more so than almost any other power. Invisibility blinds by stripping away our sight—but selectively. We can see all things but the one thing that matters most in a dangerous situation—the danger itself, our invisible adversary. We become helpless to resist, which heightens both our fear and our vulnerability, making it easy for the invisible foe to dominate us.

At the same time, from the hunter's point of view, stories in which human beings are hunted as prey appeal to the basic need to agress (as almost all horror stories do) and the need to dominate. From the perspective of the hunted, these stories appeal to the need to escape and the need to feel safe. (Paradoxically, according to Fowles, advertisements can appeal to needs by thwarting them.)

The expression “curiosity killed the cat” is exemplified in many movies, including The Skeleton Key. Often, such cautionary tales remind us, being nosy about other people's business can be costly—perhaps even fatal.

Fowles's observations about basic human needs goes a long way to explain the universal appeal—and, therefore, the recycling—of such themes as invisibility, hunting humans, and the lure of the forbidden, but there are probably other reasons for the repetition of these themes in horror stories.

How much do we trust others? Would we trust someone we couldn't see? Someone who could watch us unseen, who could alter our environment without our knowledge, even in our presence? Someone who could hear—or see—everything we did in private? We might not trust even a good friend under such circumstances. Now, imagine that the unseen person is an enemy intent upon harming or killing us! Stripped of sight, we are helpless and vulnerable.

Dehumanization might explain the appeal of stories involving the hunting of human beings. Although we are, from a biological point of view, animals, we don't like to think of ourselves as such. We prefer to think that there is a difference between animals and human beings. We'd rather imagine ourselves as the Bible characterizes us, as being “a little below the angels” (Hebrews 2:7) or as Hamlet describes us: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! / how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how / express and admirable! in action how like an angel! / in apprehension how like a god . . . !” If we must think of ourselves as animals, we should consider ourselves, at least, to be, as Hamlet says, “the paragon of animals.” Most peoples, especially in our own day, regard cannibalism as not only a criminal act but also as a moral outrage. People should not be hunted, whether for sport or for food. Stories in which human beings are hunted are, therefore, regarded as horrific; the very theme itself makes such narratives or dramas horror stories.

We are curious by nature, which can be a good attribute. Science, for example, is built upon curiosity. However, the attempt to satisfy curiosity can also lead to danger or even death. Why, we might ask ourselves, before charging in where angels fear to tread, is this room locked? What sort of valuables does the locked door protect? Treasure? Secrets too dark and dangerous to be exposed? Crimes or sins unimaginable? What skeletons lie in wait within this closet, this chamber, this attic, this basement, or this wing of the house? Or, perhaps, the door is locked not to keep us out but to keep someone—or some thing—from escaping!

Another film in which a forbidden space awaits behind a locked door.

A locked room creates a private space, a space reserved, a space off limits to everyone but the holder of the key or keys. A locked room as much as commands, “Keep Out!” A locked room as much as warns, “No Trespassing!” A locked room is a forbidden space. A locked room prompts questions, evokes curiosity. A locked room is temptation. All such impulses are familiar to all men and women and, indeed, children. A locked room story has universal appeal.

Repeated themes often indicate universal concerns, needs, fears, or impulses. Depending on how such themes are handled, their inclusion as the bases of additional horror stories, whether in print or on film, can appeal to a wide audience. They could result in a bestseller or a blockbuster.

Maybe.

Imaginary vs. Imaginative Worlds as They relate to Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In C. S. Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath points out the distinction that Lewis makes between imaginary and imaginative worlds. For Lewis, the former, McGrath says, depicts a landscape having “no counterpart in reality,” whereas the latter seeks to convey “images adequate to” the depiction of a transcendent “reality.” The worlds of mythology are examples of imaginative worlds, and “the more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability, Lewis says, to “communicate more reality to us.”

McGrath makes it clear that, in discussing imaginative worlds, Lewis does not mean that such worlds—or the works devoted to them—are allegories. They may be interpreted allegorically, but that does not mean that they themselves are allegories. As Lewis explains, his own Chronicles of Narnia can be allegorized, but that “of itself is no proof that it is an allegory.” Instead, his Narnia series, which presents an imaginative world, is a “supposal,” by which he means fiction that supplies possible answers to questions of a transcendent nature. Using Narnia as an example, Lewis writes:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress] represents Despair, he [Aslan] would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours? This is not allegory at all.”

Lewis makes several points:

1. The writer's work asks or implies a question.
2. Although the question is posed in or by a work of fiction, the question relates to an actual event or events in the real world.
3. In the context of its imaginative world, the work poses an answer to the question.
   
   

Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fails these tests and is, indeed, McGrath states, a work about an imaginary, rather than an imaginative, world. The world of Oz has no referent beyond itself. Narnia, by contrast, is shadow of another world which is itself the shadow of yet another world, just as, in Plato's thought, our sense perceptions of phenomena are shadows of the objects in the world and the world is itself a shadow of the transcendent world of perfect Forms.

An illustration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” pictures a man chained against a wall behind which men carry clay figures. The men hold the figures over their heads, and the upper portions of the figures are higher than the top of the wall against which the man on the other side is chained. A fire burning on a stone shelf of the cave, on the other side of the men, casts the shadows of the objects onto the wall in front of the chained man. Rather than seeing the actual objects—clay figures of a horse, a bull, and a pot—the chained man sees only their shadows. High on one of the cave's walls, a ladder ascends to the world above, where the sun shines in the sky. The objects the men carry are mere copies of the things in the world above—representations of the animals—and the shadows are copies, as it were, of these copies. Only in the unseen world above are the unseen, actual animals (representing, in the allegory, the Forms themselves).

Lewis's Narnia is somewhat like Plato's allegorical cave. The real world is Narnia, where Aslan dwells. Its copy is The Chronicles of Narnia, which recount the events in Narnia. The copy of the copy is our own world, a dim reflection of the imaginative world of the novels, which is, in turn, itself a faint likeness of Aslan's real world. The images that depict the world of the novels are the clay pots in Jung's cave, which represent, but do not truly reflect, the true objects themselves, any more than the objects truly reflect their transcendent Forms. As Lord Digory says, in The Last Battle, “It's all there in Plato.”

In attempting to envision Forms (i. e., in a Christian context, divine realities), Lewis depicts Christ as the lion Aslan, Satan as the White Witch, the fallen, unredeemed world as a frozen wasteland in which Christmas never arrives (until Aslan appears), and the Pevensie children are disciples. As McGrath points out,

Lewis's remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story and feel what it was like to be part of it . . . . The Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story.

Do any horror stories accomplish something similar, creating imaginative worlds wherein the writer's work asks or implies and answers a question related to an actual event or events in the real world? Do any works of horror fiction shadow the true horrors of the real world in such a way that readers can enter their imaginative worlds and “experience” the stories depicting these landscapes? Do any of them give rise to myths? Are any horror stories mythopoeic?

The icons of horror that continue to resonate with readers and moviegoers may indicate which images have particular force in conveying feelings of terror and disgust (probably the two chief elements of horror). Often, these icons appear in literary works, but they are also present in the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. Such icons include demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies, all of which have appeared in novels, short stories, or movies that meet Lewis's criteria, asking or implying a question related to what is (or is, at least, believed by some to be) related to an actual event or events in the real world, and pose answers to the question they pose.

To get just an intimation of the power these images of horror originally held for their audiences, we must try, to the best of our abilities, to envision the world as it was to them and to see, in this context, the supernatural beings they imagined as their enemies.

The world in which such creatures existed was a pre-scientific world wherein there was no well-established association of objective cause and effect. Demons, rather than bacteria, birth defects, viruses, radiation, or the like afflicted people with disease, blindness, or mental illness. They also animated human corpses, using dead bodies, as “vampires,” to drink blood. Demons also empowered witches to perform spectacular feats and wonders. The soul's survival of death enabled the existence of ghosts and zombies.

Today, we might call such a view of “reality” superstitious, but, for the ancients, it was simply the truth, the way things were, reality itself. Against such evils, such remedies as prayers, rituals, incantations were the only recourse which might prevail, and, only then, because God ruled over even the supernatural entities that afflicted humanity.

Horror is, like poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and many other human enterprises, of religious, not secular, origin, and, despite the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Enlightenment, horror continues to tap the primeval aspects of our existence as human beings that religion once addressed and, indeed, continues, for many, to address.

Just as adults retain vestiges of their childhood experience, humanity retains traces of its primordial heritage. In our fiction and in the dark, dim recesses of our ancient selves, demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies continue to horrify us, just as, in times past, they possessed, haunted, stalked, hexed, and vexed our ancestors in the “real world” in which they lived. If you doubt this, spend a few minutes alone in a cemetery by yourself after dark or imagine spending a night alone in the catacombs, among centuries-old corpses and skeletons of the dead.

Then, you will begin to fathom the terrible terror felt by those who believed in things that go bump in the night, and reading Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King will take on a new intensity. In Platonic and mythopoeic terms, their works are, after all, shadows of the shadows of the Real Horrors awaiting us beyond this world.

The Horror Writer's Muse: A Cautionary Tale

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Shadows crawl across my wall,
Dark remnants of Eden’s fall,
Due to Adam’s sin; again,
My brain reels in garish pain;
I rise, eyes fixed on nothing,
Put pen to paper to sing,
In poetry, my memory
Of primordial, eerie
Things, which, both fanged and clawed,
Squirm and writhe upon my wall. . . .

Our ancestors, daughters of men
And sons of angels fallen,
Produce monsters such as Grendel,
Brute minions, all, of deepest hell;
Some beauteous of face and form,
Others of aspect like the worm,
And others still of shadowy
Appearance, but strange and eerie,
Whose task is mine to give full voice,
Not that vile Satan may rejoice,
But that all the sons and daughters
Of ancient Cain who do yet stir
May be heard--and thus evaded--
By the living who are not dead
To the antediluvian
Origins of death and sin,
Mystery of iniquity
That, like a spider on a wall,
Crawls across us, one and all,
Leaving, in its wake, gossamer
Threads of desire, dark and deep,
Our hearts and souls to keep.

“Out, out, damned spot!” the Lady said,
Unaware that she was dead;
Shadow, spider, and spot alike
Are but mute brutes whose terrors strike
From within, their banshee’s voice
An echo of an ancient choice
As much our own as our heartbeat,
From which there is no retreat
But to return, a prodigal
Son, who once was hell’s spawn and thrall,
A shadow writhing on a wall,
As are, or once were, each and all.

(The next time you see a shadow,
Ask not, as Plato did, to see
Its form, for that which slithers forth
from Below had an evil birth,
taking shape from iniquity!)