Suburban Horror

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

During the 1800s and the 1900s, as railroads developed enough to provide dependable, relatively inexpensive travel for many, suburbs began to appear. In England, members of the nascent middle class, having improved their fortunes through industrialization, purchased homes in the environs of densely populated, polluted cities in which the factories and other industries that had, ironically, made them rich were located. The development of subways and bus routes accelerated this exodus from urban to suburban communities. Following World War I, such suburban developments as those at Kingsbury Garden Village, Wembley Park, Cecil Park and Grange Estate, and the Cedars Estate were built by the Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited, located in London.

In the United States, suburbs appeared in Boston and New York. In the latter state, on Long Island, the planned community Levittown was constructed after the end of World War II, becoming a model for other such developments. Its five styles of the ranch house were replicated thousands of times. By the twentieth century, there were suburbs in most of America's big cites. Their existence encouraged the construction of shopping malls, the development of roadways, and the spread of chain stores.

Although, in time, commentators began to criticize these planned communities for their architectural conformity and the “bland” lifestyles they promoted, many residents of suburbia found their environments to be pleasant, serene, safe, and comfortable. These qualities, of course, make suburbs ideal settings for horror, for, in novels and movies in this genre, terror and disgust often follow a period of calm or happy existence which, until the horror begins, was the standard, everyday ambiance and milieu.

In Ginger Snaps (2001), horror comes to Bailey Downs, a suburbs in Alberta, Canada, in the form of a beast that's more lupine than canine. Attracted by the scent of redhead Ginger Fitzgerald's menstrual blood, the animal attacks, but it's beaten back by Ginger's brunette sister, Brigitte, before being struck by a van as it crosses a road through the forest upon resuming its pursuit of the sisters. 

Although she's been scratched by the predator, Ginger decides not to seek medical attention, since her wounds close quickly. Ginger's subsequent transformations, both physical and mental, make it clear that the animal that had clawed her was a werewolf, which is what Ginger herself has become.

As might be expected, violence, sex, and death ensue. In the process, Bailey Downs is changed forever, its residents suffering tremendously at the jaws and paws of Ginger, who pummels Trina Sinclair, the school bully; kills a neighbor's dog; turns boyfriend Jason McCardy into a werewolf by having unprotected sex with him; murders her high school's guidance counselor and janitor; and breaks drug dealer Sam Miller's arm before killing him. The suburbs proves to be anything but the sanctuary it seems at the movie's start.

It might seem as though a new house in the suburbs would be a safe place, but appearances, of course, can be deceiving. As Travis Newton observes in an article on his blog, “The wonderful thing about living in a new suburban house is that there are no ghosts in it. Right? Wrong. Paranormal Activity took the security and safety of a new, modern home and tossed it right out the window.”

As Newton further points out, one of the scariest things about Paranormal Activity (2007) is the fact that the paranormal phenomena occur not “in some old castle or space station or haunted forest. It takes place in the kind of house your neighbors could live in. The kind of house that maybe you live in.”

Katie Featherstone and Micah Sloat have just bought a new home in San Diego, California. Afraid of the demon that has been harassing her for as long as she can remember, Katie prompts Micah to set up a camera to record any paranormal activity that may occur in the house while they're asleep or away from home.

The camera does record some disturbing incidents: flickering lights, doors moving by themselves, a planchette moving under its own power over a Ouija board, and strange creaking sounds. When the activity intensifies, the couple asks Dr. Fredrichs, a demonologist, to investigate, but, too, afraid to remain in the house, he deserts them.

The demon bites Katie, transforming her into a fiend, and the camera records her, in her demonic aspect, grinning as she crawls toward Micah's body after he's been hurled across the bedroom. At the end of the film, on-screen text informs the audience that police discovered Micah's corpse, but Katie is nowhere to be found.

Some time ago in a suburban community, Nancy Thompson and her friends battled a nightmarish dream figure, Freddy Krueger, who attacked them in their sleep. His motive for doing so—and his supernatural nature—are explained on the Fandom site devoted to the movie franchise, A Nightmare on Elm Street, of which he is the central antagonist:

A family man on the surface, Krueger was actually the serial killer known as the “Springwood Slasher.” When he was caught and subsequently released on a technicality, the parents of his victims chased him to a shack out back of the power plant he once worked at and burned him alive. Rather than succumb to death, Krueger was offered the chance to continue his killing spree after death, becoming a Dream Demon that could enter his victims' dreams and kill them in the dream world, which would thus cause their death in the physical world and absorb their souls afterwards.

The murders he commits take place in two worlds: that of the dream in which he appears and the actual, “physical world.” The Fandom site does a good job of comparing and contrasting the two as it summarizes the details of the respective incidents. Here, for example, is the account of the death—or deaths—of Tina Gray, which occurs in the franchise's original, 1984 film:

Dream World description

Physical World description

Tina awakens to the sound of a stone, tapping on her window, breaking the contact area. Puzzled, Tina goes outside to hear Freddy Krueger calling her name. She walks out further. Just then, a trash can lid rolls in front of her making a startling noise. Then, Freddy's shadow appears around the corner, Freddy emerges. Tina says "Please God" and Freddy moves his claws threateningly saying "This... is God." He chases her down the alley. Tina turns back, he is gone. Just then he jumps from behind a tree and makes her watch as her cuts off his finger and it squirts green ooze. She runs, he chases her up the stairs, knocking her off and rolling around on the floor with her. She grabs his face which proceeds to tear off, he laughs.

Tina rolls all over her bed, her chest is slit with his claws, she floats up to the ceiling after being spun around in mid-air. Cutting continues until her bloody, lifeless body falls to the floor.

As a demon, Freddy is able to shift shape, and he has adopted a variety of forms, some human, others inanimate, including those of a hall guard; a telephone; a snake; a marionette; television talk show host Dick Cavett; a television set; a nurse named Marcie; Nancy Thompson's father, Donald; a model inside a water bed; a motorcycle; a video game character; a medical doctor, Christine Heffner; camp counselors; Jason Vorhees's mother, Pamela; and a caterpillar. Anything can happen in a dream, right?

The suburbs are no safer in Elm Street than they are in Ginger Snaps, Paranormal Activity, or several other horror movies with such settings. The franchise plays upon parents' concerns for their children's welfare, crimes against minors, physical and emotional abuse, psychological trauma, object permanence, the sometimes-fine line between fantasy and reality, the potential dangers of isolation and of in loco parentis, the effects of vigilantism and vengeance, and other unsettling themes. Apparently, if we are to believe horror movie directors, suburban life is far more dangerous and lawless than many might have imagined.

But it's not just moviemakers who suggest the suburbs may be the deaths of suburbanites. A number of novelists have also implied that such communities, in themselves neither urban nor rural, might well be the deaths of us: Stephen King in The Regulators, Bentley Little in The Association, and Ira Levin in The Stepford Wives venture forth into the forbidden lanes and cul-de-sacs of American suburbia, each offering a cautionary tale about the supposedly good life that's lived there.

Several of my own Sinister Stories (available at Amazon Books) also contain tales of terror associated with the suburbs.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Aesthetic Sensations

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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