Ambrose Bierce's Puddle-Jumper, "The Flying Machine"

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Recently, I've become more and more interested in flash fiction. To my delight, Fight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales contains such a story: Ambrose Bierce's “The Flying Machine” (79).

The tale, which consists of 110 words, describes a prototypical flying machine's unsuccessful maiden flight. Despite the machine's failure, its inventor's assurance to the crowd of onlookers that the machine's “defects . . . are merely basic and fundamental” is enough to get them to invest in the construction of “a second machine” (79).

The editors, Stephen King and Bev Vincent, see the witnesses' willingness to subscribe to the second machine's construction as evidence of their gullibility. In their opinion, the spectators are duped by the inventor, a con artist who claims to have built a machine that is able to fly. King and Vincent could be right. As they point out, Bierce was both cynical and misanthropic, after all. Perhaps “The Flying Machine” is merely a literary expression of the declaration, sometimes erroneously attributed to showman P. T. Barnum, that “there's a sucker born every minute.”

A comic book version of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Flying Machine"

Another possibility—one that the late optimistic Ray Bradbury might have preferred—is that, despite the flying machine's failure, people are willing to finance the apparently impossible; in doing so, they often find that they have financed the next technological marvel, whether a flying machine, artificial intelligence, or a cure for the common cold.

Showing Off the Neighborhood

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King is known for the small-town settings of his horror novels, but other novelists also find plenty of horror in small-town settings, including Dan Simmons (Summer of Night), Robert R. McCammon (Boy's Life), Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Still Life with Crows), Dean Koontz (Phantoms), and, of course, Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes).

It's not hard to see the appeal of such stories.

Small towns are, in a way, an extension of home, as the term “hometown” suggests. In the past, especially, whether realistically or naively, many families left their doors unlocked at night and allowed their kids to roam the neighborhood at will, the single caveat “be home by dark.”

A community, we like to think, is a safe place, like home. It's a place full of friends, we like to believe. It's a place where everyone knows everyone else. There are, in small towns, interrelationships of many kinds: familial, romantic, friendly, neighborly, commercial.

One of the challenges that writers face when a small town is the setting of their novels is familiarizing readers with the community. Lots of people live in the town, people of various statuses, living on different streets, and performing different functions. Sometimes, those we think we know are actually strangers—perhaps dangerous ones—and those we don't know all that well turn out to be heroes. In a small town, anything is possible.

But how to introduce the town and its people, the townspeople? How to show their relationships to others? How to indicate their own hopes and dreams, fears and uncertainties?

In other words, how may readers be shown about town?

Writers tackle this task in several ways. Here are a few.

 

Still Life with Crows: The authors opt for description:

Medicine Creek, Kansas. Early August. Sunset.

The great sea of yellow corn stretches from horizon to horizon under an angry sky . . . .

One road cuts through the corn from north to south; another from east to west . . . .

A giant slaughterhouse stands south of the town, lost in the corn, its metal sides scoured by years of dust storms . . . .

The temperature is exactly 100 degrees . . . .

Twilight is falling over the landscape . . . .

A black-and-white police cruiser passes along the main street, heading east into the great nothingness of corn, its headlights stabbing into the rising darkness . . . 

Something Wicked This Way Comes: The author moves from character to character:

The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm . . . .

There's nothing n the living world like books on water cures, deaths-of-a-thousand slices, or pouring white-hot lava off castle walls on drolls and mountebanks.

So said Jim Nightshade . . . .

Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Holloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them . . . .

Phantoms: The author uses an eclectic approach, using description, and skipping from one character to another, but employing the dramatic, or “showing,” method rather than the expository (“telling”) method to bot introduce his town and townspeople and to generate and maintain suspense:

The scream was distant and brief, a woman's scream.

Deputy Paul Henderson looked up from his copy of Time. . . .

During the twilight hour of that Sunday in early September, the mountains were painted in only two colors: green and blue. The trees—pine, fir, spruce—looked as though they had been fashioned from the same felt that covered billiard tables. Cool, blue shadows lay everywhere, growing larger and deeper and darker by the minute.

Jenny Paige had never seen a corpse like this one.

The Santinis' stone and redwood house was of more modern design than Jenny's place, all rounded corners and gentle angles. . . .

Whichever technique an author uses—and the few above are but a tiny sample—he or she must make the setting seem “real” (i. .e, believable), provide a sense of “thereness,” create and sustain suspense, introduce the characters (townspeople), and, of course, establish a mystery that's rooted in horror. If, in the process, they can establish theme or symbolism or tone or point of view bigger than those of his or her characters' individual perspectives on life, those are pluses—and big ones.

In a later post, we'll consider how horror movies that feature small-town settings show viewers around their neighborhoods.

Plotting Board, Part 6

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

With a Little Bit of Bloomin' Luck

Our belief (or relative belief) in the influences of certain phenomena, including our feelings and attitudes, often affect our thoughts and our overt behavior, even when we deny that such is the case. In The X-Files, Mulder is frequently guided by his belief in the existence of paranormal phenomena, while his partner, Scully, is often led by her skepticism.

Other phenomena, real and imagined, also affect the characters, one of which, as VanDerWerff points out, is the concept of luck. “We all sort ourselves . . . into the categories of 'lucky people' and 'unlucky people'” (323), he suggests. FBI agents Mulder and Scully are no exceptions, which allows the series's episode “The Goldberg Variation” to explore “the ideas of luck” as “a giant system you pay into, then make withdrawals from” (323). By exploring other commonly held beliefs, communal or individual, writers acquire many ways to develop plots for short stories and novels, just as TV and movie writers do.

Religious fanaticism, as represented by a snake-handling cult in The X-Files episode “Signs and Wonders” is another example. According to VanDerWerff, the exploration of power of fanaticism to shape and manipulate religious fanatics has a lot to do with “the lure of complete commitment, of surrendering oneself to someone who claims to know all the answers” (328). It's an idea for plotting as contemporary and terrifying as Allison Mack's alleged involvement in the NXIVM cult, which, again, allegedly, included her branding other women as her and her master's property. (Religious fanaticism also has quite an influence on Pilgrim a character in the Punisher series.)

Such ideas as blessings and curses, optimistic and pessimistic attitudes, biases and prejudices, fetishes and phobias, the supernatural and the otherworldly, to name but a few such influences, also permit such stories as H. G. Wells's “Pollock and the Porroh Man,” “The Red Room,” and “The Apple”; Ray Bradbury's “Skeleton”; the effects of idols in Stephen King's Desperation; Rod Serling's “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; Shirley Jackson's “Just an ordinary Day”; and W. W. Jacobs's “The Monkey's Paw,” to name but a few.

(Seemingly) Alternate Solutions

As Handlen notes in his commentary on “The Amazing Maleeni” episode of The X-Files, one way to spin a plot while maintaining suspense is to present a mystery which has—or at least seems to have—multiple possible solutions. As the characters (or readers) discover the solution they've figured out isn't the solution at all, they continue to pursue leads or watch (or read), hoping their next deduction may prove correct, only (hopefully) to be frustrated yet again, until, finally, the true, one-and-only solution is presented, by either Mulder or Scully, naturally:

“Several times through the episode, our heroes believe they've solved the case only to come up empty-handed. The result is something that continually pulls us forward along with Mulder and Scully, promising new and greater mysteries with each new discovery” (326).

Ask the BIG QUESTIONS

Plots can be generated by simply asking the BIG QUESTIONS, as the “Sein und Zeit” (“Being and Time”) episode of The X-Files does. This installment, Handlen and VanDerWerff imply, asks what might happen to a character whose “very belief system” is “eradicated before his eyes” (330).

This is such a compelling question that its very asking is enough to make anyone want to stay tuned (or keep reading, as the case may be). It also parallels such events in the lives of historical figures and, indeed, the men and women of everyday life. What became of Jefferson Davis, the man, after the Civil War ended in the South's defeat? What did the ordinary Roman think and do after the Empire fell (or the average Brit, for that matter, after the fall of the British Empire)? What does one do the day after he or she has lost his or her entire family in a tragic accident? What happens to the citizens of a nation after the fall of their country? History records some of the answers, but never all.

The question that “Sein und Zeit” asks, implicitly, is what happens to Fox Mulder when his “very belief system [is] eradicated before his eyes”? The second part of this story is presented in the next episode of the series, “Closure.” BIG QUESTIONS, it's obvious, lead to longer plots. They also generate immediate and profound interest on the part of their audiences.

NEXT: A bit more.

The Things We Fear

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

They're big. They're repulsive. Shaped like sperm, they slither (as the title of the movie they advertise suggests), but they're red and meaty, too, visceral in appearance, and they remind one of parasites (or feces) as much as anything else.

They squirm their way up the exterior of a bathtub occupied by an oblivious damsel in distress. Her vulnerability is enhanced by her apparent nakedness and by her relaxed posture: she reclines inside the tub, only part of her calf and thigh showing.

Centered above the poster's imagery is the blood-splattered title, Slither, in black (the color of death). Despite the image of ablution, cleanliness does not deliver us from death, the poster suggests, not before or after sex, for, as Jim Morrison, late of the Doors, among others, has warned, “Sex is death.”

Her eyes, lost in deep shadows, look like sockets. Her lips are gone, showing her teeth, as her jaws gape in a silent scream.

Before her face, half of flesh, half of skull, a glass pane shatters. Shards fly off, in all directions, the missing piece at the lower right taking with it her cheek.

Perhaps, we think, the glass is not in front of her, after all; maybe she's on the glass or in it.

The poster's caption, “Rest in Pieces,” underscores our frailty, our vulnerability, our temporality as human beings. When death results from a horrific experience, we do not rest in peace, the poster suggests, but in pieces.

In any case, our destruction, our demise, is unavoidable, inevitable: it is, the movie's title assures us, our Final Destination.

We are fragile, our emotions, like our flesh itself, susceptible to trauma, to breakage. Abandonment is traumatic; it leaves us broken, shattered. The doll featured on the poster for Abandoned is a stand-in for innocence, for the faith of the young.

Its face is cracked. What should be laugh lines are fissures, wrought not by glee, but by a misery so deep and full of anguish that it produces tears of blood.

But death, who favors none, treating all the same, whether they are rich or poor, prince or pauper, male or female, young or old, awaits our coming, with a guarantee that, whatever one's fate has been in life, death is faithful; death will not abandon anyone; death embraces all.

The author of horror must be aware of the situations, events, and circumstances that frighten men and women, boys and girls. He or she should keep abreast of surveys and polls and current and historical events which identify or describe humanity's deepest, darkest fears, for disgust, horror, and terror, as Stephen King has pointed out, are the horror writer's stock in trade.

Such lists of fears come from a variety of sources, some of which may surprise us. One of the latest lists I've added to my continuing roster was supplied by Cornelia Dean, author of Making Sense of Science: Separating Substance from Spin. Her list, concerning the items of which she provides a few details, includes:

• the uncontrollable
• things imbued with dread
• catastrophe
• things imposed on us
• things with delayed effects
• new risks
• a hazard with identifiable victims
• things that affect future generations
• things we cannot see
• things that are artificial, synthetic, or otherwise human-made (32).

Moreover, she points out, “If we don't trust the person or agency telling us about the risk, we are more afraid” (32).

A story that focuses on one of these fears is apt to resonate with readers.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Advent of the Psychological-Moral Horror Story

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Edgar Allan Poe created the modern detective story and the modern horror story, and popularized human villains who suffered from various mental disorders. The psychotic or sociopathic killer was a new monster. He or she (in Poe, always a male character) located the source of evil “not in the stars,” to paraphrase William Shakespeare, “but in ourselves.” With Poe, evil became internal and psychological, not external and supernatural. Many readers find such villains far more frightening than demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, and other such monsters, because threats posed by psychotic or sociopathic “monsters” are more believable and one may actually encounter them in “real life.”

The notion that demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and witches won't be encountered in “real life” marks a metaphysical change in the Western weltanshauung, or worldview, wherein the supernatural is no longer considered a viable dimension of reality. Of course, authors of horror stories continue to populate their fiction with such creatures, but, to entertain the notion of their existence, readers and moviegoers must, more and more, adopt the attitude of “suspended disbelief” of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge first wrote in Biographia Literaria (1817). In short, to entertain the idea of the existence of such monsters, one must pretend that they are real, that they exist, at least for the duration of the story one is reading or the movie one is watching.

When it comes to victims who commit evil due to the mental disorders they suffer, suspended disbelief is not necessary—at least, not to the degree it is necessary to enjoy a tale of the supernatural—because such mental states do exist, and those unfortunate enough to suffer from one or more of them do behave in dangerous, erratic ways.

If we state this principle in the terms set forth by Tzvetan Todorov, we would say that there are no longer truly tales of the marvelous, nor is fantastic literature, strictly speaking, any longer possible. Stories may depict bizarre incidents, strange settings, and deranged characters, but these elements will be effects not of supernatural beings or forces (for none exist), but of mental illness. They may be uncanny, but they are not and cannot be marvelous, any more than they can be fantastic, because, they have no supernatural origin or cause; they are caused by natural, if bizarre, states of mind; they can be explained scientifically.

Todorov's tripartite paradigm applied to ancient and medieval texts, but it does not apply to modern literature or film, because there is nothing fantastic that is resolvable as either marvelous or uncanny. There is only the ordinary, or everyday, and the uncanny, or strange but explicable. Only fantastic stories (of which type, horror is a subgenre), set in the ancient world or during the Middle Ages can be fantastic in Todorov's sense; only such stories can be viewed as marvelous (extraordinary but inexplicable in natural or scientific terms) or as uncanny (extraordinary but explicable in natural or scientific terms).

If we judge H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” and Stephen King's short story “1408,” by our own, present-day worldview, which is basically materialistic, Wells's earlier narrative is “correct” in its rejection of the fantastic and the marvelous, while King's story is “incorrect” in its suggestion that the incidents which occur in the supposedly haunted hotel room are, in fact, supernatural events, for, according to our modern view of the world, there ae no such things as either ghosts or demons; therefore, the room couldn't be haunted by either; therefore, the room is not haunted; therefore, to explain the narrator's perceptions and beliefs, we must adopt the view that he is insane: his perceptions are the results of hallucinations. Wells's explanation of the incidents which occur in his story's supposedly haunted “red room” concur with our modern view of the world, for the narrator concludes that only his own terror caused him to misinterpret what he saw in the room: the room was haunted by his own fear, not by ghosts.

This shift in weltanshauung, which has occurred not only among the intellectual elite, but also among the majority of the millions of the Western world's population, have but one implication. Unless a story is set in the ancient world or the Middle Ages, it can identify only “inner demons,” or mental disorders, the “fault” that “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” In other words, there is now but one source of “evil,” the actions of a disordered mental state. The only monster is the madman or the madwoman. All horror stories set in modern times can investigate only this source of immorality, or of what was once called “evil.” Horror fiction, like other forms of literature, has only two sources and two concerns: the psychological and the ethical, or moral. Judgment of their literary value, more and more, will be based on these criteria.

Writers (and critics), it's probably a good idea to dust off the latest copy of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM) and lay in a good supply of books on ethics.

Horror, Past and Present

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

Certain horror stories fit a five-part plot paradigm:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Horror of Star Power

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In MassAdvertising as Social Forecast, Jib Fowles, a professor of communications at the University of Houston, identifies three “stylistic features” of ads that influence “the way a basic appeal is presented”: humor, celebrities, and images of the past and present. This post concerns how horror novels and movies use celebrities as a way to enhance horror.

Of course, almost every movie features celebrities—the actors who star in the film. However, the use of the celebrities “stylistic feature” Fowles identifies could be interpreted as referring to actors who play celebrities in horror movies. In other words, one or more of the characters in the film is a famous person. Such is the case, for example, with fictional actress Ann Darrow, played by actual actress Fay Wray, who appears in King Kong. It is in thus sense that Fowles's celebrities 'stylistic feature” is understood in this post.

By being identified as a celebrity, a character receives an elevated status, because, in the United States and elsewhere, celebrities are revered; for many, they are the equivalent, in the world of popular entertainment, to royalty, and this is true not only of actors, but of other performers, including singers, athletes, comedians, bestselling authors, politicians, and other entertainers and public figures.

Not only do such characters have fame (and often fortune), but they're also typically regarded as glamorous and charismatic, living the types of lives many believe they themselves would enjoy living. They are treated with adulation by fans, but, at the same time, they may be envied, and their fall, if their careers should fail for some reason, is often as intriguing as their rise.

Horror movies that include fictional celebrities among their casts of characters include, in addition to King Kong, Misery, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

In King Kong, Darrow's celebrity as an actress allows her to represent Beauty in a way and on a scale denied to ordinary women, despite the beauty many of them undoubtedly possess. As a celebrity, she is herself a representative of the beautiful woman, of Beauty personified. She is both a flesh-and-blood woman and a type, or idea, of woman, the ideal woman, the Beautiful Woman. It is because of her that Carl Denham, the man who hopes to produce a documentary film, has a star who can deliver the box office appeal he needs to market his production.

Darrow also contrasts with Kong: she is a beautiful woman, while he is a gigantic ape. The colossal gorilla's wild nature and prodigious strength makes Darrow's helplessness all the more apparent, as she frequently struggles in his grasp. He takes her where he will, pursues her like a bestial stalker, and finally, according to Denham, at least, dies because of the pint-size femme fatale: “It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

As a human being, Darrow is also obviously a representative of humanity. As such, it is with her plight that moviegoers will identify. Through their identification with her, they will feel her helplessness and her terror. In Kong's hand, they will be grasped as the gigantic ape navigates the jungle on Skull Island. From her vantage point atop cliffs and in caves, where Kong deposits her temporarily for safekeeping, as he battles dinosaurs, she will witness Kong's titanic struggles. The audience will see Kong's pursuit by Darrow's defenders as the gigantic beast views the chase. They will ascend the Empire State Building, in Kong's hand, as he climbs the skyscraper, clutching the actress in his immense, furry fist. From her perspective atop the edifice, they will witness the airplanes' attacks.

When Kong succumbs to technology, falling, mortally wounded, from the building upon which he took his last stand in defense of Darrow as much as himself, audiences will see the difference between Beauty and the Beast and be reminded that, despite certain similarities between the human human and the lower animals, despite their kinship, there is also a huge chasm between the two, an abyss that cannot be overcome. Darrow, despite her “courtship” by Kong, remains a human being, and the two, human and animal, must ever remain distinct.

Paul Sheldon, the bestselling romance writer in Stephen King's Misery, is also a celebrity character. His romance series has made him famous, if not immensely wealthy; his success as a popular writer has set him apart from others. However, his success is predicated upon the interests of his readers. If they sour on his work, he can quickly become a has-been or, as Misery makes clear, a victim of his formerly “number one fan.”

Of course, King's notion that a fan would capture, assault, and attempt to kill a writer simply for killing off a favorite fictional character is over the top. Most fantastic literature, whether of the horror or another genre, is, by definition, exaggerated, which is why Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the need for a reader to “suspend” his or her 'disbelief” as a condition for enjoying such literature.

Annie Wilkes, the psychotic serial killer-cum-nurse who rescues Sheldon after crashing while driving during a snowstorm, attempts to force the writer to resurrect Misery Chastain, the character whom Sheldon killed off in the last novel of his romance series, which he has abandoned in the hope of becoming a serious writer. The presence in the novel of a celebrity character affords King the opportunity of commenting upon relationship between a famous writer and his or her fans—a relationship which, in Misery, becomes more predatory than symbiotic.

According to Grady Hendrix, King's own fans reacted negatively to the novel, seeing it as an expression of King's “contempt” for his readers, and some see the novel as, indeed, a “love/hate letter to his fans.” King apparently tried to mend fences with his “outraged fans” during a “publicity tour” for the book, but it's hard to imagine he succeeded given the fact that he describes the psychotic Wilkes, his self-described “number one fan” as a soulless monster who literally reeks.

The portrait of King's fans is nothing if not ambiguous and begs the question, What sort of writer writes for such admirers? The answer appears to be Sheldon, but how much of the fictional bestselling romance author is a true likeness of King himself? There are similarities: both writers, the real and the imagined, suffered shattered legs; both became prescription pain killer addicts; and both apparently have ambiguous, “love/hate” relationships with their fans. As Hendrix observes,

King has said numerous times, the fans put food on his table. He hates them, but he owes them his life. And there are moments when Paul is waiting for Annie to react to something in the manuscript he’s writing that he knows will thrill her, or upset her, when it feels like her reaction is vital for his continued existence. He imagines her reaction and then revels in it when it comes, and one can imagine this is how King felt too. He has written for his readers (Constant reader as he calls them in his introductions) for so long that to some extent his books are collaborative: if a book is released to the public and no one reads it, does it even exist at all?

Although there are exceptions, celebrities don't typically start life as celebrities. Like everything else, fame must usually be earned. The biographies of most famous people show they paid their dues. Michael Landon, a star of the television series Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, and Highway to Heaven, not to mention the movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf, began his career as an extra. Clint Eastwood started out as a laboratory technician in Revenge of the Creature. Although they may have appeared in earlier films, many actresses, including Fay Wray (King Kong), Janet Leigh (Psycho), Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween), Jennifer Love Hewitt (I Know What You Did Last Summer), and Kate Beckinsale (Underworld: Evolution), established their Hollywood careers “scream queens.”

In I Know What You Did Last Summer, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a “D”-list celebrity, local beauty queen Helen Shivers, who hopes to leave her small town and establish herself in New York City as a major player in the entertainment industry. She finds fame elusive, and returns to her hometown, Southport, North Carolina, where she must settle for work as a “fragrance girl” in her father's department store, her show business aspirations confined to the local beauty pageant and a master of ceremonies spot for the Croaker Queen Pageant. She meets her death at the hands of the serial killer who stalks her and her friends. As far as her part in the film is concerned, the movie seems to suggest that small-town girls typically remain small-town girls, despite their hopes and dreams for something bigger and better than the lives they live as, well, small-town girls.

As with most other aspects of life in horror fiction, celebrity isn't all it's cracked up to be. For one thing, it makes a character stand out from the crowd, and that can be dangerous, indeed. Coming to the attention of—becoming, in fact, the center of attention for—a giant gorilla, a psychotic “fan,” or a serial killer bent on gruesome revenge isn't likely to promote one's career, whether as an actress, a bestselling author, or a beauty queen who wants to break out, both in the theater and from her small-town life. In fact, celebrity, in horror fiction, is likely to be brief, ending in a painful, violent, and bloody death. It's better, perhaps, to be a “nobody” than a Somebody, or, as military personnel learn, in their struggles to survive, to “keep a low profile.”