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:
- A relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting is explored.
- A series of bizarre incidents occur.
- The protagonist learns the cause of these incidents.
- Armed with this knowledge, he or she eliminates the source of the bizarre incidents.
- 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.
Posts
