Discerning Meaning, or The Theme of the Story

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the skills that we learn fairly early in our academic careers is how to spot the key idea of a passage such as a paragraph, an essay, or a book. Often, these passages are of non-fiction prose. We learn to look at the beginning of the paragraph, the chapter, or the book for a topic sentence, an introductory paragraph, or a foreword or preface. In shorter passages, we learn that the main idea may also be presented at the end of the paragraph. Seldom will we find it in the middle of the paragraph, however, because what is written first and last are emphatic, and what is presented between these two parts of the whole tends to get somewhat lost in the shuffle, as it were.

We also learn, eventually, to decipher such literary texts as short stories, novels, and poems. But, in doing so, we are taught to consider not any particular sentence or even any specific part of the work so much as the whole of the story, the novel, or the poem, for in the literature of the imagination, we learn, the meaning is in the whole, and not the parts. Fiction (and drama) ask us to fathom the meaning of an entire experience. Therefore, before we can interpret the significance of such a work, we must first summarize it. Then, we must consider the cause and effect of the experience, which is represented, in the literary work, as action or what we sometimes call the storyline.

Ask yourself what are the cause and the effect of each of the following storylines?

Father Damien, a priest, exorcises a preadolescent girl named Reagan MacNeil (The Exorcist).

Beowulf, a Geatish warrior, slays Grendel, a troll that has been terrorizing Danes (Beowulf).

Carrie White, an abused telekinetic girl, avenges herself against her mother, high school bullies, and her hometown (Carrie).

If you can answer this question, you will not only be able to understand what you read but there’s a good chance that you will also be able to write intelligible fiction.

To damn Father Damien, a doubting priest (cause), the devil possesses Reagan; the priest’s recovery of his faith, borne of his desire to deliver the girl, results in Reagan’s deliverance and Father Damien’s victory (effect). Theme: Love conquers doubt.

A man of valor, Beowulf slays Grendel (and his mother) (effect) to gain immortality through fame and to establish a bond with a foreign king (cause). Theme: Great deeds bring lasting fame.

Carrie’s mother, a religious fanatic, does a poor job in preparing Carrie for life in the
real world (cause), and, when her high school’s bullies take their harassment too far, Carrie is unable to cope and seeks vengeance through violence (effect). Theme: As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

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.

Quick Tip: Theme As Lesson

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The theme of a story is frequently defined as the point, meaning, or moral of the story, the lesson that the story imparts, explicitly or (more often) implicitly. This definition is true enough, and helpful, but I prefer to think of the story’s theme as the lesson that the main character, or protagonist, learns as the result of his or her experience as this experience is related in the story.

For example, the theme of The Wizard of Oz, which Dorothy Gale learns as a result of her being whisked off to Oz, encountering the enchanted land’s various residents, and defeating the Wicked Witch of the West, is “There’s no place like home.” The theme of The Exorcist is similar to that of the book of Job, that true faith in God persists despite the existence of evil and human suffering. The theme of ‘Salem’s Lot is that, by banding together, a community can defeat a force far greater than any single individual.

Taking Away the Teddy Bear

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Whether a doll, a favorite blanket, or a teddy bear, many children have a favorite toy or other item with which they sleep, partly because they want company but also because they feel a need for security, especially when they are by themselves, in the dark, and ordinary things become large and threatening in their imaginations. We like to think that, long before we become adults, we give up our teddy bears or whatever we substitute for them, or that, at least, they are taken away from us, perhaps as we kick and scream in protest at losing such a trustworthy and faithful companion.

The truth? Even as adults, we have our teddy bears. They’re our husbands or wives, our children, our jobs, our homes, our automobiles, our doctors, and all the other persons, places, and things (and, for that matter, qualities and ideas) that make us feel safe and secure (as well as important and meaningful).

Most of us, although we may lose one or more of these teddy bears, seldom lose them all. A spouse may die; we may be fired; we may lose our homes to foreclosure, our doctors may retire or move away, but, most of the time, not all of these possibilities are realized; we are not, as a rule, fully abandoned. We retain at least, one teddy bear, and often several. That is, until death arrives, to strip us not only of these symbols of our security, but also of life itself and the very flesh we wear, leaving us both nameless and faceless in the grave forever.

In “The Horror of The Exorcist: Its Presentation and Confrontation,” J. W. Ocker contends that “horrifying an audience” is a relatively simple matter, requiring nothing more than the filming of “atrocity.” Such filming becomes “art,” he suggests, only when the atrocity is given some sort of redeeming value, when it is filmed “in a meaningful way without reveling in the horror” (72). The Exorcist is artistic because it accomplishes this end, using atrocity to examine “what has been termed, in the theological realm, ‘the problem of evil,’” or “the paradox that seemingly unbounded atrocity can occur in a universe that is the product of a loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, benign Creator” (74-75). The novel’s (and the movie’s) theme transcends the horror of evil per se and of “an individual child being subjected to that evil” (74) to ask what meaning or purpose human existence can have in such a universe.

In other words, The Exorcist’s unrelenting “presentation and confrontation” of evil “does not allow us to distance ourselves from the evil” by “turning it into some fantastical construct of the nightly news or [a] philosophical plaything” (74) and, therefore, the novel (and the movie) makes each reader come to terms with the significance of evil’s existence. In short, The Exorcist holds the reader’s (or the moviegoer’s) feet to the fire of hell. Evil becomes real; it is not merely an anecdote or an abstraction.

The type of horror that The Exorcist’s depiction of “the problem of evil” represents is both religious and existential: “Such a horror finds its potency in the possibility of a faith unfounded, a worldview demolished. . . . It is the horror of ultimate betrayal” (75). This is the horror, one might argue, of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” or Sir Winston Churchill’s “Man Overboard.” In both short stories, the protagonists expect to be rescued, but learn, as they languish, dying at sea, that they are quite alone in an uncaring universe in which no sign of God is to be seen, perhaps because there is no God. It is a horror, one might suppose, to which there is no lower, deeper pit, the nadir of despair itself, but such is not the case, Ocker contends; rather, it is the herald of, and the catalyst to, a deeper, even more devastating understanding regarding the true nature of the universe, the type of vision that one discerns in the works, for example, of the Marquis de Sade:

This type of horror is different from, but the close forerunner of another type of horror. . . . That terror is of a universe that is either indifferent or hostile to our own existence. It is a universe in which there is no guarantee that good will triumph over evil “in the end” nor even any reason why it should. It is a universe where there is no real basis to value good over evil. . . [and] each one is a force as natural and as much a part of our reality as anything else. It is a universe in which saying that it is bad to subject a child to torment and obscenity is to say something nonsensical. One can only say in that universe, that the child is or is not being subjected to such, and one cannot tag onto that fact an objective moral judgment (75).

Earlier writers, both popular and mainstream, have suggested that God, if he exists at all, is a disinterested Creator (deism), is dead (Friedrich Nietzsche), is missing in action (Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), or is inscrutable (Job). Shakespeare suggests that God may be but a gibbering idiot (the blind force of chance evolution, perhaps?). He also characterizes the type of universe that results from such a “creator”: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth).

In bringing his reader face to face, as it were, with mindless evil, The Exorcist’s author, William Peter Blatty, denies him or her the opportunity to escape into clichéd presentations or abstract understandings of human suffering. He gives to such evil a human face, that of preteen Regan MacNeil. In other words, he takes away the teddy bear of a shallow, but comforting, religious faith that assumes that, because “God is in his heaven, all is right with the world” (“Pippa Passes”).

Others who abandoned such a teddy bear include those writers whose names or works have been mentioned--deists (Thomas Jefferson, for example), Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, Stephen Crane, Sir Winston Churchill, the author of Job, William Shakespeare--and some, either they or others, have even gone so far as to suggest a purpose for life in what might be regarded as a purposeless universe. Hedonists suggest that we should pursue pleasure and avoid pain, enjoying life in the here and now. After all, once death occurs, we will ourselves shall have ceased to exist. Others, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, propose that, by pursuing our own interests while, at the same time, accepting responsibility for our actions, we can live as authentic an existence as it is possible for creatures who are both finite and temporal to live. Still others, such as Nietzsche, recommend that we persist in order to give rise to the superman who shall come, through us, to inherit the world and to live beyond the categories of good and evil, a law--and a sort of god--unto himself.

Blatty himself surrendered his teddy bear, believing that the so-called problem of evil was real and must be not only “presented” but “confronted,” as Ockley’s essay’s title suggests, but Blatty, in confronting this issue, remains a man of faith, and a man of a deeper and truer faith than that expressed by Robert Browning’s “Pippa Passes.” The novelist’s conclusion regarding the matter seems to be spoken by Father Merrin, who tells his fellow exorcist, Father Karras:

I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us. . . The observers. . . Every person in this house. . . . I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity. . . To see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps; in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it is finally a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us.

Blatty’s point of view is interesting in several ways, not the least of which is that, if a relationship between a person and God must be based upon love, living as if it must be predicated upon some other basis, whether rationality, emotion, or morality, for instance, is to miss the whole point entirely. The problem of evil is a moral problem. If God is good, how can he, if he is also both omniscient and omnipotent, allow human beings--especially an innocent child--to suffer undeservedly. This is a rational conundrum, defying logic; its force, however, is as much emotional as it is rational, and the true significance of the problem of evil, which is that of human beings’ living in a universe, which is “full of sound and fury” that signifies “nothing,” is that it leads humanity to despair, a state in which the acceptance of God’s love becomes impossible, leaving “every person in this house,” or universe, bereft of God and abandoned to him- or herself.

The problem of evil, truly understood, is the taking away of the final, and the most cherished, of all teddy bears, the belief that life is meaningful, purposeful, and worthwhile. Paradoxically, the loss of this final teddy bear can allow its replacement not by another token of security but by the only true security there is, if there is, indeed, any at all, the God who is not only the ground of being-itself but also love. This is the answer, to the extent that an answer is possible, that Blatty’s novel offers to the problem of evil, “not an explanation,” as Ocker observes, as much as “a context”:

For Father Merrin, the exorcist, there was no doubt that there is a God, there was no doubt that evil exists, and there was no reason to dally with paradoxes. As a result, he was ready for immediate action, unlike the doctors, psychiatrists, and Father Karras himself (at first). Nor does Merrin’s death take anything away from that, for without his help, without his strength, without his sacrifice and the catalyst of his death, there could only have been more horror for all involved (77).

Characterization via Emotion

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Characterization operates by means of depicting emotion. Literary characters are, in fact, embodiments of emotion. Some emotions may be negative, either in the sense that they are unpleasant or in the sense that they cause problems, personal, social, or otherwise. Emotions can also be positive because they are pleasant or because they alleviate or resolve problems, personal, social, or otherwise.

Characters’ responses to incidents--that is, their feelings concerning events--motivate their actions. In other words, characters are often reactive: they respond to internal or external stimuli. Internal stimuli are their own attitudes, beliefs, desires, fantasies, hopes, thoughts, and, of course, emotions, such as fear, love, and self-respect. External stimuli are persons, places, things, qualities, and ideas that elicit characters’ passions, and can include threats, money, beauty, and death.

The overall, consistent pattern which underlies and is discerned in an individual’s behavior over an extended period of time suggests his or her basic personality traits and causes him or her to be regarded as just, wise, kind, ruthless, arrogant, vain, or whatever. However, many lesser, secondary traits also comprise most fictional people at any time of his or her literary life.

Hamlet is driven by his sense of duty to avenge his murdered father, but he is also hesitant, wanting to make sure that he acts justly in killing his father’s true killer--if, indeed, his father was killed, as the spirit who alleges to be the ghost of his father contends the late king was. These traits are the primary ones that motivate Hamlet, both to act and to refrain from acting. Therefore, he can be said to be a dutiful and just, but hesitant, character. In short, we might regard him as being a man of valor.

His antagonist, who is also his uncle and his step-father, King Claudius, is shown to be cold, calculating, and unrepentant, and he is driven by lust, both for power and for sex, having married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shortly after Hamlet’s father died. Therefore, Hamlet can be read as a dramatization of a conflict between these two sets of emotions: Hamlet’s dutifulness, justice, and hesitation collide with Claudius’ coldness, calculation, unwillingness to repent, and lust for power and sex.

Horror fiction is primarily about fear, but its characters are motivated by other emotions as well. Beowulf’s hero wants to prove his mettle as a warrior. Although The Exorcist’s Father Damian Karras has begin to doubt and, perhaps, to lose his faith, he remains a man of God who loves humanity, as it is represented in the possessed soul of young Regan MacNeil, enough to risk his own life in an attempt to exorcise the devil’s victim. Many of Stephen King’s characters are motivated by their need to bond and by their need to belong to a community, or by brotherly love, one might say.

Not only the protagonists of horror fiction are motivated by their emotions; their antagonists are as well. In Beowulf, the monstrous outcast, Grendel, attacks the Danes because he envies their camaraderie. In The Exorcist, the devil possesses Regan in an attempt to get Father Karras to renounce his faith and thus be damned. Many of King’s villains (‘Salem’s Lot’s Barlow, Andre Linoge in Storm of the Century, and the protean monster of It, for example) prey upon the weaknesses of small communities and their residents, motivated by their narcissistic desire to perpetuate themselves. The emotional conflicts in Beowulf, The Exorcist, and ‘Salem’s Lot can be represented this way:

Valor vs. Envy
Love vs. Condemnation
Brotherly Love vs. Narcissistic self-perpetuation

By motivating your characters to act according to their passions, you will make your fiction seem more realistic, and you will show what’s at stake, on a personal level, as it were, in the struggle between the story’s protagonist and antagonist. The nature of the struggle, in turn, may suggest your stories’ themes. For example, The Exorcist suggests that love casts out condemnation, just as Beowulf implies that valor vanquishes envy and King's novels indicate that brotherly love is more important than narcissistic self-perpetuation.

Imagining Hell

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The Christian Hell is named for the Norse goddess who ruled the Aesir’s underworld, Hel. The ancient Israelites did not have a hell in the sense that their underworld, Sheol, was a place of eternal punishment. Sheol was much more like the ancient Greeks’ Hades or, for that matter, the Norsemen’s Hel, a place of shadowy existence wherein ghostly “shades” went about the business of postmortem existence. Dante imagined his own hell, in The Inferno, and, for the atheistic French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, hell was “other people.” Perhaps the closest place to hell in the modern world is prison--or, possibly, Detroit, Michigan. (Michael Moore would have us think hell on earth is neighboring Flint.)

Hell is the garbage dump of eternity. It’s a cosmic prison. It’s the place of “wailing” and the “gnashing of teeth,” wherein the “fire is not quenched” and the “worm dieth not.” It’s the place that Mark Twain would go for “company,” preferring heaven for its “scenery.” For some, hell is a state of mind or a state of the soul, the opposite of the “kingdom of heaven,” which Jesus said “is within you.”

If anyone should be able to imagine hell, it is the writer of horror fiction. How to begin such a--well, hellish--task? Picture the condemned, which is to say, the types of individuals whose lifestyles or behaviors seem to warrant condemnation, banishment, and/or punishment, not just for a day, but for all eternity. Characterize them. What are the attributes of their personalities? What attitudes do they express? What do they believe? What do they imagine? What do they fear? What hopes, if any, do they have? What do they love, better than God or mankind--in other words, what idol do they worship? What is their besetting sin, and what lesser, but related, sins are associated with it, and why? What do they do all day?

Having imagined the denizens of your hell, picture the lay of the land, or “scenery,” that would be appropriate for such residents. Are there mountains and valleys, molten seas, volcanoes in endless eruption, frozen wastelands, deserts, underworlds within--or below--underworlds? Is your hell multileveled like Dante’s Inferno? Perhaps your hell is unlike anything familiar to mortal men and women, something like, but unlike, the mystical worlds of Marvel Comics’ Dr. Strange?

When you’ve finished peopling and landscaping your inferno, ask yourself what symbolic significance the landscape’s features have. In doing so, you might ask yourself what the images of the Christian hell represent figuratively. What is the symbolic significance of the “fire [that] is not quenched” and the “worm [that] dieth not”? Apply the same process of analysis and interpretation to the images of your own hell.

Remember this, too: now that you’ve gone to all the time and trouble of imagining a hell of your own, your stories may sometimes take place in this infernal abode, or its residents may occasionally escape and visit the world of humanity. Angels, by definition, are, after all, messengers of God, and, in the Bible, even “fallen angels,“ or demons, do sometimes visit--and afflict--ordinary men and women and, if The Exorcist is any guide to infernal behavior, children, too. Their chief, Satan, had the audacity to tempt even Christ! What “message” might one of your accursed bring to one or more of your story’s characters?

In another application of your hell, the residents may be seen as “inner,” rather than as outer demons--as psychological defects and disorders, or diseased elements of the soul, with lives of their own, so to speak, along the lines of BTK’s “Factor X” or Ted Bundy’s “entity.” Of course, they may also be both inner and outer demons, as any particular story’s plot dictates. By imagining a hell of your own, you will be more apt to put your own spin on the action you narrate, making an original contribution, perhaps, to the iconography of the damned and offer a few new insights into the hellish behavior of the demonic soul.

For those who are interested in more information about hell, “Hell in the Old Testament” offers quite a bit.

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.

Subliminal Horror

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

“Subliminal” refers to text, images, auditory statements, or other objects or props that escape one’s conscious notice but (according to theory, at least) are recognized on a subconscious level. Supposedly, subliminal techniques are used to sell everything from movie theater popcorn to alcoholic beverages. Some even go so far as to say that governments, including that of the United States, use such messages to propagandize and brainwash their citizens.

Subliminal messages are also used in printed and filmed horror stories, albeit rarely, it would seem.

In fact, I’ve seen the use of a subliminal image in a horror movie. It occurred at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho--not in the original film, but in a release of the movie on videotape or DVD (I don’t recall which now, as this experience occurred several years ago, but I believe it was a videotape.) As Norman Bates, at the end of his killing spree, sits in a jail cell, dressed as his mother, Norma, a human skull flashes over his face.

I remember feeling especially uneasy during this scene, although it hadn’t seemed as frightening or eerie when I’d first witnessed the scene, as a child. On an impulse, I played the sequence again, in slow motion, and the skull, which I hadn’t noticed before (consciously, at least) was visible as it appeared briefly, over Norman’s face, and then vanished again, just as abruptly, the superimposition of the skull image over Norman’s face occupying only the space of a few frames. I’d heard of subliminal images, but this was the first time I’d ever seen one myself.

Apparently, subliminal images are used much more widely than one might suppose, not only in advertising, but also in popular entertainment media, including Walt Disney’s art and big-name comic books’ illustrations.

In Who Killed Roger Rabbit, Roger’s wife, Jessica, is shown, sans panties, exiting a taxicab.

 


The cover for the DVD release of Disney’s The Little Mermaid shows an erect phallus among the spires of a castle; a constellation of stars in The Lion King spells out S-E-X; and a nude painting is shown in a background setting in The Rescuers. It seems that, posthumously, Uncle Walt’s not nearly as family friendly as he was when he’d been among the living.




The “S” word also makes its appearance in New X-Men #118--at least 18 times, by one count.

In horror fiction, it’s more likely to be the gruesome and the ghastly or the bloody and the gory that sells, rather than sex, and it’s just such subliminal texts and images that are occasionally found, as in Psycho.

Another example of the use of such images occurs in the original Hitchcock version of the film itself. In three frames (equating to approximately 1/8 of a second) of the shower scene, in which Norman-as-Norma, attacks Marion Crane as she is showering, the knife thrust is reversed, so that it appears to penetrate her lower abdomen.

Although it’s questionable as to whether Hitchcock had any transcendent reason for including the subliminal images of penetration, he apparently did have a thematic purpose in mind for the shower scene itself besides mere titillation. According to Janet Leigh herself, who played Crane in the original film:

Marion had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean, and take the consequence, so when she stepped into the bathtub it was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters. The spray beating down on her was purifying the corruption from her mind, purging the evil from her soul. She was like a virgin again, tranquil, at peace.

(Well, as long as Leigh bought the line. . . .)

In The Exorcist, a demon’s face is flashed on the screen on two occasions, once when Father Damien Karras recalls seeing his mother as she is about to enter a subway station and, later, when Regan's mother walks down a hallway, but not so few times per foot of film that it can’t be seen, so this use of imagery doesn’t, strictly speaking, constitute the employment of a subliminal technique.

In a previous post, I showed how Bram Stoker’s deft use of description and innuendo creates what amounts to a sort of literary subliminal coding of the narrative’s text, heightening the story’s fear factor by suggesting that there is some astonishingly powerful force operating behind the scenes, so to speak. Subliminal text and images are today’s equivalents, in extremis, of yesterday’s rhetorical, literary, and cinematographic techniques and, yes, they can be effective. In fact, they can frighten the hell out of you!

Source

Leigh, Janet. Psycho : Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. Harmony Press, 1995.

Alternative Explanations, Part III: Telekinetic and Levitating Characters

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Alternative Explanations, Part II: Clairvoyants,” we considered ways by which skeptics seek to debunk alleged clairvoyance. In Part III, we will take a look at how the skeptical character in your horror story may seek to dismiss or provide a natural explanation for alleged telekinetic characters such as Stephen King’s Carrie White and levitating characters such as Regan MacNeil.

Telekinesis refers to the alleged power of some individuals to move or affect material objects with nothing more than the power of their minds. Uri Geller is one such individual. He claims to be able to bend spoons and to perform other feats involving material objects (keys and stopwatches are favorites) by exercising his mind alone.

Scientists have a simple explanation for apparent telekinetic feats in relation, at least, to such objects as pencils and other lightweight things: the supposedly telekinetic person surreptitiously blows on the object that he or she seeks to move.

According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, Uri Geller met his match when he appeared on The Tonight Show. The host, Johnny Carson, was a former professional magician, and he switched the stock of spoons that Geller had brought to the show to bend with a supply of Carson’s own. Geller decided that he was not up to snuff that night and refused to try to bend the unfamiliar spoons. Carson and a fellow professional magician, the famous debunker James Randi, suspected that Geller had “softened” his spoons before bringing them onto the show, which prompted Carson to make the switch.

Randi got into a protracted and controversial public argument with Geller that included a series of lawsuits filed by each party against the other and a chapter in Randi’s book on hoaxes and frauds, Flim-Flam, or The Truth About Geller. In addition to the blowing-of-lightweight-objects explanation that some scientists have advanced to discredit apparent telekinesis, your horror story’s skeptical character may wish to employ some of Randi’s debunking arguments, among which is that Geller, in handling the spoons, surreptitiously bends them.

Another who has exposed Geller’s apparent trickery is Massimo Polidoro, a founder of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CICAP), who discovered a videotape that shows Geller, who appeared on an Italian television program to demonstrate his telekinesis by bending a key and stopping a watch with nothing more than an exercise of his mental powers, apparently cheating at one of the tasks: “Geller can be seen taking out the stem of the watch to move its hands, maybe thinking that the move went unnoticed.”

Surreptitious blowing, bending, and using sleight-of-hand tricks seem to explain the inexplicable powers of Uri Geller, but what about those who claim to be able to rise into thin air and float or hover without benefit of any mechanical devices--in other words, to levitate themselves through the application of telekinesis? What might your horror story’s skeptical character say about this alleged paranormal ability? The Skeptic’s Dictionary attributes levitation to the use of “’invisible’ string, magnets, and other trickery.”

One of the most chilling levitation scenes occurs in The Exorcist, in which Regan MacNeil levitates out of her bed and hovers within a foot of the ceiling, shocking the priests who have been called to her house to exorcize the demon--or legion of demons--who are inhabiting her body. In her case, according to the film, at least, the devil made her do it, but how else can people levitate--or pretend to levitate themselves, others, or objects?

Saints are alleged to have levitated themselves, as have Indian fakirs. Likewise, witches claim to be able to make their bodies--or objects--float off the ground and soar through the air. (When witches levitate, it’s known as transvection.)

In one levitation trick, a magician used a steel beam to support his assistant, whom he was claiming to levitate. After she was horizontal above the stage floor, he passed a hula hoop around her body, from her head to her feet. The section of the hoop that he held between his hands had been removed so that the resulting gap could be passed “through” the beam, creating the illusion that there was no obstruction to impede the passage of the hoop. The result was to make it appear that the woman really was floating unsupported in midair, or levitating. The effect was quite amazing--until the magician revealed how he’d accomplished the trick. In a videotape on The Skeptic’s Dictionary website, famed magician Chris Angel demonstrates another method of levitating.

Your horror story’s skeptical character could challenge a levitating character by suggesting that the trick is accomplished in one of these ways or by the use of another technique. Magicians have worked out several variations by which to make themselves, other persons, and even inanimate objects “float” in, through, and around in thin air--or seem to do so.

Sources Cited and Further Reading:

The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Live Science
Federation of American Scientists
NOVA Online
MythBusters

In Part IV of “Alternative Explanations,” we’ll consider how your horror story’s skeptical character might debunk claims that such creatures as vampires, werewolves, and zombies exist.

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.