Just What I Needed: Another Exercise!

 Copyright 2021 by Gary Pullman

 

We not only learn new skills but hone old ones by pausing in plotting, writing, and revision to practice our skill at plotting, writing, and revision. (In my opinion, a writer can always improve by practicing, until he or she reaches perfection like William Shakespeare.)

The exercises should be challenging; they should also be something we can crosscheck with the results established writers might have produced had they performed the same exercises. Oh, yes! They should also relate to horror stories or to horror movies. Here are three.

 

I. You Are What You Do

1. List several personality traits for your protagonist. Then, explain what your protagonist does, based on one or more of these traits, in a specific situation. For example, perhaps your protagonist wants to start life anew with her boyfriend, who refuses to marry her until he's paid off his debts.

2. Instead of explaining that a protagonist is in love with another particular character, show the protagonist being in love with this other character.

 

II. Do What You Will

Briefly identify a motive for each of these actions: (1) following a monster's trail; (2) exploring an allegedly haunted castle; and (3) spying on neighbors.

 

III. Defiance Punished

Identify three interdictions that, defied, result in a character’s suffering or death:

1.

2.

3.

 

Here's How They Did It

  

I. You Are What You Do

 

1. Asked to deposit a real estate client's cash down payment for a house he is buying his daughter, Marion Crane instead steals the money from her boss and runs away to meet her boyfriend (Joseph Stefano, Psycho screenwriter).

 

 

2. Scottie stared at Madeliene, as she sat across the room, unaware of him. An image of a painting flashed in his mind. The lady's portrait's contours fit those of the woman before him; it was a perfect likeness of her, he thought. Later, when he entered a florist's shop with her at his side, she seemed ethereal, more fantasy than reality, and the light was as luminous as the flowers were bright and beautiful, their fragrance an embodiment of the very scent of the woman herself. It was as if they alone existed and as if the shop were a sunlit garden, a paradise created for them alone (Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, Vertigo).

 

II. Do What You Will

 

 

1. following a monster's trail: to rescue a woman captured by the monster (James Creelman and Ruth Rose, King Kong)

 

 

2.    exploring an allegedly haunted castle: to prove that the castle is not haunted (“The Red Room” by H. G. Wells)

 

 

3. spying on neighbors: to pass the time while recuperating from a broken leg (John Michael Hayes, Rear Window).

 

III. Defiance Punished

 

1. Glen Lantz  is told not to go to sleep; when he does, he is killed (Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street)

 

 

2. Caroline Ellis is told not to enter a locked room; after she does, she is paralyzed and her body is possessed by a hoodoo practitioner (Ehren Kruger, Skeleton Key)

 

3. A character is told not to enter a closed area of a national park; when he does so, he is killed by a bear, and the animal then pursues his girlfriend (Adam MacDonald, Backcountry)

 

The Means to an End, or Catch and Release

 Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In plotting horror fiction, as in other genres, it helps to think of the phrase “a means to an end.”

The “means” are the means that the writer employs to encourage the reader to continue to read the story.

The “end” is the theme, or the “meaning,” of the story of film, the point of the narrative or the drama, what it is all “about.”

Here is a simple illustration: an attractive young woman in a bikini is the “means”; the reason for her being a part of a story about a serial killer who preys upon attractive young women in bikinis is the “end.”

We can think of the means as a series of hooks. The writer hooks the reader, but releases him or her; hooks the reader again, and releases him or her a second time; hooks the reader yet again, and releases him or her a third time; and so on, until, at last, the writer releases the reader for good, at the end of the story.

Too often, writers think of not a series of hooks, but of a single hook: the hook that lands the reader, that succeeds in getting him or her to read the rest of the story. However, the idea that even a short story has but a single hook does not work, and it does not work for a novella or a novel, either. (It also doesn't apply to a feature-length film—and what we say here, in this post, about written stories also applies in general to filmed ones; simply substitute “screenwriter” for “writer,” “film” or “movie” for “story” or “novel,” and “audience,” “spectator,” or “viewer” for “reader.”)

We might also note that every hook leaves behind a question which is answered either sooner or later. The hooks (usually actions) generate questions; the questions generate suspense. Once the suspense is satisfied—temporarily—the next hook is set.

Let's take, as an example, H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room.” Here are the hooks:

Hook 1: Castle caretakers warn a young man who has recently arrived not to spend the night in the Red Room, which, they say, is haunted.

Question: Will the young man be dissuaded?

Hook 2: The warning is repeated.

Question: Will the young man be dissuaded?

Hook 3: The warning is repeated again.

Question: Will the young man be dissuaded?

Hook 4: The young man proceeds upstairs to the Red Room.

Question: Will the young man continue to the room or change his mind and depart from the castle?

Hook 5: The young man locks himself inside the room.

Question: Will he stay in the room?

Hook 6: Having secured himself inside the room, the young man inspects the chamber for any signs of secret entrances or hiding places.

Question: Will the young man find any secret entrances or hiding places.?

Hook 7: A candle goes out.

Question: Why?

Hook 8: The young man suspects a draft, but he cannot find a source of an air current.

Question: What caused the draft that blew out the candle—or was it a draft that extinguished the flame?

Hooks 9-12*: One by one, additional candles are apparently snuffed.

Question: What caused the drafts that blew out these additional candles—or were they drafts that extinguished the flame?

Hook 13: The fire in the fireplace is abruptly extinguished.

Question: What caused the fire to go out? (Here, the reader may draw a tentative conclusion: a draft of air certainly could not have extinguished the fire!)

Hook 14: The young man panics, running through the room, and is knocked out.

Question: Did ghosts attack him?

Hook 15: The castle's caretakers ask him whether the room is haunted, as rumored?

Question: What will the young man answer: is the room haunted?

End: The room is haunted—by the young man's own imagination, which ran away with him.

*The numbers are invented, as the exact number escape me at present.

While the incidents of a plot must be linked by cause and effect, they should also be related through actions, or hooks, that cause questions, generating suspense, until, at the end, all is explained.

But must stories be explained? Isn't ambiguity best, in some cases? That's a question for a future post.

The Tzvetan Todorov Plot

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Dr. Tzvetan Todorov differentiates between fiction that is fantastic, uncanny, or marvelous.

 

A story is fantastic, he says, if it cannot be resolved as either uncanny or marvelous. For example, at the end of Henry James's novel The Turn of the Screw (1898), it remains unclear whether the ghosts are real or simply products of the governess's hallucinations.

A story is uncanny if its seemingly fantastic incidents can be explained rationally or scientifically. According to this understanding, H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” (1894) is uncanny: the ghost that allegedly haunts the castle in which the protagonist has come to spend the night turns out to be the invention of his imagination, an effect of his fear.

A story is marvelous if its incidents cannot be rationally or scientifically explained. Stephen King's short story “1408” (1999) is marvelous, because the ghosts (or demons) that allegedly haunt the hotel room in which the writer spends the night are, in fact, truly supernatural.

Whether intentionally or not, Todorov offers a formula for plotting fantastic, uncanny, or marvelous fiction. It sounds complicated, but it's actually fairly simple. This is how it works:

1. Develop a single situation that can be understood in either natural and or terms or that can be interpreted by reference to the supernatural or faith.
2. During the course of the story, indicate that the situation may be supernatural.
3. Show that the situation actually is supernatural or natural in origin of character or that the situation cannot be resolved in either way.

Fiction provides many models of this approach. Here are a few:

Uncanny:“The Damned Thing” (short story) (1893) by Ambrose Bierce; “The Premature Burial” (short story) by Edgar Allan Poe (1844); A Tough Tussle” (short story) by Ambrose Bierce (1888)

 Marvelous: The Exorcist (novel) (1971) by William Peter Blatty; The Sixth Sense (movie) (1999) directed by M. Night Shyamalan; “Dracula's Guest” (short story) (1914) by Bram Stoker

Fantastic: The Exorcism of Emily Rose (movie) (2005) directed by Scott Derrickson;“The Birds” (short story) (1955) by Daphne du Maurier; Let's Scare Jessica to Death (movie) (1971) directed by John Hancock

By analyzing these stories and others that use the Tzvetan Todorov plot, we can see what specific techniques their writers use to create and sustain the ambiguity that results from the tension between the two opposite interpretations of the stories' incidents, that of the natural and that of the supernatural.

Uncanny: In writing “The Red Room,” Wells withholds the actual (natural) cause of the allegedly supernatural incident (the ghost's haunting of the red room) that the protagonist investigates. By doing so, Wells allows the extinguishing of the candles and the fire in the room's fireplace to seem to be the work of the ghost. His panic causes him to run through the chamber in the dark, seeking escape, which results in his knocking himself unconscious when he collides with a piece of furniture. It is only upon awakening that he realizes that the red room was haunted only by his own fear-fueled imagination.

Marvelous: In The Exorcist, Regan MacNeil's strange behavior causes her mother Chris to seek both medical and psychiatric help for Regan after Chris cannot rationally account for Regan's behavior. Both sciences fail to help Regan, who becomes worse. To help Regan, Chris eventually turns to a priest, Father Damien Karras, despite her own atheism. Through exorcism, at the cost of his own life, Father Karras rids Regan of the demon that possesses her. By postponing the revelation that Regan's apparent demonic possession is, in fact, genuine, Blatty creates and sustains ambiguity as to whether the possession is apparent (the result of a physiological or mental disorder) or real.

Withholding the cause of the seemingly fantastic, as Wells does in “The Red Room,” or showing the failure of both reason and science to account for a seemingly supernatural incident before revealing that the incident actually is fantastic, as Blatty does, introduces the possibility of the fantastic while establishing it as subject to natural or rational interpretation or as genuinely marvelous. 

Other techniques that writers using what is here referred to as the Tzvetan Todorov plot include:

• Swinging back and forth between the natural or scientific explanation of an incident that only at first appears to be marvelous and never explaining the incident's inexplicable mystery (i. e., implying its truly marvelous character).
• Explaining, eventually, that the apparently fantastic incident is the result of a trick; it is a hoax, a prank, or a publicity stunt.
• Explaining, eventually, that the apparently fantastic incident is the enactment of a rite or ritual performed by people who genuinely believe that the act is supernatural.
• Confusing one state of affairs (e. g., a cataleptic trance) with another state of affairs (e. g., death).

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 Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Satisfy Curiosity

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

“Human beings,” communications professor Jib Fowles note, “are curious by nature, interested in the world around them, and intrigued by tidbits of knowledge and new developments.” In adverting, such appeals are often satisfied by the information that advertisements deliver. Unless a product is new to the market, the item advertised is usually already familiar to the advertisement's audience. In this case, the information such advertisements convey is likely to be about some “improvement” to the product, an increase in its size, or the addition of a new ingredient.

In horror fiction, the person, place, or thing about which curiosity is excited is apt to be unfamiliar to readers or moviegoers. In horror fiction, the anomalous makes us curious. We want to know about someone, someplace, or something because it is abnormal, aberrant, deviant, atypical, bizarre, singular, strange, or weird. Human cognition and experience is reducible to six categories, each of which relates to a specific question or set of questions: who?, what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, and how much? or how many? (quantity in number or volume). 

Each of these categories and related questions is further associated with a real-world, or existential, referent: why?, with an agent or an agency; what?, with an action or an object; when?, with time or duration; where?, with location; how?, with method, process, or technique; why?, with cause, motive, purpose, or meaning; how many? with quantity in number; and how much?, with quantity in volume. All six categories relate to cognitive element, identity.

A table neatly summarizes these relationships:

Question	Existential Referent	Cognitive Element
Who?	Agent or agency	Identity
What?	Action or object	Identity
When?	Time or duration	Identity
Where?	Location	Identity
How?	Method, process, or technique	Identity
Why?	Cause, motive, purpose, or meaning	Identity
How many? How much?	Quantity (in number or volume)	Identity

It is with regard to these categories that curiosity is aroused, either by ignorance or by the appearance of the anomalous or the extraordinary (or, most often, by the combination of the two). In other words, in horror fiction (as in life), questions about the identities of agents or agencies, actions or objects, times or duration, locations, methods, processes, techniques, causes, motives, purposes, meanings, and quantities make us curious.

As we discovered in a previous post, the suppression of knowledge about the origin or nature of an entity, a force, or another kind of phenomenon maintains mystery and suspense. It also maintains curiosity, of course. Since we've already covered this ground, let's focus on the other major cause of curiosity, the appearance itself of the anomalous or the extraordinary.

We're familiar with this figure of ancient Greek mythology, although it was doubtlessly astonishing enough to us the first time we made her acquaintance, which brings up a point: all things are extraordinary the first time that we encounter them. Often, they can be made extraordinary again, by transforming them in some way:

Unless we're experts in a particular field of inquiry, many of the phenomena that are familiar to the experts will be new—and, therefore, unfamiliar—to us, as laypersons. I'd never seen this creature before (or so I'd thought), but zoologists have, and when they identified it as a turtle without a shell, I realized I have seen the animal before, just not without its shell. The mystery was solved, but, in the process, the extraordinary became ordinary (sort of).

As Edgar Allan Poe said (and showed, many times in his own work), by combining old forms in new ways, an author creates new visions of reality and suggests fresh perspectives on our lives. In the process, writers (and other artists) also evoke readers' or audiences' curiosity and appeal to their need to satisfy this curiosity.

Plenty of horror stories and movies appeal to reader's or viewers' need to satisfy their curiosity. We'll limit our discussion to just three of them: H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room,” the film adaptation of Stephen King's short story “1408,” and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 movie Psycho (1960).

Having absconded with her boss's money instead of depositing it in the bank, Marion Crane is forced by a storm to stop at an out-of-the-way motel. She waits in her car, but no one in the office comes outside to assist her, so she dashes inside, only to find the office empty. Going outside again, she notices a light on in a second-story window of a Victorian house on a hill overlooking the motel. Seeing a woman walk past the window, she returns to her car and honks her horn. A young man hastens from the house, down three flights of stairs, and crosses the parking lot, inviting Marion into the motel's office, where she registers while he makes small talk about the decline in the motel's business after the new highway bypassed the motor lodge.

The sight of the house, large and imposing, that looks down on the motel, emphasizes the Victorian residence as a presence. Overseeing all that takes place within its purview, it sees all, knows all, at least in relation to its manager, Norman Bates. Literally looking down on him, the house also represents the judgment of his mother, the dominant personality he has created within his disordered mind. His every action, thought, and emotion is controlled by Mother, who makes her disdain for Marion and women in general known and soon puts an end to any possibility that Norman will be able to develop a romantic relationship with Marion (not that this seems at all likely).

By showing the audience not just a house, but this house—large, imposing, dark, and located on a hill high above the motel Norman manages—Hitchcock excites his viewers' curiosity. As the movie progresses and the audience learns more about this abode, their curiosity, although partly satisfied, is further aroused, as new mysteries are revealed. Why, for example, is there an outline of a body in the mattress of the bed in Norman's mother's bedroom? What other dark secrets does the house hold?

In dreams, some believe, houses symbolize the human personality. The attic is the intellect, the basement the unconscious. The bedroom represents sexuality; the kitchen, domesticity and nourishment; the dining room, appetites; the living room, personal interests. If one follows adopts such suggestions, applying them to the characters in Hitchcock's film and the incidents that transpire because of their actions, the film may take a new level of psychological complexity, although many would reject such an interpretation as unscientific and speculative. In any case, the house is certainly a symbolic presence that exerts a malevolent influence on the thoughts, emotions, and actions of its residents, Norman, and his “Mother”—and it certainly evokes and sustains the audiences need to satisfy their curiosity.

Stephen King's 1999 short story “1408,” and the 2007 motion picture of the same title based on it, are, in effect, reversals of H. G. Wells's 1894 short story, “The Red Room.” In all three stories, the protagonist (Mike Enslin in King's story and the movie adaptation of it and an unnamed young man in Wells's story) are warned multiple times in the strongest terms not to go through with their intention of investigating the supernatural events that have allegedly occurred in a hotel (King) and a castle (Wells). In each story, the protagonist is skeptical of the existence of supernatural entities. Disregarding the warnings not to investigate, both Enslin and Wells's protagonist stay overnight, putting the reports of supernatural activity to the test.

The multiple, fervent warnings arouse readers' and viewers' curiosity, as does the question of whether the protagonists' respective investigations will prove or disprove the allegations that the places they investigate are haunted.

In King's story and the film adaptation of it, Enslin discovers that a supernatural presence, ghostly or demonic, haunts the hotel room in which he stayed, barely surviving the experience, whereas Wells's protagonist finds that only his own fear, which has caused his imagination to run away with him, haunts the castle chamber in which he'd spent the night.

According to literary critic Tzevetan Todorov, fantastic literature tends to resolve the issue of whether narrative events are supernatural by either affirming or denying this proposition. If science can explain the events, they are no longer fantastic, but uncanny; otherwise, the events are marvelous. Whereas Wells's story suggests that the events his protagonist experienced are uncanny (the are explainable as the results of an imagination overly excited by fear), King's story and the film based on it both suggest that science cannot explain the incidents that Enslin experienced, so they are no longer fantastic, but marvelous. Thus, in this sense, King's story is a reversal of Wells's tale.

One more point needs to be highlighted. Fowles does not say that most advertisements appeal to people's curiosity. He says that they appeal to people's need to satisfy their curiosity, mostly by becoming informed, i. e., by being educated, about an advertised product or a service. The appeal to the need to satisfy curiosity is a means of generating suspense, which will keep readers reading or viewers viewing as they anticipate the moment at which all shall be made known and the mystery of the nature or the origin of the phenomenon the story's characters have encountered is resolved.