Saturday, August 17, 2019
Scientist Turned Ghostbuster (and Vampirebuster)
Monday, October 29, 2018
Eerie Paintings and Their Equally Eerie Interpretations
- A four-year-old girl, Samantha Houston, a US senator's daughter, tumbled down the hotel's grand staircase as she pursued a ball.
- Samantha's ghost is attracted to the painting.
- Samantha's ghost is trying to “communicate” with hotel staff and guests through the painting.
- Observers witness the portrait's “expressions change” over time.
Friday, August 24, 2018
Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Autonomy
Probably one of the clearest examples horror fiction's tapping into readers' need for autonomy is Stephen King's first novel, Carrie (1974). It recounts the difficult childhood of adolescent Carietta (“Carrie”) White. Her mother, Margaret, is a fanatical Christian fundamentalist who projects her own personal and sexual insecurities onto her daughter, referring to Carrie's breasts as “dirty pillows” and suggesting Carrie is a slut because of her interest in boys. Margaret says Carrie is a hell-bound sinner certain to be damned if she doesn't watch her ways and reinforces her own dictates as to her own dictates with physical abuse. At school, Carrie, who is unpopular, is often treated cruelly and with contempt.
The onset of menstruation is a terrifying to Carrie, who is unprepared for its occurrence, her mother having taught her nothing about puberty and its effects. Her classmates taunt her, throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her in the communal shower following physical education class, when Carrie begins to menstruate, shouting at her to “plug it up!”
King says he based Carrie on two schoolgirls he knew during his high school years:
King says he wondered what it was like for the first girl to grow up in a home like hers.
Without parental guidance and ostracized by her classmates as a social pariah, Carrie has no guidance (one of Fowles's fifteen “basic needs”), but she has enough courage to attempt to escape her mother's domineering influence and her schoolmates' cruelty as she attempts to establish autonomy, especially after she discovers she possesses telekinetic abilities.
When one of her tormentors repents of her cruel treatment of Carrie, asking her boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to escort Carrie to the prom, Carrie is overjoyed, despite her mother's insistence that going to the dance is a sinful “carnal” act, and she makes herself a red velvet dress. Margaret is afraid of her daughter, convinced that Carrie's telekinetic abilities prove that she is a witch. (Witchcraft, Margaret contends, runs in the family, appearing in every other generation.)
At first, things seem to go well at the prom, until one of Carrie's tormentors, Chris Hargensen, arranges with her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, to pour pigs' blood on Carrie and her date. In the process, Tommy is killed.
Humiliated, Carrie then launches her revenge, locking the students in the room, electrocuting several of them, and incinerating the rest. On her way home, she destroys much of her hometown, snapping power lines and destroying gas pumps to cause massive explosions.
At home, Margaret, believing her daughter to be possessed by the devil, attempts to stab Carrie to death, by Carrie thwarts her mother by stopping Margaret's heart. (in the film adaptation, Carrie kills Margaret by piercing her with knives in a parody of the crucifixion of Christ.) Thereafter, as she makes her way to the roadhouse at which she was conceived (according to Margaret, as the result of “marital rape”), Billy and Chris attempt to run over her with Billy's car, but she crashes their vehicle, killing her would-be murderers. Carrie dies of the mortal wound inflicted by her mother.
Sixteen-year-old Carrie, despite her mother's abusive treatment of her and her classmates' cruelty, attempts to gain independence, defying her mother as she adopts her own values and beliefs and to find acceptance at school by attending the prom with a popular boy. She also exchanges her drab attire for the red velvet dress she made especially for the occasion, a coming-out affair of sorts for the troubled teen. Despite Carrie's lack of parental guidance, the insecurities and fears her psychotic mother attempts to project onto her, and her schoolmates' ostracism and torment of her, Carrie sees that life is to be embraced, not feared, and she courageously attempts to exercise autonomy as she takes charge of herself and her own life.
King suggests that, despite such courage—and despite the paranormal powers Carrie possesses—his protagonist's efforts are in vain because several other “basic needs” have not been met, such as the need for affiliation, the need for nurture, and the need for guidance. Without the fulfillment of these needs, she is unable to satisfy the need for autonomy. By denying Carrie the fulfillment of her need for autonomy, King endorses the importance not only of this need but the others which support it.
Friday, July 20, 2018
Body Horror and the Ghost in the Machine
The ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought into the strange and mystical. . . . To be appreciated, you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.
Such grotesque exaggeration is typical of body horror no less than it is of any other type of popular fiction. The body in which the mind is trapped frequently experiences deviant sex, violence, injury, deformity, or death of the most horrific kinds, as these examples attest:
Bentley Little's novels. As we observe in “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the Nature of Sin,” this author frequently describes scenes of deviant sex acts, not only to titillate his readers, but also to suggest that such behavior “is a shorthand way of suggesting the sinfulness and impiety of modern humanity.” Since we've already examined Little's use of sadistic and other deviant forms of sex in this previous post, there's no need to revisit it in detail in this essay. Those interested in the discussion need only access the link (above).
Slasher movies and splatter films. Violence and injury are staples of most horror fiction, but they are especially prevalent in such slasher flicks as I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Scream (1996), and Halloween (1978), to name but a few, and in splatter films, such as Dawn of the Dead (1978), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Hostel (2005), Turistas (2006), Saw (2004), and many others. In many splatter films, the violence is so extreme and so gratuitous that this subgenre is also known as “torture porn.” Even these movies, though, don't deliver the shock and horror of the exploding head in Scanners (1981).
The mutant cannibals of The Hills Have Eyes (1977; sequel, 1995), the Phantom in the silent film The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Dr. Phibes (The Abominable Dr. Phibes [1971]), Belial (Basket Case [1982]), Freddy Krueger (the Nightmare on Elm Street series [1984-2010] [so far]), and Seth Brundle (The Fly [1986]) are among the most grotesque and, in some cases, to some extent, the most pitiable deformed characters in horror movies.
Death is so ubiquitous in horror movies that a list of the movies in which it appears is probably unnecessary, but films in which the causes of death are among the most horrific include Elvira Parker's smashed head (Deadly Friend [1986]) (although it does look less than realistic) and, again, it's hard to top the exploding head in Scanners (1981). A runner-up might be the death inflicted by the otherworldly embryonic “chest-buster” in Alien (1979).
Movies are good at showing the blood, guts, and gore associated with body horror, but they can't compare with the printed word, because body horror is not as much about blood, guts, and gore as it is the suffering that goes on in the mind. Body horror is more about the mental anguish that we suffer as minds trapped inside the prisons of our flesh. It is in the mind, not the body, that horror, terror, and disgust occur. These emotions are the effects of these afflictions, but, in body horror, the effects count more than their causes. That's the reason that a master of horror such as Poe can cause mental anguish—more horror and terror and disgust—in a short story such as “The Premature Burial,” which takes place inside the coffin of a man who's been buried alive, than even the best horror movie producer can create. Poe has the power of the written word, the medium of cognition, at his command; the director must rely on nothing more than pictures and sounds. The body, without the mind, is only an object. A corpse has no fear of the dentist—or of the psychotic serial killer. It is only when the mind and the body are alive and the mind is trapped inside the body, a “ghost in the machine,” that the dentist's drill or the serial killer's knife is a thing of terror beyond imagining.
Friday, July 18, 2014
"Large. . . and Startling Figures," Indeed
Friday, July 11, 2014
The Monster as Sexual Menace
On one level, most horror fiction is about sex. Monsters are rapists. Monsters are penises. Monsters are sperm. Monsters assault, force their way in, invade. Their victims are vaginas, wombs, and ova, disguised as men and women or, less often, children. Because monsters are often of or related to body parts or their secretions—saliva, mucus, semen, blood—they themselves often produce visceral reactions and such dark emotions as fear and loathing, disgust and repulsion.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
"The Flowering of the Strange Orchid": A Cautionary Tale
“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” is a cautionary tale, the moral of which may not be so much that it’s not nice to fool with (or try to tame) Mother Nature as it is that Nature, despite her beauty, can be, and often is, treacherous, dangerous, and even deadly. The storyteller alludes to a study by Charles Darwin in which the naturalist discovered that “the whole structure of an ordinary orchid-flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant.” The moth was important, in this scheme, as it were, only with regard to its role as a courier or, more accurately, a midwife. In the case of the strange orchid of H. G. Wells’ short story, the same seems to be true of human beings: the orchid collector Batten died that the orchid could live. The plant feeds upon blood, and it was Batten’s blood that it fed upon, killing him. The natives of the Andaman Islands preserved Batten’s collection of orchids, including the hemophiliac flower, until the dead collector’s colleague, an ornithologist, returned from a trip he had undertaken into the island’s interior to retrieve the flowers and bring them back to England.
Wells’ story is a slap in the face, so to speak, to those who believe that the universe is a product of divine design. Human beings, who fancy themselves the crown of God’s creation, are no more important or purposeful than the strange orchid that would survive by bleeding them to death, as it had Batten, whose death had been blamed on “jungle-leeches.” In fact, human beings are but a food source for the orchid, just as moths are midwives, so to speak, according to Darwin, to “an ordinary orchid-flower.” In themselves, human beings are often of little, if any, true value to the cosmos they inhabit, as the narrator’s description of the protagonist, Winter-Wedderburn, indicates:
He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employments.Instead, Winter-Wedderburn busies himself with a hobby, the growing of orchids in his “one ambitious little hothouse,” a pastime no more significant or beneficial to humanity than any other such amusement as collecting “stamps or coins,” translating “Horace,” binding “books,” or inventing “new species of diatoms.” Everything that human beings do to pass their time is insignificant, Wells seems to imply, because human beings themselves are insignificant, just as are the orchids that the protagonist grows or any other life that the earth has spawned. The universe is absurd; therefore, everything in it, including life in general and human life in particular, is also meaningless and without value. As Winter-Wedderburn himself says, “Nothing ever does happen to me,” and the things that do happen to others are of no real significance; during the past week, Harvey, an acquaintance of Winter-Wedderburn, to whom things do happen, “picked up sixpence. . . his chicks had staggers. . . his cousin came home from Australia. . . and he broke his ankle.”
Nevertheless, plants, like human beings, struggle to survive, the strange orchid extracting blood from its hosts as “an nary orchid-flower” attracts moths to carry its pollen among itself and its neighboring plants. The functions of organisms, whether the collection of coins or stamps, the raising of orchids, the attraction of pollinating moths, or the bleeding of human hosts, are all without any more purpose than the absurd struggle of the species for its survival.
Ironically, believing that it was “jungle-leeches” that drained Batten’s blood, the protagonist tells his housekeeper, the strange orchid may have been “the very plant that cost him his life to obtain,” and, at the end of the story, it is his own death-struggle with the orchid that, giving him something to talk about, revitalizes his pathetic existence, saving his own life, as it were. His housekeeper rescues Winter-Wedderburn from the orchid, as it feeds upon his blood, allowing him to live to tell the tale:
The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and putrescent. The door banged intermittingly in the morning breeze, and all the array of Wedderburn’s orchids was shriveled and prostrate. But Wedderburn himself was bright and garrulous upstairs in the story of his strange adventure.As is often the case with Well’s shorter fiction, the true horror is beneath the surface of the story, not so much in the incidents as in what they suggest. In this case, the story’s action implies that human existence, which occurs in an absurd universe in which the struggle for existence is meaningless, is purposeless and pathetic. What would have been lost had the strange orchid’s flowering led to the death of the tale’s protagonist? Very little. His insignificance, like that of the story’s readers, is the true horror of “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”
Monday, August 11, 2008
The Birth of Monsters and Other Poems
In previous posts ("Horrific Poems: A Sampler" and "Charles Baudelaire's 'Carrion'"), I shared a few poems in the horror genre. In this post, I'm sharing a few of my own verses, which, hopefully, will be found diabolical enough to thrill, if not to chill.
I chose the sonnet because of its rhyme scheme. The sonnet form I've selected requires that, in the first twelve lines, the last word of each alternate line must rhyme. It also requires that the last two lines constitute a rhyming couplet. The overall rhyme scheme often forces an image, a trope, a thought, or a sentiment, thereby, helping, as it were, to write the poem itself, as if the rhyme scheme were something of a muse.
To The Wind
The wind blows free, but you and me,
We are captives, bound by a force
Mightier than stone, field, or tree:
Gravity determines our course.
Within the confines of the earth,
We may go wand'ring as we please;
Our minds may conceive and bring forth
Flights of fancy, winged fantasies,
Divorced of flesh and wed to naught,
With no authority to say
Nay, ye have transcended what ought
Be thought or tried by mortal clay.
Fettered by our humanity,
A faint breeze is cause for envy.
The Birth of Monsters
Beneath the canopies of trees, shadows,
Thick and dark, fall across stained, moss-covered
Headstones, and the rising winter’s wind blows;
Leafless branches, like clawed fingers, scratch; stirred,
By a sudden gust, wreaths and flowers leap
From vases overturned, blow and scatter,
And, were the cadavers not buried deep,
They might, clotted with gore and blood-splattered,
Rise from their coffins and their graves, to reel
And stagger across the dark churchyard’s grounds,
Insensible and unable to feel,
Among the tombs and the burial mounds.
Look! Listen! The imagination warns;
Of such wild nights are ghastly monsters born!
The Great Debate
In life, the skeptic and the man of faith
Each sought to refute the other one’s view,
The former claiming that to see a wraith
Meant one had lost his reason, for, ‘tis true,
That quick is quick and dead is dead; buried,
Bodies are removed from society,
Fit for naught but food on which worms may feed.
The latter argued that the soul, set free
By the body’s death, ascends unto God,
In whose image and likeness it was made,
Leaving but mortal flesh beneath the sod,
The transcendent spirit beyond decay.
Their passionate arguments have long since
Ended, unsure--by their own deaths silenced.
Fiendish Kinsmen
Winged, fanged things with claws, vague and indistinct,
Haunt the dark; furtive and stealthy, seldom
Are they seen, for which reason they are linked,
More often than not, with nightmare or some
Horrid fantasy, reason’s predators,
Slimed in mucus and enveloped in blood,
Stalking, or creeping, or slinking through gore,
Vile, evil things unseen since Noah’s flood,
The very spawn, perhaps, of murd’rous Cain,
Living embodiments of sin, exiled
From Eden, homeless, now, but for the brain
Of man, whose thoughts are both wicked and wild.
Not once were these mad fiends clearly described,
Yet we know them well, for we’re of their tribe.
The Book of Art, the Book of Life
The image, metaphor, and symbol each
Is plucked, as a leaf, from the tree of life
That it, pressed within an art book, may teach
The lesson of sorrow, anguish, or strife.
Authors may select a flower, a dove,
An ocean liner cruising the vast deep,
A rainbow shining in the sky above,
Or a road winding up a mountain steep;
Wordsworth wrote of a cloud of daffodils
Beneath a clear sky, both bright and azure,
Keats of a granary at autumn filled,
And Blake of a lamb, wooly-bright and pure;
Only in poems by Baudelaire and Poe
Does art blush to see blood and guts on show.
The Roulette Wheel
The roulette wheel, having been twirled, must whirl,
Its silver ball leaping from red to black,
Having, from the Croupier’s hand been hurled,
A fortune risked upon its fateful track.
Past the even and the odd, the small ball
Runs round the tilted track within the wheel;
Where it shall stop, no one yet knows, but all
Watch, transfixed, to see which fate it shall seal--
In Europe, thirty seven chances be,
One more in American destinies:
In the modern world, our technology
Has replaced the Norns, Moirae, and Parcae:
The wheel spins with pain, grief, and misery,
Red blood, black death, and silvery decay.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The Etymology of Horror
Let’s start with the word “horror” itself. According to our source, this term originates in Old French, where it originally meant “bristling, roughness, rudeness, shaking, trembling” and had the sense of meaning “to bristle with fear, shudder.” It was associated with the ruffling of feathers and the “rough” appearance of the hedgehog. The word “horror,” our source shows, is related to quite a few other terms, including:
- “horrific”
- “pall”
- “horrendous”
- “horrid”
- “hideous”
- “abhor”
- “caprice”
- “gruesome”
- “creep”
- “phobia”
- “urchin”
- “gothic.”
The word “horror,” we may observe, references the physiological aspects of fear, reminding us that horror, like other emotions, has not only a psychological, but also a physical, even a visceral, nature. It is as much of the body as it is of the mind, making the hair to stand on end and the frame to shudder. A poem, a short story, a novel, or a film that can cause such a visceral reaction is successful as a horror story, whatever its demerits or other merits may be.
Since we’ve considered the term “monster” in previous posts, we won’t repeat its consideration here, although its etymology and those of the words associated with it are quite interesting.
Where there’s a monster, there’s likely to be a victim. According to our source, this word derives from the Latin language, where it originally referred to a “person or animal killed as a sacrifice” and is associated with such other terms as:
- “con”
- “sponge”
- “patsy”
- “sandbag”
- “immolate”
- “Harry”
- “mark”
- “humor.”
(Concerning “humor,” our source offers a handy, dandy table of terms listing “types of humor,” which originally appeared in H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage [1926].) (One never knows what unexpected treasures he or she will come across in the pursuit of knowledge.)
Victims often bleed, which brings us to “blood.” According to our source, this term comes from Old English, where it meant “to swell, gush, spurt.” As one might expect, it is associated with a large family, as it were, of fellow terms:
- “bloody”
- “sanguine”
- “Rh factor”
- “bless”
- “sanguinary”
- “Aceldama”
- “bleed”
- “-emia”
- “sambo”
- “consanguinity”
- “O”
- “dreary”
- “sang-froid”
- “vampire”
- “ichors”
- “gory”
- “Inca”
- “raw”
- “blue blood”
- “antibody”
- “circulation”
- “arena”
- “corpuscle”
- “spirit”
- “hoopoe”
- “gout”
- “red-handed”
- “carnal”
- “sangria”
- “bask”
- “Rambo”
- “angio-”
- “bucko”
- “gore”
- “cinnabar”
- “Pegasus”
- “donor”
- “coronary”
- “hemophilia”
- “flux”
- “vein”
- “quadroon”
- “stanch”
- “hyperglycemia”
- “hypoglycemia”
- “vendetta”
- “septicemia”
- “octoroon.”
Some of these associates have interesting origins or histories themselves. “Bless” refers to the former tradition of marking the body with blood so as to consecrate it, and alluded to “a blood sprinkling on pagan altars.” “Sanguinary” meant “characterized by slaughter.” “Aceldama” is the name of the potter’s field (a cemetery for indigent corpses) “purchased with the blood-money given to Judas Iscariot” and, by extension, has come to mean any “place of bloodshed.” “Dreary” once meant to be “cruel, bloody.” “Ichors” is the vital fluid that flows through the veins of the Greek divinities, instead of blood. “Red-handed” referred to a “murderer caught in the act, with blood on the hands.” “Bask” originally meant to “wallow (in blood),” not sunlight. The mythological flying horse, Pegasus, was said to have sprung from the blood of the slain Medusa.
Like round, dynamic characters, words have both origins and histories--in short, lexicographic biographies. Knowing the lineage of a language’s terms enables a writer to discern possibilities for dramatic situations and twists. For example, knowing that a victim was originally a “person or animal killed as a sacrifice” could have led one to imagine a woman who was intended as a sacrifice not to a god or another supernatural being but, rather, to an animal--a gigantic ape, perhaps. Viola! King Kong! (The fact that this is not the origin of this story’s plot does not preclude the possibility that it could have been its inspiration, nor does it preclude the possibility for its being the actual inspiration for a wholly new story along similar lines.) Likewise, knowing that copses reside, as it were, in a cemetery that was “purchased with the blood-money given to Judas Iscariot” suggests some horrific possibilities to the imaginative thinker, particularly one who is in search of a vehicle for yet another tale of vampires or zombies, perhaps. Likewise, what might happen were a contemporary Heinrich Schlieman to find, instead of the ruins of Troy, a vial of ichors (or, for that matter, a little leftover nectar and ambrosia)?
Not only have the etymologies of words associated with horror fiction given us ideas for possible horror story plots, but they have also suggested a simple, but effective, means of testing the success of such literature: does it make the hair stand on end or the body shudder?
Monday, August 4, 2008
Sexing It Up, Part II
With few exceptions, horror fiction has a reputation for being puerile and jejune. One might add that this reputation, hard won, is well deserved. However, the same charge may be leveled accurately at any other genre of fiction and, indeed, has been leveled at many classics in mainstream fiction as well by the critics and contemporary authors of the day in which these literary classics made their debuts. It may be interesting to some to review the plots of a few of the more brazenly irrelevant examples of what might be termed erotic films. In doing so, it should be apparent to any that the flimsiest excuse for a model or an actress to doff her clothing was regarded as reason enough for her to do so. What is good for the goose of the sexploitation movie, one may argue further, should be good for the gander of the horror story. Violence and, indeed, gore needs no more persuasive or socially redeeming reason for being than erotica disguised as--well, let’s look at the rationales, suggested or stated directly, for the sexploitation films of the past and see just what reasons they do offer for their existence.
2069: A Sex Odyssey: Venus’ females (who, as it turns out, resemble the most beautiful women that planet Earth has to offer) visit our planet to fornicate with men so as to preserve their own species. Reason for being: Species survival.
The Beautiful, The Bloody, and the Bare: Behind Closed Doors: A nude photographer--no, he’s not nude; his models are--takes fine glamour shots unless the color red appears. The color of blood drives him to lust--for blood--and, therefore, to murder. Reason for being: Art for art’s sake.
Philosophy of a Knife: A documentary (kind of) concerning the Japanese version of Nazi Germany’s Dr. Mengele. (Okay, so this one does have a little real reason for its gratuitous displays of nudity, which make such displays no longer gratuitous, just nude.) Reason for being: Documentary of human villainy.
Bikini Airways: Sexy stewardesses find a way to earn their pay after their airlines seems to be going belly up financially: they rent their aircraft as a flying forum for wild bachelor parties. Reason for being: Financial survival.
Brigitta: Swingers’ fantasies about swinging. Reason for being: Uh, Brigitta?
Curse of the Erotic Tiki: A talisman sold at a bikini shop causes whoever wears it to lose her sexual inhibitions. Reason for being: Magic and enchantment.
Okay, now that we’ve taken a squint at some of the lamer sexploitation flicks and their reasons for being, let’s look at a few horror movie plots to see whether the excuses that they offer for their existence are any less lame.
Species: An alien female mates with Earthmen to avoid her species’ extinction. Reason for being: Species survival.
The Picture of Dorian Gray: Due to his sins, Dorian’s portrait ages while he stays young. Reason for being: Art for art’s sake.
Ed Gein: A transvestite killer wants his mom back--from the grave. Reason for being: Documentary of human villainy.
Hostel: An entrepreneur’s inn of supposed pleasure turns out to be a not-so-public house of pain. Reason for being: Financial survival.
The Abominable Dr. Phibes: The doctor is a rabbi, maybe, who uses the same sort of amulet that Moses apparently used to stir up the plagues in ancient Egypt, because he’s doing the same thing now, in modern America, using a set of his own similar charms. Reason for being: Magic and enchantment.
Wow! It looks like a tie, proving that other film genres--in this case, sexploitation films--offer excuses for their existence that are just as flimsy--in fact, identical at times--as those of the weak excuses that horror films advance for their existence. In fact, at times, it’s hard to tell the two genres apart, since many horror films are made to exploit the adolescent crowd, as are sexploitation films. Sex and violence both sell, and, with the former, as with the latter, there is often the added bonus of bikini-clad girls or actual nudity. What does a little prurience matter, along with the puerility or a little jiggle along with the jejunity? It’s all harmless fun until someone gets an eye poked out.
Friday, April 18, 2008
How to Haunt a House: Part III
One expects strange things to happen in a haunted house because, well, it’s haunted. Ghosts aren’t like us. They’re spirits. Of the departed. By all accounts, mythical, religious, literary, and otherwise, there’s a world of difference between the quick and the dead. Therefore, ghosts should be expected to do the unexpected, to behave in a bizarre manner, and to be frightening, if not terrifying. Many choose to set up housekeeping in a house, rather than in, say, a house trailer or a flophouse. Consequently, the house, haunted, may also be expected to do the unexpected, to behave in a bizarre manner, and to be frightening, if not terrifying. In other words, if a house is truly haunted, one is entitled to expect to see (and, often, to hear, smell, taste, and feel) signs and symptoms of is condition. A home may be where the heart it, but a haunted home is where the horror is.
Anyone who has ever read a story or seen a movie about a haunted house (which is to say virtually everyone) knows some of the things that happen in such a place. Let’s consider these phenomena in relation to the senses by which they are perceived:
Sight
Walls or ceilings (or both) drip blood. Bathroom faucets pour blood. Black slime oozes from the walls. Walls bulge. Floors rear or buckle. Stairs flatten to form long, steep ramps. Mirrors exhibit horrific images. Furniture or dishes move by themselves, and are sometimes thrown across kitchens, dining rooms, or other chambers. Appliances turn off and on by themselves. The press of a hidden lever reveals a hidden room. Trapdoors drop into basements or water-filled wells. Oil paintings depict ghastly scenes, and the eyes of the subjects of portraits seem to follow the observer wherever he or she goes. Flies or wasps or insects may swarm within the house. Horrifying messages, written in blood, may appear on walls or other surfaces. The house’s floor plan may change overnight or even more abruptly. Doors may open upon other dimensions or even hell itself. And, of course, sooner or later, the ghosts themselves--or something even worse--will make a grand entrance.
Hearing
Strange noises are heard in the attic or basement. Doors slam shut. Mysterious footsteps are heard in vacant rooms or hallways. Doors may open or close of their own accord. Shadows may be cast by invisible forms or figures. Pets may behave strangely--cats may hiss or dogs may bark or growl for no apparent reason or may run from something that only they seem able to sense. Moans, groans, cries, or voices may be heard when no one is there or music may be heard when there is no musical instrument in the house.
Taste
Familiar foods may taste bitter, sour, or disgusting. Things that do not have a flavor may develop flavors--nasty ones, of course.
Smell
The stench of decaying flesh or some other particularly disgusting smell may waft through the house.
Touch/Emotion
A heavy, oppressive feeling of dread seems to cling to the house or to a specific location within the house. Cold spots appear in unlikely places. Residents may feel as if they are under constant visual surveillance by an unseen observer. Residents may even feel as if someone--or something--has touched them. Something--or someone--may bear down upon or sit atop one’s body as he or she sleeps or rests in bed. Residents may undergo physical or sexual assault by invisible assailants.
Remember, House = Self
In general, it’s a good idea to associate such phenomena with the main character of the story. Since it is he or she who will see, hear, smell, taste, and/or touch most of these phenomena, they should be related to him or her in some manner. Perhaps the phenomena are really signs and symptoms of a mental illness with which the protagonist is “haunted” rather than clues that the house in which this character resides is haunted. Maybe he or she needs a psychiatrist rather than a ghost buster.
The phenomena could have a moral significance. Maybe the sights, sounds, and other perceptions of strange and horrific incidents represent feelings of guilt and sorrow concerning past or present misdeeds that “haunt” the protagonist.
An elaborate prank, a practical joke, or a more sinister hoax could be the cause of the haunting, as in the movie Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in which a house is made to appear to be haunted in an effort to drive the protagonist mad so that her relatives can have her committed to a mental institution and inherit her estate. A bed-and-breakfast inn might be rigged to appear to be haunted in order to generate publicity.
Houses become haunted--or are said to become haunted--after famous people live (or die) in them. If your story features such a house, obviously the manner in which it is haunted, and the identity of its ghost or ghosts, should relate to the celebrity in question. One might expect a piano to play in Liberace’s house, for example, were it to be haunted, and maybe, in Charlton Heston’s abode, the actor still clutches a rifle in his “cold, dead hands.” Remember the metaphor that equates a house to the self of the person who resides there. A haunted house should be symptomatic of the haunted soul who lives within the distressed domicile.
In this post, we deduced these additional rules for haunting a house:
- To be, horrors must be perceived (even mysterious phenomena, whether paranormal or supernatural, must be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and/or touched).
- A haunted house will probably have an emotional effect upon its resident.
- The phenomena associated with a haunting should also be associated with the resident and with his or her mental states, moral failings, or personal experiences.
- A haunting may result from a condition or set of circumstances other than ghostly habitation (mental illness, practical joke, hoax).
Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?
Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.
It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.
What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”
Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.
As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.
Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:
Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.
In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.
Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.
According to Todorov:
The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).
Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.
And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.
My Cup of Blood
Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:
Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.
Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.
Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.
Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).
Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.
Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.
Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.
Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.
A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.
A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.
Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.
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