Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche's Children of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre's Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley's schoolboy effusions Zastro (1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya) there arose many memorable weird works both in English and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first written in the French language but published in an English translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland's French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour which only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated a sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as freely strewn through popular literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure and learning which animates the average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming sorceress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar's primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly ignited and eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book to a permaneat place in English letters. No less notable are the three Episodes of Vathek, intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek's fellow-victims in Eblis' infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout the author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of William Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.
But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of terror-literature in these times may be mentioned the Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who followed his famous but non-supernatural Caleb Williams (1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of the elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of "Rosicrucians," is handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was represented by George W.M. Reynold's Faust and the Demon and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece.
His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her inimitable Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-classics of all time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human being moulded from charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created by its designer "in the mad pride of intellectuality," the monster possesses full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all whom Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat "to be with him on his wedding night." Upon that night the bride is strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object of his search and creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its creator's room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the yellow moonlight with watery eyes--"if eyes they may be called." Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels, including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated the success of her first effort. It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, The Vampyre; in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian wood.
In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing such independent bits of narration as The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering Willie's Tale in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his productions. "The German Student" in Tales of a Traveler (1824) is a slyly concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into the cosmic tissue of "The Money Diggers" in the same volume is more than one hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his account of subterranean frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis. De Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the rank of specialist.
This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such short tales as "The Werewolf," made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), founded on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits like “The Signalman,” a tale of ghastly warning conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which allied it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a "Psychic" or pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the prolific and popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied.
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements more elaborately handled, and introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded by a horrible "Dweller of the Threshold" who haunts those who try to enter and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel; and can be read with genuine interest by the not too sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.
In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent--if somewhat melodramatic--tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life's elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the modern background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about us--this time handled with much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told. Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist Alphonse Louis Constant ("Eliphas Levy"), who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic, and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero's times.
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson--the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim, The Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary horror-tales as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its "human element" commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its mad vistas of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Brontë's eerie terror is no mere Gothic echoe, but a tense expression of man's shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder school.
In “The Witch” (episode 3 of season 1), Buffy defeats a witch who has used a magic spell to swap bodies with her daughter so that she, the mother, can relive her glory days as a former cheerleader in a more-than-merely-vicarious way. When the witch seeks, literally, to cast a spell at Buffy, the slayer uses a mirror to deflect the witch’s hex, and, as a result, the witch ends up trapped inside the miniature figure of a cheerleader inside the school’s hallway trophy case, the only part of her that can now move being her eyes. In a later episode, Oz notices that there seems to be something odd about the cheerleading trophy--”its eyes seem to follow you”--but no more is made of the witch’s odd prison. The trophy could be the basis for another plot, though. The witch could escape. Maybe the trophy topples from its shelf when custodians move the case and it breaks, releasing the imprisoned witch. Alternatively, the trophies could be shipped to a new location (for example, a new high school is built after Buffy and her friends blow up the old school) and, in the process, is stolen by someone who uses it Ali Baba fashion, as a genie’s lamp, releasing the witch--or, as before, it could simply get broken in transit, becoming a threat to new characters in a different time and place. Possibly the daughter, missing her mother, despite her abusive ways, steals the trophy and takes it home, using magic to release her.
Based upon this plot seed, several storylines could be developed. Again, were one to take up this leftover plot, he or she would have to change it substantially. For example, the origin of the trophy would have to be different, since, otherwise, the plot that ensues would be a rip-off of “The Witch” episode’s plot. Therefore, one would have to come up with another reason for the trophy’s being inhabited, as it were, by a human soul, whether the soul is to remain that of a witch or to become that of another character. Inspiration’s wanted, not plagiarism or copyright infringement. Maybe the cheerleader was just a cheerleader, but she put so much of herself into her practice and performance that, upon winning a cheerleading contest, she really and truly (and permanently) bonded with the token of her success, becoming the trophy. Absurd? Perhaps, but believable within the parameters that you would establish at the outset of your story, given people’s willingness to suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoying a fantastic tale. For example, in a world of witchcraft and magic, anything’s possible as long as the incidents make sense dramatically and emotionally. In fantastic fiction, which obviously includes horror and, often, science fiction, the cause-effect relationships among the incidents of the story’s action are motivational, dramatic, and emotional, not necessary physical (in the scientific sense of the word) or natural.
“Teacher’s Pet” (episode 4, season 1) also ends on an unresolved note that could be the basis of a plot for another story. In this episode, Xander, attracted to the beautiful teacher, Miss French, who substitutes for his regular biology instructor, goes to her house, ostensibly to help her create a model of prating mantis egg sacks for the upcoming science fair. Soon after he arrives, however, Xander finds out that Miss French is herself a preying mantis in human guise, and she (or it) has lured Xander--and another boy, Blayne--to her lair to mate with her, after which she, good praying mantis that she is, would devour them alive. Buffy rescues the dudes in distress and all ends on a positive note--until the camera shows the audience the storage closet in the biology classroom, in which a praying mantis egg sack waits to hatch. Silly? Of course, but, again, in fantastic fiction, which obviously includes horror and, often, science fiction, pretty much anything is possible, since the cause-effect relationships among the incidents of the story’s action are motivational, dramatic, and emotional, not necessary physical (in the scientific sense of the word) or natural.
The leftover plot--the egg sack--provides the opportunity for a sequel, but the series ignored this possibility, except to pose it as something of a teaser. The egg, like the seed, is a natural point of origin that can be used to introduce a monster. Presumably, some monsters at least, are born (or hatched), just like people--well, maybe not just like people--and, if a seed can produce a natural plant, why shouldn’t a deformed, radiated, or extraterrestrial seed produce an unnatural or otherworldly plant? In fact, another Buffy episode, “Bad Eggs” (episode 24, season 2), uses this same motif as eggs that Buffy, Xander, Willow, and the other members of their health class are given as surrogate babies upon which to practice future parental responsibilities hatch into monsters, attacking, possessing, and threatening students and townspeople alike.
Likewise, natural forces--volcanoes, earthquakes, icebergs, shifting tectonic plates--effect change; if they do so in nature, they can do so in fiction as well, although, in fantastic fiction, the changes thus effected may not be those that normally would result from the same causes. The leftover egg can become the springboard to new plot that uses an egg, a seed, an earthquake, a melting glacier, a volcanic eruption, an earthbound meteor, or anything else that can change the natural order or create something new and, of course, in horror fiction, something hideous and horrible. A story idea, including those that derive from the manipulation of leftover plots or plot-seeds, can be developed in as many ways as one has the capacity to imagine.
In “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date,” Buffy accepts a date from Owen, a boy in love with what he believes, based on his reading of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, is the romance of death. When he follows her to a funeral home, where she must go to dispatch vampires and save her mentor, the Watcher Rupert Giles, Owen thinks he’s found his soul mate. Buffy breaks up with him, not wanting to endanger him, and that’s the end of their relationship. But what if it weren’t? What if Owen refused to take no for an answer? What is he continued to follow Buffy around and to get in her way, posing a danger to himself, to Buffy, and to others? Here is a potential plot for one or more stories--the pesky devotee whose naiveté, incompetence, or foolishness causes dangerous situations and potentially lethal consequences. Such a character need not associate with a vampire slayer and her friends. He or she could hang out with any character or characters who routinely perform dangerous tasks. The use of such a character, therefore, can (and should be) original.
Xander and some school bullies are transformed into a pack of hyenas when they visit the local zoo. At the end of the episode (“The Pack,” episode 6, season 1), Buffy again saves the day, and Xander and the other students revert to themselves. The zookeeper, who is behind the enchantment, is killed when Xander, to save Willow, tosses him to the hyenas. However, the mystic circle inside of which the students had stepped, triggering their transformations, remains. Could it be used as a catalyst in a future story, to bring about the same or a similar transformation? The circle is an artifact--a physical object that introduces change. There are many others--rings, amulets, charms, potions, garments, even spaceships. As such, it makes an excellent inciting moment. (An inciting moment is the incident near the outset of the story’s action that sets everything that follows in motion--the narrative spark, so to speak, that ignites the rest of the story’s action. It is the one moment in the action of the story without which there would be no story. If Xander and the other students hadn‘t stepped inside the mystic circle, they wouldn‘t have been transformed; if Dorothy Gale hadn‘t run away from home, she wouldn‘t have been caught in the tornado that carried her off to Oz; if Huckleberry Finn’s father, Pap, hadn’t returned to take custody of his son, Huck would never have run away from his foster home.) The mystic circle reminds us that virtually any physical object can be an inciting moment or a catalyst for change and that it can be used again and again to accomplish the same purpose (although too much repetition of the device will become boring).
What have we learned, so far, from considering “leftover plots” or plot-seeds or springboards or whatever we choose to call narrative motifs that suggest additional storylines?
Ideas cannot be copyrighted, so they are fair game as inspirations for plots.
The specific and unique ways in which ideas are developed can, and often are, copyrighted. Using the characters, settings, and other elements of such treatments could constitute plagiarism and/or copyright infringement.
Ideas must be given an original treatment in which characters, settings, and other elements are new, not derivative.
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