Showing posts with label euglena. Show all posts
Showing posts with label euglena. Show all posts

Sunday, September 2, 2018

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Aesthetic Sensations

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


According to communications professor Jib Fowles, almost every advertisement has “an undeniable aesthetic component.” Often, the appeal to the need for aesthetic sensations is accomplished through visual means, through “photography or filming or drawing,” Fowles notes, but adds that every other aspect of the advertisement is also carefully chosen to contribute to the overall effect, including the type and the layout.


Edgar Allan Poe, in a different context, argues something similar. To create a singular, unified effect, or emotional payoff, Poe writes in “The Philosophy of Composition,” the author of a narrative literary work must direct every element of the composition toward the story's conclusion. Character, plot, setting, style, theme—all must contribute to the story's effect, so that its conclusion appears to be the inevitable outcome of all that has preceded it. There is beauty in such a deliberate and thoroughly consistent, precise series of causes and effects, Poe implies.

Poe also had something to say about the aesthetics of literary art. For him, not only beauty, but also ugliness, could be a source of pleasure. As Kevin J. Hayes notes, in The Annotated Poe, the author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, argues that “Poe . . . built the grotesque into his critical theory. Beauty and deformity could be combined in original ways to create art” (8).


Since ancient times, philosophers have struggled to define and clarify the concept of beauty. Aesthetics, as a discipline, was born neither of literature nor of advertising; it is one of the five branches of philosophy, the others of which are epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and ontology. The article “Aesthetics” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that the term may be defined narrowly as the theory of beauty, or more broadly as that together with the philosophy of art.” Some of the features and problems of aesthetics with which philosophers have dealt and with which they continue to deal are such “aesthetic concepts” as beauty and sublimity; “aesthetic value” in which such characteristics as symmetry, uniformity, and intensity, truth or “aptness,” universality or “partiality,” and knowledge or “non-cognitivism” come under consideration; the role of the audience in determining the constituents of the aesthetic experience; and the elements of “aesthetic attitudes” (e. g., “disinterested attention” and the degree of “distance” between the aesthetic object and its audience); the creators' “intentions” as artists and how their experiences may have contributed to their creations of art.



One of the more interesting matters of controversy concerning the aesthetics of art discussed in “Aesthetics” is perhaps the section concerning “Definitions of Art”:

Up to the “de-definition” period [beginning about the middle of the twentieth century, with the work of Morris Weitz], definitions of art fell broadly into three types, relating to representation, expression, and form. The dominance of representation as a central concept in art lasted from before Plato’s time to around the end of the eighteenth century. Of course, representational art is still to be found to this day, but it is no longer pre-eminent in the way it once was. Plato first formulated the idea by saying that art is mimesis, and, for instance, Bateaux in the eighteenth century followed him, when saying: “Poetry exists only by imitation. It is the same thing with painting, dance and music; nothing is real in their works, everything is imagined, painted, copied, artificial. It is what makes their essential character as opposed to nature.”



With the rise of the Romantic Movement, circa 1800-1850, “the concept of expression became more prominent,” and, in “the twentieth century, the main focus shifted towards abstraction and the appreciation of form,” but “response theories of art were particularly popular during the Logical Positivist period in philosophy, that is, around the 1920s and 1930s,” when “Science was . . . contrasted sharply with Poetry, . . . the former being supposedly concerned with our rational mind, the latter with our irrational emotions.” More recently, communication theorists, emphasizing audience, artwork, and artist, focused on the transmission of “aesthetic emotion” between artist and audience by way of the artist's work, often employing the analogy of art as “a form of language” with a syntax and grammar of its own (“Aesthetics”).


Finally, the “Aesthetics” article considers the nature of art objects themselves. The discussion distinguishes tokens, or examples, of objects and types of objects. In the alphabetical sequence “ABACDEC,” for instance, there are seven tokens and five types. “Realizations” of ideas for art objects are tokens; “but ideas are types.” An artist creates tokens, but “particulars are made” from a “recipe” provided by the artist. For example, a choreographer creates a dance, but the dancer makes it; an architect creates a blueprint; a builder makes the house; a script-writer creates a script; actors make the film. In the same way, Leonardo created Mona Lisa, but print makers make it (in the form of prints). This line of thought, however, takes no account of the artist's community and the social context in which he or she works:

. . . The major difficulty with this kind of theory is that any novelty has to be judged externally in terms of the artist’s social place amongst other workers in the field, as Jack Glickman has shown. Certainly, if it is to be an original idea, the artist cannot know beforehand what the outcome of the creative process will be. But others might have had the same idea before, and if the outcome was known already, then the idea thought up was not original in the appropriate sense. Thus the artist will not be credited with ownership in such cases. Creation is not a process, but a public achievement: it is a matter of breaking the tape ahead of others in a certain race.

 

Several of my own short stories, as collected in volume one and volume two of Sinister Stories: Tales of the Fantastic, Marvelous, and Uncanny, illustrate some of the concerns of aestheticians.



Today, the Western world's concept of feminine beauty is being challenged as ethnocentric and racist in its emphases upon characteristics typical of Caucasian women. However, some of the attributes singled out as beautiful in regard to the feminine face can be ascribed to women of any race. Symmetry, uniformity, and intensity, for example, can be applied to women across the globe. The question then becomes whether women whose features lack such qualities to one degree or another are more or less beautiful (or ugly). Another way to examine the issue is to ask whether a woman must “fit” the socially accepted or traditional idea of beauty in order to be beautiful.


A Complete Makeover” examines these questions. Aging star Penelope Sweet is losing her fan base. She's receives fewer and fewer calls from her agent, Louie, as her popularity fades. Lately, she was asked to “star” in a commercial—about a wrinkle crème. Insulted, she'd turned it down, as she had Louie's suggestion that she revitalize her career by accepting nude roles. Now, Louie was advising her to submit to plastic surgery. After distressing news from her accountant concerning her precarious financial situation, Penelope reconsiders her agent's advice and decides “a little nip and tick couldn’t hurt.” Although Penelope decides to have “a complete makeover,” her luck doesn't change until she contacts her friend Guido, who's “connected” to the “Chicago mob” and asks him for “a favor.” This story shows the influence that traditional concepts of feminine beauty have on the American consumer—in this case, moviegoers—and the people—in this case, an actress—who provide aesthetic sensations associated with beauty. Penelope's career was built upon her beauty as much as her talent, it seems, and, as her beauty fades with age, her career suffers to the point that she is at risk of losing everything for which she's worked. It is only by obtaining “a favor” from a mobster that she may make a comeback.



In different ways, in both “A Complete Makeover” and “The Engine of Pain,” people (i. e., fictional characters) become art objects. Dehumanized and objectified, they are exhibited as if they were nothing more than mannequins in museum or art displays. In the latter story, a tour guide for The Museum of Cruel and Unusual Punishments offers Les, a visitor, a “private tour” of a closed wing after the museum closes and the other visitors have left. He's astonished and disturbed to find that several of the mannequins seem more than just life-like: the wax “skin” of one feels like human flesh, and the wig of another feels like human hair. Sharon tells Les she's a sadist, and he's surprised to find himself following her commands. He lies upon a slab, and she secures him in place with leather straps. She then inserts a balloon into his urethra, inflating it as she tells him, “The pain will get worse and worse . . . until you want to die. Scream all you like. No one will hear you.” When Les asks why she selected him, she explains,

All day, I’ve looked for the perfect mannequin for this exhibit, and you were it. Young, handsome, virile―a real stud. You’ll make a great mannequin. James Dean said it best―die young and leave a good-looking corpse. That’s just what I have planned for you, except I prefer to think of my corpses as mannequins.”



In “Engine of Pain,” people are reduced to museum “mannequins”; in “The Art of the Avant-garde,” photographer Jerry Mason keeps the interests of his voyeuristic BDSM clients in mind as he photographs Betty Burke, a beautiful model, insisting that she lie inside a coffin on a mortuary set. He closes the lid on her and locks it, allowing her to expire as he shoots photographs of her through the custom-made coffin's glass lid. Later, her death verified and her corpse matched to the model who appears in his photographs, Jerry will make a fortune from “the world’s first and only snuff products.” As he confides to her corpse, “To the BSDM crowd who will buy the calendar, no art is more avant-garde than snuff pictures.”

Both stories' victims are types, or examples, of the idea of a dehumanized and objectified person, human beings reduced to objects of art. (In Poe's fiction and poetry, this type recurs, possibly because Poe regarded “the death of a beautiful woman as unquestionably the most poetical topic [or idea] in the world.”)



Another way to think of the relationship of type to idea is to consider the former an example of the definition of a term, and the definition, or meaning, of the word as constituting an idea. For example, if “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground” defines the idea of a tree, specific types of this definition are its examples: apples, beeches, chestnuts, dogwoods, elms, figs, gingkos, hickories, and so forth.



Horror arises when a type seems to contradict the idea that the type supposedly exemplifies. The Euglena is a type (i. e., an example) of this notion, or idea, that taxonomic contradictions horrify us. The microscopic organism has chloroplasts, which enable it to photosynthesize, as a plant does. At the same time, however, it can move under its own power, thanks to its flagellum, and it can obtain nourishment by consuming other organisms, as an animal does. It has abilities of both plants and animals, which defies the once-neat kingdoms of Plantae and Animalia. It is both part plant and animal, yet, at the same time, neither fully plant nor animal. As the seventh edition of Biology, edited by Eldra P. Solomon, Linda R. Berg, and Diana W. Martin, points out, the Euglena “has been classified at various time as in the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom” because its peculiar abilities don't fully match those of other specimens in either kingdom.


True, the microscopic Euglena itself doesn't necessarily horrify us, but that's not my claim; my assertion is that the idea of taxonomic contradictions horrifies us. That's not to say that, under the right set of conditions, a creature similar to the Euglena might well horrify us in and of itself, as a type, rather than as an idea. Were we to meet DC Comics's Swamp Thing or Marvel Comics's Man-Thing face to face, it's exceedingly likely that we would be horrified, and what are they but gigantic Euglenas who are smarter than your average swamp lily? It is just this manipulation of forms, this combination of existing materials in new ways that Poe regarded as the basis of creativity and may be the reason he believed that the aesthetics of art should include not only the concept of beautiful, but that of “deformity' as well.



Saturday, March 7, 2009

Monster Mash, or How To Create A Monster, Part 2

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman


In the introductory chapter of Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains the theses upon which he believes the “understanding” of “cultures through the monsters they bear” should rest. In doing so, he provides, inadvertently, perhaps, a framework upon which writers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction may construct monsters of their own.

These are his seven theses, which, in this post, we shall explain and modify to fit our own purpose as monster makers:
Thesis I: The monster’s body is a cultural body.
Thesis II: The monster always escapes.
Thesis III: The monster is the harbinger of category crisis.
Thesis IV: The monster dwells at the gates of difference.
Thesis V: The monster polices the borders of the possible.
Thesis VI: Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire.
Thesis VII: The monster stands at the threshold. . . of becoming.

Thesis I: The monster’s body is a cultural body.


Cohen’s first thesis is that the monster represents an existential concern--“a fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy”--of a particular time and place.


Thesis II: The Monster always escapes.


According to his second thesis, such concerns change from time to time, so the monster that represents them must be protean, altering its appearance as necessary so that it might continue to embody the latest of its culture’s ever-shifting, real-life fears, desires, anxieties, and fantasies. Its shape-shifting character makes its essential nature a mystery.

Thesis III: The monster is the harbinger of category crisis.

The monster also heralds (and, therefore, warns) of a “crisis” regarding its culture’s categories of understanding the world, including itself and the societies and individuals who comprise the culture. It defies the neat scientific pigeonholes into which a culture would group all things under the sun--for example, as mineral, plant, or animal--resisting “compartmentalization” and inviting new explorations of the world and new understandings of existence. Neither fish nor fowl, it doesn’t fit its culture’s categories of understanding, and, therefore, its meaning is ambiguous and open to interpretation: “A mixed category, the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy and binary opposition, demanding instead a ‘system’ allowing polyphony, mixed response (differences in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration” (7). In sum, as Cohen argues,
The monstrous is a genus too large to be encapsulated in any conceptual system; the monster’s very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure; . . . it threatens to devour. .. any thinker who insists otherwise. . . . It breaks apart bifurcating, “either/or” syllogistic logic with a kind of reasoning closer to “and/or,” introducing what Barbara Johnson has called “a revolution in the very logic of meaning” (7).

Sometimes the tiny helps us to grasp the much larger, so a real-life example of a categorical crisis might help to elucidate Cohen’s third thesis. To this end, ladies and gentlemen, I introduce the lowly Euglena. Scientists had long argued that all things are divisible into three broad categories: minerals, plants, and animals. Then, one day, they happened to catch sight of the Euglena under their microscopes. A one-celled animal, with a cell wall and the ability to move under its own power, by thrashing a flagellum, it was an animal--except for the chloroplasts that allowed it to photosynthesize--organelles that animals lack and an ability that animals do not have. The Euglena was neither animal nor plant, but a whole new sort of organism that defied their neat scientific pigeonholes and led to a crisis, of sorts, in the culture of their discipline, until they were swept into a new category, specially made for them alone, that of the Protista. The tiny Euglena was a monster of the microscopic world, creating in microbiology the same “rebuke to boundary and enclosure” that the monster, in general, creates on the much larger level of cultural understandings of the world. (think of what Swamp-Thing might accomplish!)


Thesis IV: The monster dwells at the gates of difference.

The monster is the eternal Other, the Not-Me of its culture, the culture’s rejected self, envisioned as an outsider who dwells in the land beyond one’s own. As such, “the monster,” Cohen observes, “is difference made flesh” (7), whether the monster of the day represented “the aboriginal inhabitants of Canaan” who were “envisioned as menacing giants to justify the Hebrew colonization of the Promised Land,” the Muslims whom medieval French crusaders pictured as “demonic caricatures whose menacing lack of humanity was readable from the bestial attributes,” Native Americans considered “as unredeemable savages” and threats to “Manifest Destiny” which sought to “push westward with disregard,” or “an alien culture. . . within vast communities dedicated to becoming homogeneous and monolithic” against whose very existence a “Final Solution” was required (7-8). Many monsters, both ancient and modern, Cohen says, are the products of “race” as much as cultural and other biases: “From the classical period into the twentieth century, race has been almost as powerful a catalyst to the creation of monsters as culture, gender, and sexuality” (10). The monsters that such biases help to spawn are such as supposedly inferior ethnic groups, “hermaphrodites,” homosexuals, and other “marginalized social groups”; quoting Rene Girard, Cohen reminds his reader that--
Monsters are never created ex nihilo, but through a process of fragmentation and recombination in which elements are extracted “from various forms” (including--indeed, especially--marginalized social groups) and then assembled as the monster, “which can then assume an independent identity” (11).

As that which is different and Other than the status quo, the monster, which cannot be pigeonholed according to the reigning culture’s categories of understanding, including those of its own understanding, the monster is a reminder of the arbitrary nature of the culture itself and of its categories of understanding and “threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed” (12).




Thesis V: The monster polices the borders of the possible.


Although the monster invites exploration of the unknown (the body of potential knowledge that lies outside the “boundary and enclosure” of the culture’s categories of understanding), it also repels such exploration, because one of its purposes is to guard and protect the borders that a culture erects to defend itself against the absurd and against challenges to its own system, or, as Cohen says, “The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together that system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot--must not
--be crossed” (13), the fact that some of these “relations” are, of themselves, “horrid”:

Primarily these borders are in place to control the traffic in women, or more generally to establish strictly homosocial bonds, the ties between men that keep a patriarchal society functional. . . (13).

The prototypical example of a monster that threatened the culture of its day is that of the Cyclops, Cohen says, whose anarchistic society, bereft of tradition, represented a threat to classical culture by the lawless and uncultured barbarian. The monster, Cyclopean or otherwise, threatens because it is potentially deconstructive:
The monster’s destructiveness is really a deconstructiveness: it threatens to reveal that difference originates in process, rather than in fact (and that “fact” is subject to constant reconstruction and change) (14-15).

Not only does the Greek myth concerning the threats of the Cyclops to its culture, but such science fiction films of the 1950’s as She and Them! also reflect the “deconstructiveness” of the monster and its theme of cultural relativism. She is a movie about “a radioactive virago from outer space who kills every man she touches” and Them! is about “giant ants (really, Communists) who burrow beneath Los Angeles (that is, Hollywood) and threaten world peace (that is, American conservatism)” (14). As such, both movies reflect the tendency of their makers, white men, to cast women and nonwhites as “monsters” and reflect taboos against incest and miscegenation, two threats that white men see as incompatible to their continued supremacy within, and control of, their society and culture (17).


Thesis VI: Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire.


Notwithstanding its threatening nature, the monster is, paradoxically, an object of desire, Cohen argues, in the same way that the forbidden fruit attracts the appetite. Confined to the limits of the silver screen (or, one might add, the page of a novel), the monster offers a means of venting the impulses an audience has which, otherwise, are forbidden and subject to social sanctions. The monster is cathartic. Besides, sooner or later, a hero will arrive to chop off its head:
When contained by geographic, generic, or epistemic marginalization, the monster can function as an alter ego, as an alluring projection of (an Other) self. . . . We watch the monstrous spectacle of the horror film because we know that the cinema is a temporary place. . . . King Arthur will ultimately destroy him. The audience knows how the genre works (17).

What is true on the individual level, Cohen argues, is apt to be true on the cultural level as well. If the individual can see him- or herself as the monster, his or her culture can also project onto the monster those aspects of itself that it officially rejects, creating a sort of mirror self of the damned:
What Bakhtin calls “official culture” can transfer all that is viewed as undesirable in itself into the body of the monster, performing a wish-fulfillment drama of its own; the scapegoated monster is perhaps destroyed in the course of some official narrative, purging the community by eliminating its sins. The monster’s eradication functions as an exorcism and, when retold and promulgated, as a catechism (18).

Thesis VII: The monster stands at the threshold. . . of becoming.


“Monsters are our children,” Cohen contends, for it is we, out of our own “fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy,” create, and, when they reenter our world “from the Outside,” from the outer darkness, as it were, into which we have cast them, which they invariably will do, they come bringing gifts of a sort: “not just a fuller knowing of our place, but. . . self-knowledge, human knowledge” (20). Moreover, they fulfill a critical function, asking “us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place”:
They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perceptions of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them (20).

During her stint as television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sarah Michelle Gellar said, tongue in cheek, that she knew that vampires exist, because she saw them every day. Near the conclusion to his chapter, Cohen asks a similar question, but offers a serious, rather than flippant, answer. “Do monsters exist?” They do, he insists, “for if they did not, how could we?”


For the monster maker, monsters are a means both of critiquing the existing order and for supporting it. They are paradoxical creatures in this, as they are by nature. They show us the germs, some of them pathogenic, in the baby’s bath water, but they retain the baby, at the end, rather than tossing it out with the water in which it has bathed. The baby is the individual self, but as it exists in the greater context of a specific culture located here and now. The Other which threatens the self and its culture exposes horrors within both, but, in so doing, it exposes these threats as diseased tissues, as it were, that must be excised--or exorcized--if the body itself is to survive. After the dragon is loosed upon the earth for a time, King Arthur will arrive to chop off its head. Meantime, the monster will target the vices and sins of the ruling elite itself, against whom King Arthur is both the sire, the defender, and the conqueror, all in one.



As we saw in the previous post in this series, In developing his taxonomy, David Williams, perhaps inadvertently, offers twelve ways by which writers may create monsters:

Hypertrophy: One or more organs (or the whole body) may be enlarged, to produce a giant of some kind. Example: Giants.



Atrophy: One or more organs (or the whole body) may be shrunk, to produce a pygmy of some kind. Example: Pygmies.

Excrescence: Abnormal outgrowths may appear upon the face, the body, or both, disfiguring a person and giving him or her a monstrous appearance. Example: Elephant Man.

Superfluity of body parts: One or more superfluous body parts--arms, breasts, eyes, legs, nipples, teeth--may form on (or inside) the body, often in unusual locations. Example: Multicephalic (many-headed), tricephalic (three-headed), or bicephalic (two-headed) creatures, such as the hydra, Cerberus, and Janus, respectively.

Deprivation of parts: There may be an absence of one or more body parts that would normally appear on (or inside) the body. Example: One-eyed Cyclops.

Mislocation of organs: There may be a mix of human and animal body parts. Examples: Centaurs, mermaids, satyrs.

Animal births by women: In a means of creating monsters that implies bestiality, women may give birth to animals. Example: Mixture of human and animal parts.

Body parts may be incorrectly located or redistributed. Example: Blymmes, epifuges, grylles (creatures who lack a head and whose facial features are dispersed throughout their torsos).

Disturbed growth: Normal growth may be “disturbed” in some way. Example: Premature aging, as with Rip Van Winkle.

Composite beings: A creature may result from a composite of various body parts, animal, human, plant, mineral, and otherwise. Example: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ents, griffins, Gorgons, Pegasus, vegetable lambs.

Hermaphroditic birth: Both sets of genitals may occur in the same individual. Example: Hermaphrodite.

Monstrous races: The existence of “monstrous races” may be posited. Examples: Dog-headed Cynocephali or the Astomori, who lacking mouths, live on the upon the odors of apples.


To these twelve, we added a couple more:

The monster should exist, but “far away, not here,” so that its existence cannot be easily confirmed, if at all.

Monsters must be metaphorical.


Based upon a modification of Cohen’s seven theses, as indicated by paraphrases that reorient some of his insights, we can now add seven more principles to consider in the creation of monsters:
The monster is an embodiment of its culture’s peculiar concerns.The monster always escapes.

The monster indicates a dissolve of a culture’s ways of understanding itself and its world.

The monster represents that which is different from accepted truths.

The monster protects the interests of the status quo.

The monster allows an audience to vent pent-up antisocial desires.

The monster both critiques culture and also tells us who we are, thereby helping us to become what we are not but may want to be.

In our final installment in this series, we will consider how these ideas and principles, and some others, apply to the creation of more monsters that inhabit horror fiction that has Christian interests and themes but which is not necessarily marketed as “Christian” fiction per se.


Source:


Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.


Williams, David. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature. London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Everyday Horrors: Plants


copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Plants are our friends. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to breathe--or eat. Only they can convert carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy (sugars and starch) using ultraviolet energy (sunlight). Without them, all animal, including human, life would die. Actually, without them, there would be no life to live or die.

Plants themselves, in fact, are food. Their ripened ovaries are hard to beat when one craves a sweet and succulent treat. Plants are also the source of hundreds of products that we sometimes take for granted, but, without which, we wouldn’t live nearly as well as we’re accustomed to do: paper, lumber, fabrics, fuel, medicines, plastics, dyes, soaps, paints, shampoos, perfumes, and a host of others. Without plants, men wouldn’t be able to bribe women into forgiving them or put them in the mood for romance with the gift of a dozen roses or a bouquet of flowers, either, and, of course, gardens would be rather colorless affairs.

So, what’s so horrible about plants?

Like people, many are good eggs, but, to torture a metaphor, there are a few bad apples among them as well. In most cases, the horrible plants are poisonous. Some are horrible for other reasons, though.



Let’s start with the poisonous ones. According to Live Science, the “Top 10 Poisonous Plants,” in descending order, are:

10. Narcissus
9. Rhododendron
8. Ficus
7. Oleander
6. Chrysanthemum
5. Anthurium
4. Lily-of-the-valley
3. Hydrangea
2. Foxglove
1. Wisteria

In no particular order, for pets, these are the five deadliest plants:

  • Azalea
  • Castor bean plant
  • Lily
  • Oleander
  • Sago palm

The stinging tree is an interesting plant. Indigenous to tropical rainforests, it has thick, hair-like structures on its leaves and stems that, when brushed against, deliver a painful sting. The tips of the leaves and stems penetrate the skin, in which they break off, releasing a poisonous irritant, the effect of which may last for months. There’s no antidote. However, stick insects, weevils, chrisom lid beetles, and even opossums enjoy the taste of them.

In horror fiction, plants can be dangerous--or even deadly--even when they’re not poisonous. In Dean Koontz’s The Taking, demons use a hellish fungus to help to prepare the earth for conquest. In Stephen King’s “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verril” segment of Creepshow, an extraterrestrial fertilizer, delivered by the courtesy of a meteorite, causes an alien fungus to overrun everything--and everyone--in its past, Jordy Verril (played by King himself) included. In Seed People, alien seeds turn humans into zombies. The campy Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978) has mutated tomatoes turning into mad killers.

As “Man-eating Plants”points out out, no carnivorous plant is large enough to threaten humans. These plants’ largest victim, according to this article, was a rat that, dead, was found, partially digested, inside a pitcher plant. However, “Man-eating Plants” suggests that the legends of such plants as the one in Little Shop of Horrors might have been inspired by an actual plant, the Amorphophallus titanum, or corpse flower, which is definitely not recommended for milady’s (or yours) bridal bouquet:

Amorphophallus titanum, which is said to be the biggest, smelliest flower in the world, looks like something that could eat a human being. When it blooms it can reach at height over nine feet in height and smells like a mixture of rotting flesh and excrement. . . .

. . . Although the Amorphophallus titanum looks a lot like you would imagine a man-eating plant to look like, and it even smells like somebody is dead inside, it is not carnivorous.

As horrible as man-eating plants might be (were they to exist), intelligent plants might be even more appalling. For a long time, scientists maintained that animals are not able to reason, and philosophers have always excluded them from such abilities, defining humans alone as “thinking reeds” or res cogitans. If animals were to be denied anything more than sentience, plants certainly weren’t likely to be considered potential Nobel laureates any time soon.

However, this bias may be changing. If Professor Stefano Mancuso has anything to say about the issue, it may not be long before plants are his tenured colleagues. He operates the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV) near Florence, Italy, where he hopes to demonstrate that plants are not only intelligent, but are also capable of solving problems. According to Mancuso, “If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us. Not only are they ‘smart’ in how they grow, adapt and thrive, [but] they [also] do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain.”

According to “Smarty Plants: Inside the World’s Only Plant-Intelligence Lab,” the laboratory is exploring a variety of research topics: “In addition to studies on the effects of music on vineyards, the center's researchers have also published papers on gravity sensing, plant synapses and long-distance signal transmission in trees.”

Plants have been found to be able to distinguish between siblings and strangers, and, perhaps as xenophobic as people, among them, sap apparently is thicker than water. According to Live Science’s “Plants Recognize Siblings”: “Plants can recognize when they are potted with their siblings or with strangers. . . . When strangers share a pot, they develop a competitive streak, but siblings are more considerate of each other.”

In science fiction, plants have demonstrated intelligence for years. As far back as Dante and Virgil, humans dreamed of communing with greenery. However, the desirability of doing so, at least as far as William Hope Hodgson is concerned, might be questionable. In “The Lands of Lonesomeness” chapter of his novel, The Boats of Glen Caring, “evil trees are prone to wrap their branches round the unwary traveller,” and “human souls are somehow sucked into the trees and then beckon for more to join them.”

Intelligent plants also betray evil designs on humans in Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri,” Clark Ashton Smith’s “Seedling of Mars,” and Raymond Z. Gallun’s “Seeds of the Dusk.” Bizarre, threatening plants also appear in H. G. Wells’ short story, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”


Until the discovery of the euglena, scientists believed that there was a hard and fast differences between plants and animals. The main difference was that the former could photosynthesize, while the latter could not. The discovery of the euglena changed this view. Like animals, they can move under their own power, by means of a flailing flagellum, engulf and ingest food using a “phagotrophic. . . apparatus,” “sense light using a red pigmented eyespot,” and change color to match their red or green environment. The euglena also has chloroplasts that enable it to do what only plants can do--photosynthesize. So is it a plant or an animal? Neither--and both. It’s a euglena!

Swamp Thing could be the lowly euglena, writ large. He’s a humanoid vegetable or, if one prefers, a vegetative humanoid, who lives in a swamp and, in the 1982 movie named for him, dated Adrienne Barbeau (a. k. a. Alice Cable).

There’s something else eerie about plants. They’re quiet. They loom. They seem to wait, if not to lurk. They appear to be biding their time, awaiting their chance. To do what? We don’t want to know. What may go on inside those leafy branches and green stems? We don’t even want to guess. Plants are so different from us that, in their majestic, grand silence and their seeming indifference to us, they seem, at times, as when the wind is in the treetops, to whisper of plans that may be not as cool and green and comforting as their stoic postures suggest they are.

If science fiction and horror stories featuring plant-monsters teach us anything worthwhile, it’s to listen to Mom and eat our vegetables--before they eat us!

“Everyday Horrors: Plants” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

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

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

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.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

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.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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