Stories That Will Bug Your Readers

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Chillers and Thrillers has posted several articles about using horror movie posters as prompts to fire up the imagination. Such posters make good muses for writers in search of themes, especially if authors brainstorm about the posters without knowing the plots of the movies the posters promote.

By using the posters' images, visual and textual figures of speech, and captions, authors can work out plots of their own; at the same time, they can acquire clues as to what the posters' creators regard as their audience's fears, anxieties, and concerns with respect to specific themes.

In this post, bugs are the topic. There's something about creepy crawlers that many people find unsettling.

A poster for the 2011 film Millennium Bugs suggests that this movie is aimed specifically at Millennials, those who are born between 1980 and 2000 or so. According to this label, the members of the targeted audience would be between 31 and 11 years old at the time of the motion picture's release.

According to “Childhood Fears By Age,” children between the ages of 12 and 18 typically “fear for their safety, fear . . . sickness, fear . . . throwing up at school, fear . . . failure in school or in sports, fear . . . school presentations, fear . . . how they look to others, [and] fear . . . violence and global issues.” Those who are between the ages of 18 and 20 “fear . . . germs and [other threats to] health, fear . . . homelessness, fear . . . death, fear [failure related to] academic performance, fear . . . romantic rejection, fear [a lack of] life purpose, [and] fear . . . being an adult.”

Curiously, a “fear of bugs” is characteristic of children between the ages of five and seven, but it's easy to see how many of the fears of children between the ages of 12 and 18 (and, indeed, young adulthood) could involve a fear of insects as well. Insects can threaten safety, cause sickness, carry germs, and even precipitate death. In addition, the presence of bugs which one fears and loathes could cause people to “throw up” in the presence of others or hamper romance.

 

The list of childhood fears suggests that a horror story, whether movie or novel, would likely include junior high or high school children and be set, at least part, in the children's public or private school. Other characters would be the principal, an assistant principal, coaches, parents, maybe the school nurse, a janitor or two, and perhaps a bus driver.

The poster's caption, “What's bugging you?” further suggests that the story would involve psychological issues. The bugs might, in fact, symbolize the characters' emotional states, in which case the school counselor or a psychologist would also apt to be among the story's characters.

The poster for the 1985 movie Creepers suggests a different take on insects as villains. The poster shows a teenage girl. The right side of her face is pretty, but the skin has been eaten away on the left side of her face, as has much of the underlying issue and muscle. In fact, her skull shows through the top of her head; a hole through the exposed cranium offers viewers a glimpse of blue sky.

A swarm of insects flies against a full moon; as they approach, they become visible in detail, and viewers can discern that the swarm is composed of an unlikely assortment of various kinds of insects, some of which appear to be unfamiliar, perhaps never-before-seen species. They land in the girl's open, upraised palm.

“It will make your skin crawl,” the poster's caption warns. “It” doesn't refer to the girl or to the insects (unless it alludes to the whole swarm), so it seems to suggest the movie itself. Either way, whether “it” refers to the film or to the swarm of insects the girl holds in the palm of her hand (and to the many others on their way), either will be enough, viewers are warned, to make their “skin crawl.”

Interestingly, this movie takes place in a school; the girl is herself a “school girl,” additional text informs viewers, but she is a teen with unusual abilities:

Horror movie enthusiasts know [director Dario] Argento as the master of modern gothic horror films . . . .

Now they can see what he does with maggots, spiders, killer bees, and a school girl who has telepathic powers over them all.

What she can do “will make your skin crawl.”

Much of the plot of a horror story built upon this theme is suggested by the poster, but there are questions yet to be answered, such as:

• Who is this school girl?
• How did she come by her strange power?
• Why does she seem intent upon harming, perhaps killing, others?
• Who are the “others” she targets?
• Can she be stopped?

This poster also suggests many of the characters such a story would include: high school students, the principal, an assistant principal, coaches, parents, maybe the school nurse, a janitor or two, and perhaps a bus driver, but also, at some point, an etymologist and maybe a team of exterminators. In a story of this sort, the paranormal teen's motives will be a big part of the narrative.

The poster also suggests a few scenes:

• A science teacher's classroom lecture on insects
• A science fair
• A field trip to a beekeeper's hives
• The school girl's collection of her swarm

In plotting a novel or a movie about villainous insects, it's probably a good idea to research phobias related to bugs: entomophobia, acarophobia, or insectophobia, as well as more specific insect-related phobias such as arachnophobia (fear of spiders), isopterophobia (fear of termites and other wood-eating insects), acarophobia (fear of insects that cause itching), scolopendrphobia or chilopodophobia (fear of centipedes), xarantaphobia or myriapodophobia (fear of millipedes), myriadpodophobia (fear of decamillipedes [millipedes with 10,000 legs]), lepidopterophobia (fear of butterflies), melissophobia, melissaphobia, or apiphobia (fear of honey bees), spheksophobia (fear of wasps), muscaphobia (fear of flies), katsaridaphobia (fear of cockroaches), mottephobia (fear of moths), myrmecophobia (fear of ants), pediculophobia (fear of lice), skathariphobia is the fear of beetles,

necroentomophobia (fear of dead insects), and

cnidophobia (not a fear of insects per se, but, rather, a fear of stingers and of being stung).

(With so many insect phobias, it's clear that the the school girl in Creepers is well-versed in insect fear; the variety of bugs at her command allows her to terrify a large number of victims.)

Although phobias are regarded as “irrational fears,” psychologists have developed theories as to why people tend to fear insects in general. Their appearance in itself can be seen as disgusting, generating a response of repugnance. Some insects carry pathogens. Other causes of insect fear include “environmental” factors, “medical conditions and trauma,” “social isolation,” “depression,” and, strangely enough, “age.” “Fear of Bugs and Insects Phobia—Entomophobia or Acarophobia” explains each of these causes in more detail. For example,

static electricity, [the] presence of mold, pollen, household allergens[,] and formaldehyde[-]impregnated products can all manifest as unexplained dermatitis or skin irritations. These lead the sufferer to believe that an insect or bug is crawling on the skin.

Brainstorming about horror movie posters' images, figures of speech, and text, initially without any other context, can often suggest ideas for characters, settings, conflicts, scenes, and plot development. Then, tossing in a bit of research concerning the posters' theme can further and refine these elements. As a result, the writer's tabula rasa is a blank slate no more, and he or she is ready to start writing the next cinematic or literary horror masterpiece.

For example, what do you make of the following poster as a horror story prompt?

Note: No insects were harmed in the writing of this article.

From The Breakfast Club to Deadly Detention

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Have you ever wondered which of deviants and losers of The Breakfast Club (1985) would survive if a brutal killer were out to slay them?

Director Blair Hayes

Thanks to the horror-comedy mix presented in Deadly Detention (2017), we know director Blair Hayes's answer to the question.

In The Breakfast Club, Molly Ringwald plays pretty, but pampered, Claire Standish; her counterpart in Deadly Detention is Lexie (Alex Frnka), who's so sexy she doesn't even need a last name.

The Club's athlete, Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), undergoes a sex change, as it were, appearing as Jessica (Sarah Davenport) in Detention. 

Club's white dude Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall) is replaced by Detentions's black, nerdy, Bible-toting Kevin (Coy Stewart). 

Club's space case Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) is transformed into Detention's "freak show" Taylor Hunt (Jennifer Robyn Jacobs).

Juvenile delinquent John Bender (Judd Nelson), of Club, is retooled as Detention's Barrett Newman (Henry Zaga). 

Club's Assistant Principal Vernon (Paul Gleason) and janitor Carl Reed (John Kapelos) are combined into Detention's Principal Presley (Gillian Vigman).

Detention occurs in an allegedly haunted, abandoned prison. Soon after their arrival, things get bloody, as Ms. Presley succumbs to an attack by an unseen killer. Next, one by one, the detainees are picked off at the murderer's leisure, until only one chick, the proverbial "final girl" of slasher films, remains—wait for it!—the sassy, brassy beauty of the bunch, Lexie!

The others have been picked off in horrific ways by the murderer, a father who blames his victims for his daughter's suicide.

So, against a relentless serial killer, The Breakfast Club's Claire (and her Detention counterpart Lexie), it seems, would be the sole survivors of their respective films—except that Hayes is only playing with us; in the end, all the losers win; they all survive—thanks to Ms. Presley, who seems to have been really most sincerely dead, but was maybe just comatose for a while or resurrected somehow (?) and saved all the deviants' lives (we aren't shown how).

Deadly Detention is a fun, tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy flick, but the movie doesn't take itself seriously enough to be a really, most sincerely good movie. Somewhere between the losers' arrival at the prison and their mysterious—indeed, miraculous—survival, the screenwriters, Alison Spuck McNeeley and Casey Tabanou, become too lazy to connect the dots, and Hayes films the result, disconnects and all.

11/22/63: A Book That Shall Live in Infamy

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King can’t seem to help himself. For the past twenty years or so, he’s been writing when he really has little or nothing more to say (worth saying, at least). Instead, it bashes Republicans, conservatives, or whatever he sees as the monster of the moment.

His self-indulgent attacks upon all-things-not-Kingly are tiresome, not entertaining.

Apparently, he’s now given up even pretending to write about horror. Instead, he’s taking up alternative history--or alternative history and science fiction--as his new “literary” genre--or genres. In his latest tome, which is quite the doorstop at over 800 pages, King stretches his readers’ ability to suspend their disbelief to the breaking point and beyond by introducing a time machine (in the form of a “wormhole.”) A local butcher has been using the device to slip back a few decades and buy some cuts of meat at way more than bargain basement prices for resale in the here and now. King’s protagonist has a better idea: he uses the time machine to throw himself (and horror fiction) back more than half a century so he can prevent the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, or “JFK,” as King prefers to refer to the former president.

The whole idea sounds rather more tiresome than entertaining.

But that’s understandable. After all, 11/22/63 is King’s fiftieth book. Apparently, he’s too tired himself, at this point in his career, to trouble himself to write words when numbers will do--or, perhaps, in his pastiche-prone way, he’s simply trying to associate his book with 9/11, another date which, like 12/7/41, lives in eternal “infamy.”

Apparently out of gas (or maybe full of gas), King trots out the trite and the familiar: time travel, JFK’s assassination, chaos theory, high school, teacher-writer protagonist (the novel’s hero, Jack Epping, is a high school English teacher, as King himself once was, before he became the Big Mac and fries of the literati), domestic violence, and a classic car (shades of Christine and From a Buick 8). He even tosses a little Groundhog Day into the mix. (Something’s gotta stick, right?) About the only thing missing is a St. Bernard.

Recommendation: Don’t buy it; if you must read it, wait until your local library pays for a copy out of your tax dollar.

It Is Necessary to Suffer To Be Beautiful. . . Or Believable. . . Or Interesting

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, once told the show’s star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, that, to create interesting television, it was necessary to make her--or her character, at least--suffer.

His tongue-in-cheek statement has a serious aspect to it, for it refers to the need of a narrative to depict conflict. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, authors of Understanding Fiction, point out that without such conflict, there is no, nor can there be any, story.

In longer works of fiction, such as epic poems, television series, movies, and novels, the main character is going to be beset by problems. Several, not just one, is going to impede his or her progress toward reaching the goal that he or she has set for him- or herself. Some are likely to be due to circumstances, others to the actions of other characters, and still others to the protagonist’s own internal conflicts. In general, such conflicts will be natural, psychological, social, or theological. Most likely, two or three--or perhaps all--types of conflict will be operative in such a story.

A couple of examples, represented by simple diagrams, will illustrate the point. In the diagrams, the circle represents the character whose name it bears, and the text at the ends of the lines radiating from the circle represent the conflicts, some psychological, some social, some theological, some situational, in which the character finds him- or herself.


The first diagram shows the plight in which the protagonist of Stephen King’s novel Carrie finds herself. On the edge of adolescence, Carrie lives with her mother, Margaret, a mentally disturbed religious fanatic who considers sex to be wicked. Carrie’s mother has never bothered to tell her daughter the facts of life, and, when, while Carrie is showering following a physical education class, she begins her first menstruation, she is horrified to think that she is bleeding to death. Her classmates find her horror a cause for amusement, and, cruelly, they toss tampons at her, chanting, “Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up!” Although the teacher puts an end to the girls’ taunts, Carrie is humiliated.

A social pariah among her peers even before this incident, Carrie continues to be tormented by her schoolmates. However, her life seems about to take a turn for the better when one of the school’s more popular boys, Tommy Ross, asks her to be his date to the prom. Instead, after she is given a taste, as it were, of what it would be like to be accepted by her peers, she is again publicly humiliated when she is drenched in pigs’ blood. She loses control of herself, unleashing, with devastating effect, the telekinetic power with which she was born. Before she is through exacting vengeance, she has killed most of her fellow students and many of the school’s teachers, destroyed the gymnasium, and obliterated her city’s downtown area. Returning home, she has a showdown with her mother, in which she learns that she is the product of her mother’s having been raped. Margaret stabs Carrie, but Carrie kills her before, later, Carrie herself is killed.Another King novel, Desperation puts its protagonist, twelve-year-old David Carver, through his paces, as indicated by this diagram. As a younger child, David had promised God that he would serve him, no matter what God required of him, if God would heal David’s friend, who was dying. God honored David’s prayer, and, now, years later, God has a mission for David: save the captives of the demon Tak, who, having escaped burial in an abandoned mine, possesses the bodies of various residents of Desperation, Nevada. David manages to do so, at the cost of his little sister’s and his mother’s deaths and his father’s near-loss of his sanity. David concludes that “God is cruel.” However, another character, John Edward Marinville, something of a stand-in for King himself, it seems, advises David that God is beyond human understanding and that, although his actions may seem “cruel” to human beings, God possesses many attributes, including, especially, love.

During the course of the seven-year-long series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, protagonist Buffy Summers suffers many a conflict, not only with demons, but with inner demons as well, as the diagram representing her struggles suggests. It is her lot in life to have been “called” as the “chosen one” by The Powers That Be, to protect the world from vampires, demons, and other monsters that slither, creep, or crawl out of the Hellmouth (located beneath her high school’s library) each week. Instead, Buffy longs to live a “normal life” in which, as a teen, she can moon over boys and whine about homework. Over the years, she is unlucky in love (to put it mildly), and a number of people she loves, including her parents (her father through divorce, her mother through death) are taken from her. She herself dies not once but twice along the way.

Writers who want to create fully developed characters who seem lifelike enough to be a tormented soul trapped in the hell that is high school, to serve as latter-day servants of God, or to fulfill whatever other role he or she is assigned should take Whedon’s dictum to heart. Just as it is necessary to suffer to be beautiful, as the French say, it is necessary that the protagonist suffer to be believable and for the story to have interest to its reader, as Whedon says.

Saturday’s Child: A Prequel to Mystic Mansion

Synopsis

Edgar Allan Poe High School, Home of the Ravens, was a normal academic institution, populated by normal teenagers--or was it? Once the new principal took over, things quickly went from normal to bizarre, and Crystal Fall’s and her friends’ lives were in danger. But the teens had a secret ally: God was on their side! For readers who've graduated from R. L. Stine but aren't quite ready for Stephen King, this novel and its sequel, Mystic Mansion, are perfect reads!

For more, visit Saturday's Child

Sample

Prologue

Amy Black nodded. Her head dropped, and she woke with a start. Mr. O’Brien was droning on, something about a bare body or a bear named Bodkin or some other such Shakespearean nonsense. Why couldn’t Shakespeare have written his plays in English? she thought drowsily.

She closed her eyes.

Her head fell forward again, and she saw the gun--

It was there, in her locker, under her gym bag.

She reached in, took the cold hard steel in her hand.

Him! That jerk!

She watched him enter the boys’ rest room. Her legs carried her down the hallway, and she pushed the door open.

He was at one of the sinks, washing his hands. He turned, saw her, his mouth and eyes wide with surprise.

“What are you doing in here?” he demanded.

He was always demanding something.

“Can’t you let me have even a moment’s privacy? Do you have to--”

There was a sound of thunder, a flash of lightning, and the gun kicked hard in her hand.

Somewhere, someone was screaming.

She sat bolt upright in her chair, barely able to distinguish her dream from the commotion around her and the ringing bell.

The other kids were gathering their books. They left their seats and hastened toward the door, toward a few minutes of freedom, toward a five-minute rendezvous with their friends. Mr. O’Brien called after them, reminding them of their homework. Amy grabbed her book, too, stuffed it into her book bag, and strode from the classroom, the deafening sound of the gunshot still in her ears.

In the hallway, outside Mr. O’Brien’s English Lit class, Amy paused to lean against the wall. She was breathing fast. She was shaking, and she felt faint. The dream, the vision, the hallucination, whatever it was--it had been so vivid, so real! And this was the third time in two weeks that she had had the nightmarish vision.

Why did she keep seeing herself shooting Ed Warner?

She may not love him, exactly, not anymore. But she still had some feelings for him. Certainly, she didn’t hate him. And, most definitely, she did not want to hurt him, least of all to see him dead. After all, he was her boyfriend, for the time being, anyway.

Sure, sometimes Ed could be a little too pushy--all right, a lot too pushy, demanding even, but, hey, that wasn’t any reason to have such violent fantasies.

Maybe I need help, Amy thought. Maybe I’m going crazy.

The thought frightened her. What would Ms. Martin, the counselor, do if Amy dared to confide in her about her “dreams”? Call the cops? Have her arrested? Or put her into a mental institution? Amy shuddered, feeling even weaker. She couldn’t bear being torn from her home, from school, from her parents and friends, and she didn’t think that the understanding Ms. Martin would, in fact, be all that understanding. Maybe no one would, not doctors or her mom and dad or even her friends. She didn’t understand it herself. How could anyone else?

No, Amy decided, she couldn’t risk telling anybody about these strange hallucinations. She would just endure them and maybe, eventually, they would no longer plague her.

She bent over the water fountain and drank deeply of the ice-cold water. Her head hurt. There was a dull ache behind her eyes that threatened to explode at any moment.

“Hi, Amy!”

She straightened, forcing a tight smile.

Her friend, Dee Dee Dawkins, looked at her, an expression of concern on her face. “Are you all right?” Dee Dee inquired.

“Not bad for a Monday,” Amy lied. “Just a little headache.”

“Yeah,” Dee Dee replied, with a giggle. “A headache by the name of Ed Warner.”

Amy gasped.

Dee Dee’s eyebrows lifted. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Sure,” Amy said.

She didn’t sound too convincing, Dee Dee thought. Then Dee Dee said, “Duh!” and smacked herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “It’s because you’re breaking up with him today, right?”

Amy smiled. This time, the smile looked more genuine. “Well, maybe not today, not with this headache,” she said, “but soon.”

“I’m glad,” Dee Dee said.

Amy arched an eyebrow, looking pointedly at her friend.

“Well, I am,” Dee Dee insisted. “He’s become such a jerk!”

The girls came to a junction in the hallway. “See you at lunch,” Dee Dee said.

“See you at lunch,” Amy repeated mechanically, her thoughts elsewhere.

Dee Dee, looking at her friend as Amy walked slowly down the other hall, shook her head. “Boys!” she said, exasperated.

Amy thought about lunch, about Dee Dee, about the test coming up in Biology, about what a mess her room was and how she’d promised her mom she’d clean it up after school, about the new teen club that she and her friends were considering visiting tonight--about anything and everything she could think about to keep her mind off Ed Warner and the awful visions she had had of the smoking gun in her hand and his lifeless body on the bloody rest room floor.

For more, visit Saturday's Child

The Academy: Learning from the Masters, Part 2

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In part one of “The Academy: Learning from the Masters,” we explored how Bentley Little juxtaposes the normal, the natural, and the rational with the paranormal and the supernatural throughout his novel, The Academy, allowing (until the final resolution of the narrative’s conflict), a dual understanding of its incidents. We argued that the idea that everything could happen as a result of the natural and could be rational prevents readers from rejecting the situations as unlikely from the beginning and, by the story’s end, allows them, perhaps, to accept that they are, in fact, paranormal or supernatural. We also suggested that the juxtaposition also creates, maintains, and heightens suspense and fear and that Little, like other horror writers, recognizes that horror is personal, and, in his fiction, he makes it personal for his characters, relating it to their past or present experiences and to their future aspirations.

In this post, we are going to explore another technique that Little and other horror writers typically employ to create, maintain, and heighten suspense and horror: the presentation of experience from the viewpoint of the prey or the intended victim. A good example of this technique occurs in chapter nine of the novel, as a student arrives at Tyler High School to participate in a session of the student council, of which she is a member:

Myla took the key out of the ignition, shutting off the radio, causing the lit dashboard to go black. The world was suddenly silent. Getting out of the van, she locked the vehicle’s doors. She wished she’d brought a flashlight. There was one somewhere in the van that her mom kept there for emergencies, but she didn’t know exactly where it was, and she didn’t have time to look for it. She was already late (97).

There’s more to the description, but let’s pause for a moment and analyze it so far. The first two sentences function well together, the first delineating an incident that is typical of teenagers--listening to the radio as they drive a parent’s car. Teens usually like to turn up the volume, so, in reading this paragraph, many readers would be apt to imagine the radio to have been loud, even blaring. Therefore, when Myla turns off the engine, the resulting silence would be deafening, so to speak, and it might well seem that the whole “world was suddenly silent.” Going from loud music to a “world” of silence in a mere instant--the amount of time it would take for the driver to shut off the ignition--would be dramatic in itself, and it changes the tone of all that went before and all that follows this sentence. In such complete silence, especially after such loud sound, there might be an element of menace. It is normal behavior to lock one’s vehicle after exiting it, but locking doors also suggests the need to take precautions to ensure one’s safety. The use of the word “emergency,” in reference to the flashlight, also plants the idea that Myla may be abut to have an emergency of her own. She is a character in a horror novel, after all. As a teenage girl making her way from her parked, locked car in the darkness, Myla is vulnerable, but she is made more so by the fact that she is “late already” to her destination and “doesn’t have time” to search for the flashlight, because hurrying makes one less cautious than he or she might otherwise be and suggests that Myla’s thoughts might be elsewhere, focused upon her being late and, perhaps, upon whatever task she is executing. We, the readers, are on the scene, somewhere, as observers, and what we see is disquieting; we are afraid for Myla, about whom we have a premonition that all may not go well for her.

The first paragraph focuses upon Myla’s sense of sight (and her thoughts). The next paragraph describes her sense of hearing and her sense of sight. In addition, it describes her emotions:

Myla stepped over the curb, starting down the walkway that led into the center of campus. She didn’t like the echoing sounds her footsteps made on the cement or the way that indistinct lighting from within the quad ahead of her made the surrounding trees and buildings look unfamiliar and threatening.

By hearing through Myla’s ears and seeing though her eyes and by getting inside her heart, at her emotions, and inside her head, at her thoughts, Little’s omniscient narrator has made his story’s suspense (if not yet its horror) personal. It is not something that the reader merely imagines, but it is something that is seen and heard and believed and felt from within a character with whom the reader, for the nonce, at least, identifies. The familiar campus is alien to her, and her echoing footsteps suggest to her, perhaps, that there are others in the area. Their footsteps could be among her own, lost in their echoes. Someone could be stalking her. She feels threatened, and, the next sentence informs us, “she quickened her pace.” A moment later, she sees “a small dark form rush past the front of the library” and she runs. By making the suspense personal, Little has ratcheted up the tension.

Myla makes it safely inside, to participate in a decidedly odd session of the student council. The paragraphs were just a teaser, were they? Yes and no. They did tease, making us think that something was going to happen to poor Myla--something bad, something horrible. When nothing bad did happen, we breathed a sigh of relief, but, while she was crossing the dark campus, frightened at the shadows, sounds, and sights she heard and saw along the way, we bonded with her. Now, when something terrible does happen to her, it will affect us all the more strongly, because we have come to care, however much, for Myla. We didn’t want anything horrible to happen to her, and it didn’t.

Not this time.

But it might--and probably will--next time.

By presenting the action from the point of view of the prey or potential victim, Little gains his reader’s sympathy. If next he presents her injury or death from her point of view, we will be all the more horrified than we would have been had, in seeing her for the first time, as she is injured or killed, we otherwise would be. Seeing the action presented from the potential victim’s point of view makes us, the readers, potential victims, too. We become more than mere observers; we become the prey.