Horror: The Contributions of Personification and Dehumanization

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movie monsters often have offensive capabilities modeled upon those with which nature has equipped terrestrial animals. Sil, Species's female alien-human hybrid created through a synthesis of alien and human deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), is a case in point. An extended description of her appearance and her abilities shows that, despite her human characteristics, she is, at heart, much more alien than human:

Her human form is, in truth, merely a disguise and her true alien form is an exotic, sensual, alien mockery of the human form. Her form is chitinous and reptilian, somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the film Alien, but still humanoid in appearance. Her “hair” is a mass of prehensile tentacles which are slicked back behind her head. She possesses two sets of teeth with the internal set being razor sharp. Her breasts, rather than storing fat or mammary glands, instead store long, slimy tentacles which emerge from her “nipples.” She can use her breast-tentacles as weapons but they are also used in her amorous mating ritual (as shown in the second film). Sil has long sharp spines up her back that she can retract and extend at will. These seem to be utilized as a weapon in Species 2 by Eve. Last but not least, Sil's infamous tongue. Her long tongue is tipped with sharp spines and is her primary defense mechanism (or weapon). When threatened, she can simple impale her aggressor with her tongue. This "kiss of death" is shown in each of the franchise's films at least once. Sil’s alien form is also capable of holding its breath underwater for an extended period (“Sil's Appearance”).

A conglomeration of insect, reptile, mollusk, feline or bird, and human, Sil possesses anatomical weapons that resemble those of the shark (her “two sets of teeth”), the octopus (her “prehensile tentacles”), spiny lizards (the sharp spines on her back), and cats or birds (her barbed tongue). In biological terms, she is more than simply a hybrid, or cross-bred organism; she is, in fact, a chimera, “an organism or tissue that contains at least two different sets of DNA.”

The surrealist artist H. R. Giger, who helped to develop the designs for Sil, the original of which, for her tongue, was festooned with shark's teeth, said, “My original idea was for a death kiss in which Sil forces her lethal tongue down her lover's throat, and pulls it out tearing his insides out with it. It was not to smash through the skull as in the final film.” From the beginning, Giger envisioned Sil's tongue as an anatomical weapon: “My original idea was for a death kiss in which Sil forces her lethal tongue down her lover's throat, and pulls it out tearing his insides out with it. It was not to smash through the skull as in the final film, exactly as it was done in Alien and Alien3.”

Giger also designed the spines that project from Sil's back, “hair with flaming tips,” breast tentacles, and “claw[-]like nails.” Oh, yes—she would be fire-resistant as well. Although he wasn't satisfied by the way his designs were incorporated, sometimes in an altered fashion, in the film, without his creative ideas, the movie would have been as original and as, well, surreal.

Before his work on Species, Giger also designed the Alien alien that has come to be known, unofficially, as the xenomorph. The creature's five-stage “life cycle” (Ovomorph, Facehugger, Chestburster, adult, and Queen) is elaborate and reminiscent, to some extent, of that of “wasps of the Chalcidoidea and Ichneumonoidea families, which lay their eggs on live prey that are then consumed by the hatching larvae.”

A mobile ovary with finger-like appendages and a phallic proboscis, the Facehugger attaches itself to its host's face after emerging from an egg laid by the Queen. After incapacitating its host with “a cynose-based paralytic chemical,” the Facehugger uses its proboscis to implant the creature's egg (formed during the first stage of the alien's life cycle) in its victim's chest. It then detaches itself, “crawls away and dies.” (While it's still attached, its “acidic blood prevents” its removal.)

The attachment of the Facehugger to its victim's face and its subsequent death are somewhat reminiscent of the fate of the male anglerfish, except that it attaches itself to the larger female, withering away until it becomes nothing more than a pair of testicles.

This stage of the xenomorph's “life cycle,” some contend, is a parody of the human reproductive process, substituting rape by means of something akin to oral sex for penile-vaginal intercourse performed in a context of mutual love and respect. (Alien is not recommended by feminists.)

The implanted egg is not only parasitic, but also tumorous in its growth, and it's like a virus, commandeering the host's body to use the host's DNA and other “biological material” to develop its own body, which includes assuming some of the host's own “physical traits [e. g., bipedalism] via a process known as the DNA Reflex.” Once the egg develops into a Chestbuster, it bursts through the abdomen of its host and flees, rapidly increasing in size until, within mere hours, it reaches its adult dimensions.

In short, Giger's design for the xenomorph's “life cycle” envisions reproduction as a monstrous process involving sodomy, rape, parasitism, infection, disease, and death. In his view, sex is not lovemaking, but rape combined with sexual perversion, which leads to death as well as birth, and may substitute a male host's abdomen for the uterus: the fetal Chestbuster erupts from the chest; it does not emerge from the womb. Sex, as Giger envisions it, isn't merely messy; it is itself a confusing and contradictory mess devoid of love and respect, involving violence, invasion, parasitism, infection, and disease.

Daniel D. Snyder sees the xenomorph as representing “obvious distortions of the standard human physique.” Although I'm not sure what he has in mind by “the standard human physique,” his observations are, otherwise, intriguing. Giger's alien, Snyder says, “is a filthy, primal parasite whose very survival is contingent on it's [sic] continued rape and exploitation of other species.” As such, Snyder believes the xenomorph reflects the Darwinistic struggle to survive not only by adaptation, but also through the reproduction of the species, or as Snyder himself puts it, “the cold, mechanical struggle to survive.”

He sees in Giger's monstrous vision of sex, an experience that can cause “pain” and death, and a fusion, in the xenomorph's phallic form, or “phallus and . . monster” that suggests “that thing between your legs [if one happens to be male] is also an instrument of evil.” The monstrous creature of Alien is not ourselves, exactly, but “a penis come to life [and] running amok.” As such, it is also somehow “our own weapon [turned] against us” to show “the terror of what we do to each other and the creatures we torture and exploit every day as a matter of simple survival.”

While Snyder may go a bit over the top with his xenomorphy-as-exploiting-human “run amok,” his understanding of the xenomorph's phallicism is certainly on target, as I have likewise suggested, and the creature's complex, perverse “life cycle” obviously does parody, if not critique, sexual reproduction in general.

In such monsters as Sil and the xenomorph, both personification and dehumanization are at work simultaneously, as they often are when non-human organisms or objects are given human characteristics or abilities and human beings are regarded as less than human. A mermaid is a woman—in part—but she is also a fish—in part. That's why the mermaid is extraordinary and, it must be admitted, not only eldritch, but also horrible.

By increasing or decreasing the quality of a person, an animal, or a thing, we alter it. We transform it, so that it is no longer itself. Whether, in doing so, we make it more or less than it as before, we have meddled with its identity and its essential character. We have played God, creating Sil, or the xenomorph, or whatever in our own image and likeness. That which we have changed remains changed, as does it nature, its existence, and, if it is sentient or intelligent, its experience. Where “man-made monsters” are concerned, this is the true and lasting horror, the horror of Pygmalion and Prometheus and Frankenstein: the creator becomes more monstrous than his or her creation.

Like the bat, a pit viper (the bushmaster, copperhead, and rattlesnake, among others) is equipped with a heat-seeking organ located between its eyes. This organ helps the snake to “accurately aim its strike at its warm-blooded prey.” (The bat uses its heat-seeking organ to locate blood.) Not only the chameleon and other lizards, but also plenty of other animals, including insects, fish, birds, and mammals, use various forms of camouflage, as do soldiers, to conceal themselves from predators. Insects have green blood. So does Papau New Guinea's green-blooded skink. But blood doesn't exist only in red and green; some species of octopi have blue blood, and the ocellated icefish has clear blood. Although, as far as I know, no animals have luminescent blood, many of them, including lightning bugs, or fireflies, glowworms, Jellyfish, and anglerfish, to name a few, are bioluminescent.

The alien creature in the Predator movie (1987) senses body heat, can camouflage itself (using a cloaking device, rather than natural means), and has luminescent green blood. Its traits and abilities are extraordinary, but they're not unique. Appearing in, or exhibited by, a biped creature of humanoid shape, these traits and abilities do seem novel, however, making the extraterrestrial marauder seem to be truly out of this world. They make the monster seem more nonhuman, even as its bipedalism, use of tools, and thinking ability make it seem not altogether unlike its human prey. Again, the monster is both enhanced by personification and degraded by dehumanization. The combined personification and objectification of the creature makes it seem uncanny and, therefore, all the more horrible and frightening.

Sensory Links

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The size of the sensory homunculus’ hands, tongue, ears, nose, and eyes represents the relative space that human body parts occupy on the somatosensory cortex and the motor cortex and the relative sensitivity of each of the senses of touch, taste, hearing, smell, and vision, respectively.

In first five paragraphs of Monster, Frank Peretti uses sound and sight to link paragraphs, which not only provides transitions that might otherwise not exist, except as chronological associations among the incidents of action represented by the author’s descriptions, but also lends to the action itself a sense of immediacy, creating the illusion that the reader him- or herself is, as it were, on the scene. Whether through auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory, or tactile sensations, such references to the senses and their perceptions can link paragraphs for any writer, whether Peretti or you, whether the fiction is of the horror or another genre. Therefore, it is worthwhile to consider how Peretti accomplishes this feat, quoting a few paragraphs from his novel. In doing so, we start with the first paragraph and quote the next ten, each in turn, as well, bolding the auditory sensory links in blue and the visual sensory links in green (which are neither bolded nor colored in the novel itself, of course):

The Hunter, rifle in his hands, dug in a heel and came to a sudden halt on the game trail, motionless, nearly invisible in a thicket of serviceberry and crowded pines. He heard something.

The first rays of the sun flamed over the ridge to the east, knifing through the pine boughs and morning haze in translucent wedges, backlighting tiny galaxies of swirling bugs. Soon the warming air would float up the draw and the pines would whisper like distant surf. But in the lull between the cool of night and the warmth of day, the air was still, the sounds distinct. The Hunter heard his own pulse. The scraping of branches against his camouflage sleeves was crisp and brilliant, the snapping of twigs under his boots almost startling.

And the eerie howl was clear enough to reach him from miles away, audible under the sound of the jays and between the chatterings of a squirrel.

He waited, not breathing, until he heard it again: long, mournful, rising in pitch, and then holding that anguished note to the point of agony before trailing off.

The Hunter’s brow crinkled under the bill of his cap. The howl was too deep and guttural for a wolf. A cougar never made a sound like that. A bear? Not to his knowledge. If it was his quarry, it was upset about something.

Notice that Peretti’s use of these auditory and visual sensory links in these opening paragraphs are approximately equal in number. However, after paragraph six, which is a transition, neutral in terms of sensory linkage, the paragraphs’ visual sensory links become more numerous than their auditory links, thereby emphasizing the hunter’s (and the reader’s) vision over his hearing.

And far ahead of him.

He moved again, quickstepping, ducking branches, eyes darting about, dealing with the distance.

Before he had worked his way through the forest another mile he saw a breach in the forest canopy and an open patch of daylight through the trees. He was coming to a clearing.

He slowed, cautious, found a hiding place behind a massive fallen fir, and peered ahead.

(With but few auditory sensory links, the next paragraph--the first, so far, of any length--is replete with images that appeal to the character’s [and the reader’s] sense of sight; we have identified these images in bold green font.)

Just a few yards beyond him, the forest had been shorn open by a logging operation, a wide swath of open ground littered with forest debris and freshly sawn tree stumps. A dirt road cut through it all, a house-sized pile of limbs and slash awaited burning, and on the far side of the clearing, a hulking yellow bulldozer sat cold and silent, its tracks caked with fresh earth. A huge pile of logs lay neatly stacked near the road, ready for the logging trucks.

Although the next paragraphs also include a few images, the main focus of the descriptions is again on single words--nouns and adjectives, for the most part--which continue to favor sight over sound:

He saw no movement, and the only sound was the quiet rumble of a battered pickup truck idling near the center of the clearing.

He waited, crouching, eyes level with the top of the fallen tree, scanning the clearing, searching for the human beings who had to be there. But no one appeared and the truck just kept idling.

His gaze lifted from the truck to the bulldozer, then to the huge pile of logs, and then to the truck again where something protruding from behind the truck’s front wheels caught his eye. He grabbed a compact pair of binoculars from a pocket and took a closer look.

The protuberance was a man’s arm, motionless and streaked with blood.

The book goes on, for approximately 425 more pages, so we will part company with it here, and see what we can fathom as to the narrative and rhetorical purposes that Peretti’s sometimes simultaneous, sometimes alternating use of mostly auditory and visual sensory links within and among these paragraphs suggests.

Often in the novel, as in its opening paragraphs, sounds precede sights, reversing the order in which human beings normally perceive their environment, for we are much more dependent upon sight than hearing; sight, it could be said, is our preferred sense. It is the one to which we look, if such a pun may be pardoned, before we look to any of the others.

Hearing and touch tell us much, and we are also highly dependent upon them, of course, and less so upon smell and taste (although, once the novel’s protagonist, Rebecca [“Beck”] Shelton, is abducted by the monster of the novel’s title, she is surprised as to how much she becomes dependent upon her sense of smell as well as those of her sight and hearing). In the big pine woods, to which Beck, her husband Reed, and their friends have come to undergo a few days of survival training, sight is greatly reduced by the thick foliage of the dense stands of trees, and normal perception is put, as it were, off balance. (Even the hunter frustrates vision by wearing camouflage.)

Moreover, with the sense of hearing heightened and the sense of sight impeded, the auditory perceives nothing reassuring; far from it, the sounds of the forest are unfamiliar (“He heard something,” but he doesn’t know what, nor do we, the readers), and even the sense of sound, like that of sight, is reduced and obstructed: it is often reduced to a whisper or a lull, or silenced altogether. What is heard distinctly is the terrifying howling of “something” that, as Peretti is careful to inform us, is unlikely to be any familiar forest predator, whether wolf, cougar, or bear. The implication is that, whatever the howling “something” is, it is far worse even than these predatory beasts.

The deep forest makes the use of the senses upon which human beings most depend--sight and sound--problematic at best, increasing their ignorance and subjecting them to more potential menace. As such, the reduction of the senses, referenced within and between the novel’s opening paragraphs by the sensory links of sound and sight, of the auditory and the visual, may be a metaphor for the ignorance of humanity itself, especially in regard to knowledge that is assimilated by means of the senses--in other words, empirical knowledge, the type upon which scientists, including the evolutionary biologists who are the novel’s antagonists as much as the monster of its title, depend.

If the senses are undependable; if they are all but shut down, as it were, at times, then, perhaps, the sciences that are built upon them and its theories, including the theory of evolution, are tentative at best and prone to error. Certainly, this is the view of the creationist scientist Dr. Michael (“Cap”) Capella and his “lovely Coeur d’Alene Native American” wife, Sings in the Morning, or “Sing.” Ironically, both she and the novel’s other Native American character, a tracker, believe in the reality of the monster that abducts Beck; it is the immigrant European, the white man, who disbelieves, despite Caucasian scientists’ attempt to create, a la Dr. Moreau, a hideous new species of human-animal hybrids.




The undependability of the senses, especially those of sight and hearing, seems to reinforce the irony of empirical scientists who are skeptical of divine creation, having neither the eyes, as it were, to see the error of their theory nor the ears to hear the creationists’ criticisms of their fallacious reasoning. If anything, it is faith, not empirical knowledge or even reason, that must save the day.

It is good writing to link paragraphs by the use of words and phrases that appeal to sight and sound, both within and between, paragraphs, but it is superb writing to make such a device thematic as well as merely rhetorical, as Peretti does, creating of such links a metaphor that echoes and reinforces the novel’s very theme, expressed explicitly, several times by Dr. Capella in the course of the novel, and, quite succinctly, by one of Cap’s colleagues, Dr. Emile Baumgartner: “Tampering with DNA is like a child trying to fix a high-tech computer with a toy hammer. It’s always am injury, never an improvement, and we have boxcar loads of dead, mutated fruit flies and lab mice to prove it.”

Empirical science, sense-based, as it is and must be, has its limitations, even aided by reason, for the senses are limited, often inaccurate, sometimes deceived, and cannot penetrate beyond mere appearances. To pretend to understand the origin of the universe and the consequences that flow from the uncaused cause of the Big Bang is not only absurd, but it is also dangerous, Peretti suggests--as dangerous as being alone in a dense forest in which there be monsters that one cannot see or hear--until, perhaps, it is too late.