Describing Images of Horror: Part 2

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

At the end of the initial post about this topic, I ended with this poster promoting the 1981 film Possession and the idea that images, such as those depicted on movie posters, are open to several, if not to many, possible interpretations, each of which interpretations could give rise to a story, at least theoretically. In other words, a set of images could become the basis of two or more stories, rather than just one.

The Possession poster showcases the back of a topless brunette, whose sleek skin suggests that she is likely young, as does her luxuriant, shoulder-length hair. The very top of the cleavage of her buttocks shows within the “V” of a low-riding garment, the exact nature of which defies definite identification.

The background is black, suggesting night (or evil), and her head is surrounded by an eerie aura, from either side of which projects a pointed beam reminiscent of a horn. Hands lie upon her shoulders—her own, it seems, and yet, inexplicably, they look old, and they end in sharp claws, two of which puncture her flesh, just below her right shoulder, producing blood that trickles down her back.

Below the figure, blood-red letters spell “Possession”; the dot over the “i” is vaguely like a Valentine's heart.

Is the film about demonic possession, as indicated by the horns, the demon's hands, and the blood, or does the movie concern romantic possession, as suggested by the half-naked woman and the Valentine's heart? The caption, below the image of the woman, suggests that both views are correct: the picture shows “Inhuman ecstasy fulfilled.”

However, there are also other possibilities, the words, in white, above the female figure, suggest: "Is it desire? Or violation? Devotion? Or bondage? In any case, “our hidden fears will be aroused,” the text promises.

Probably, we will wonder who the woman is. Or, perhaps what she is. Some of the possibilities that might spring to mind are:

• Mother of the Antichrist

• Succubus

• Witch

We might also ask what “hidden fears” are tapped by the image of evil, of sensuality, of dark devotion, of deviltry, of sexuality, of seduction. Are we afraid of being seduced by darkness, by the devil, by our own improper carnal desires? Maybe all of the above?

By raising several possibilities, the poster makes viewers curious, but it also confuses, just as potent temptations and seduction and a variety of interpretations as to just what a woman represents (and what opportunities she presents) may make one feel confused, even afraid. One is overwhelmed by possibilities, some of which may be appealing and desirable, others of which may be disgusting and terrifying.

As is often the case, the poster's images are ambiguous, multivalent, even conflicting. Ultimately, they may be unsettling, alarming, and frightening.

Perhaps a novel that takes a similar approach would, transcending the merely possible by multiplying the possibilities of interpretation, would achieve artistic respect. Sometimes, rather than being taught a lesson, it might be better if we were taught that an experience, fictional or dramatic, might reflect actual life experiences which, likewise, are open to several interpretations. 

Life, such a work might teach readers or moviegoers, is complicated and, often, mysterious or ambiguous, if not meaningless and full of angst. Such fiction is horrible, indeed, like some of the situations real people actually do face in their everyday lives.

Describing Images of Horror as a Means of Enriching Narrative Possibilities

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Describing horror movie images can suggest directions in which to take a story. A poster for Sweet Sixteen (1983) shows a young, topless woman hugging herself as she stands hip-deep in a dark body of water (most likely a lake), a night sky behind her. Rippling out from her, a shadow upon the surface of the water extends toward the bottom of the poster (and, seemingly, toward the viewer), transforming into the blade of a knife, the point of which is overlaid by the film's title and the production credits.

This poster suggests the transformation of woman into knife, of a naked (and, therefore, vulnerable) woman into a phallic weapon, of flesh into steel: the woman's upper body becomes the hilt of the knife, formed by the union of the woman's shadow with the blade into which her shadow transforms, just as darkness is transformed into the blood-red lettering of the movie's title and the credits. The female figure becomes a weapon. The image's suggestions create a series of contrasts: Woman, from whom life is born, becomes an instrument of death, just as darkness becomes blood, and nature points toward language, the medium of communication, a precursor to civilization.

Whatever metamorphosis the young woman is experiencing has to do with her coming of age, the title suggests. It is unlikely, though, that the red of the letters represents menstrual blood, because girls tend to experience the onset of menstruation at about twelve-and-a-half years of age, long before age sixteen. Therefore, the blood is likely to be associated with another coming-of-age experience, the loss of a girl's virginity, which is also an occasion marked by blood. This possibility is supported, perhaps, by the image of the teenager's nudity. Her innocence is gone; she is no longer “sweet” (that is, in this context, virginal) now that she has been deflowered. She owns the phallic knife that “pierced” her; in a sense, she has become one with it, a “phallic woman,” the Freudian notion referring “to the fantasmatic image of a woman (or mother) endowed with a phallus or a phallic attribute . . . . [and] to the fantasy of the woman (or the mother) retaining the phallus internally after coitus.”

The poster's tagline, an implied question that is concluded by the movie's title, “What terrors are unleashed when a girl turns . . . Sweet Sixteen[?],” suggests that the young woman's loss of virginity “unleashes” horrors.

My analysis of the poster's imagery seems quite plausible, but the movie's plot does not support it—at least, not entirely. A brief summary of the plot reads, “Teenager Melissa moves into a small town filled with racial prejudice and bullying, and each time she meets up with one of the boys in town, [he] end[s] up murdered—but who is the killer?”

A young woman, the virginal Melissa attracts boys. She is a seductress not because she intends to be, but because she, in the flower of young womanhood, attracts boys, as a blossom attracts bees. Her Aunt Tricia's attempt, in the guise of Joanna, to protect Melissa, due to Tricia's confusion of Melissa with her own dead sister Joanne, is Tricia's motive in killing Melissa's suitors. (Tricia killed her father to protect Joanne, but the patricide caused Tricia to go mad and she was institutionalized.) Tricia dispatches Melissa's pursuers with a knife, stabbing them to death. Therefore, it is Tricia who is the phallic woman. Her belief that her niece is her sister, whom she tries to protect from men, as she had tried to protect Joanne from their father, is the basis for her transformation not only into Joanne, but also into the phallic woman who stands up to men. Melissa transforms not herself, but Tricia, into a “knife,” but only because Tricia, in her mind, has first transformed Melissa into Joanne.

Although my own interpretation of the movie poster's imagery differs from the movie's plot, my interpretation is equally valid and could be the basis of a different plot that is also suggested by the poster's images. This possibility is not a surprising, because an image or set of images, like a situation, can be understood in several ways, each of which is both possible and feasible, which is why it is often said that a movie (or a novel) about the same situation or theme is apt to generate as many plots as there are writers. For this reason, the description of a horror movie's images can suggest not one, but several, viable directions in which to take a story, because there is not one, but many, valid interpretations of images and as many directions in which to develop a story's plot, as, for example, this Possession (1981) movie poster suggests:

 

Plotting by Poster

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I would like to suggest how movie posters can help to suggest plots. Before I get to a couple of examples, though, I offer a few guidelines for anyone who might like to try this approach to plotting stories. They have served me well.

1. If the poster you select promotes a movie you have seen, pretend it does not, and don't reference the film, even in your thoughts, as you analyze the poster. The poster should speak for itself, as it were.
2. We are taught to read from left to right and from top to bottom. Graphic designers know this and use our training to their benefit in creating designs and art and in communicating to us.
3. A poster is likely to have a central image, and this central image will be emphasized in some way—through its position, just off center; through color or intensity; by being of bigger than other images. It is obvious that the artist wants the viewer to focus attention on this central image. Text and other images, if any, will relate to this central image and help to develop its figurative aspects.
4. Most art employs various “visual” figures of speech—metaphors, similes, allusions, personifications, exaggerations, understatements, symbols, puns or other plays on words, synecdoches.
5. See all there is to see—not just size, but color, intensity, depth, balance, negative and positive space, shape, texture, size, density, position, arrangement, patterns. facial expressions, hairstyles, costumes (i. e., the models' clothing), age, sex, gender, class, income level. Also consider whatever props might be displayed.
6. Analyze visual evidence of behavior: care, neglect, attendance, abandonment, support, and so forth.
7. Consider the other four senses, too: what sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations does the poster suggest?
8. The text is the key that unlocks the visual imagery's figurative meaning.

With these guidelines in mind, start by describing the poster. Start at the top and work your way down. Include quotations of any text you encounter. Be detailed, but don't be flowery. At this point, be a camera operator, not a sketch artist, an objective viewer, not an interpreter.

After describing the poster, use the elements you identified to complete this list, creating a complete sentence in the process. In doing so, stick to the poster itself.

WHO?
WHAT?
WHEN?
WHERE?
HOW?
WHY?

Next, question yourself about each of the six phrases you entered into the table. In doing so, make observations; draw inferences from what you see and read in the poster. Look for potential relationships among the poster's elements. Look, also, for possible connections between your own thoughts, between your own feelings, and between your own thoughts and feelings. Ask yourself how the answers you listed in the table could be “flipped,” or reinterpreted.

As a result of this process, you may develop an idea for a story or even a synopsis of a plot for a story. At the same time, you will have a sequence of elements that are logically related and which, together, form a narrative thread upon which, by the questioning process and the use of your own imagination, you can embroider, or develop further.

FRIGHT NIGHT

Text above the image reads: “There are some very good reasons to be afraid of the dark.”

It is night. There are stars and a full moon. Spirits swarm above a house. One appears to be the ghost of a vampire; its wide open mouth is positioned above the center of the house, near the domicile's rooftops. Two other spirits have a bestial appearance. The rest are heads with faces and fanged mouths—demons, perhaps.

Behind a simple white rails, a front porch runs the length of the three-story Victorian house. In the center, second-floor room (perhaps a bedroom), the silhouette of a standing figure, hands on hips, is visible between drawn drapes, against light.

Five low steps lead to the porch from the end of a sidewalk, the other end of which connects to a sidewalk that parallels the street out front. Low shrubs are planted along the front of the porch. A tree flanks each side of the front of the house; each is almost as tall as the house. The lawn is cut. Behind the house is a line of trees, perhaps the front rank of a forest.

Text below the image reads, “Fright Night: If you love being scared, it'll be the night of your life.”

Observations

Although the house could be in a suburbs, it seems more likely that it is in a more rural area. Not only are there large trees present, but the visibility of the stars suggests that the house is some distance from the street lights common to suburbs.

The swarm of spirits seem to fountain from the house, suggesting that it is haunted.

Although rather indistinct, the figure appears to be wearing a dress, which would indicate that the figure is that of a woman. It is impossible to tell whether she faces forward, but her presence at the window suggests that she is looking out of the room.

The house is in good repair, and the lawn is landscaped and well kept.

The text suggests that this is a special night; it is Fright Night. The text also suggests that the spirits are the “reasons” that one should fear the dark.

The text that reads “it'll be the night of your life” suggests that Fright Night will be momentous, probably unique.

The figure stands in a lighted room, surrounded by darkness. The room may be her “safe place,” but only as long as the light continues to burn.

WHO? A young woman

WHAT? stands watch

WHEN? at night

WHERE? in the lighted room of an otherwise dark Victorian house in a rural part of the United States

HOW? ready to become a conduit for spiritual warriors

WHY? to ward off a horde of demons that appear every decade on Fright Night.

Questions

Over what, if anything, do the demons rule? What powers do they have? Why do they appear every decade on Fright Night? Whom do they seek to frighten? Why is one the spirit of a vampire? Why are two of bestial form? Why do the remaining demons look similar? Where are the spirits' bodies? Why have they gathered here, at this particular house? Is the house significant in some way? Who is the young woman? Why is she in the house? Why is she alone? How can the story line be flipped?

IT FOLLOWS

Text above the image reads, “it doesn't think. It doesn't feel. It doesn't give up.”

Looking frightened, a tense, young blonde woman, eyes wide, stares into her car's rear-view mirror, which she adjusts. Outside, it is dark and perhaps foggy. Her headlights don't seem to penetrate the gloom.

Text below the image, the film's title, reads, “It Follows.”

Observations

The woman wears makeup, and her nails are painted red-orange. Her eyebrows, like her eyes, are brown, which suggests that she is a peroxide, not a natural, blonde. She wears her hair in a bob or a pixie cut.

WHO? A young woman

WHAT? looks into her rear-view mirror

WHEN? at night

WHERE? on a lonely stretch of country road

HOW? as she is driving her car

WHY? fleeing from a relentless, inhuman pursuer.

 

Questions

Who is the young woman? She appears to be alone—is she? If so, why? If not, why not? Where is she going? Where has she been? Is she on some sort of mission or is she just trying to escape? Why is she driving at night? Who or what is she fleeing? Why is her pursuer chasing her? Why is her pursuer relentless? Is her pursuer behind her, as she appears to believe, or in front of her? Her tension and fear suggest she may be involved in an emergency situation? Is she? If so, what is the emergency? If not, what else explains her tension and fear? Is her car a sedan? A convertible? New? An older model? How large or small is her car? Is it in good repair? Is someone expecting her? If so, who? Why? If not, why not?

In future posts, I may model this technique for plotting by posters again. There are many posters, after all—an inexhaustible supply of them. To generate a strong, intriguing, suspenseful plot, we need only one. Meanwhile, why not try your own hand at this poster:

Horror, Past and Present

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Jib Fowles, professor emeritus of communications at the University of Houston, three “stylistic features” influence the presentation of the fifteen “basic needs” he identifies in Mass Advertising as Social Forecast: “humor . . . celebrities . . . [and] time imagery, past and future.” History, traditions, and nostalgia, he says, are rich sources of such imagery, often tying in with such basic needs as the need to achieve, the need for guidance, the need for aesthetic sensations, and the need for guidance. This post discusses the use of past and future imagery in horror fiction.

Typically, imagery of the past and future are featured, mainly for two reasons.

Certain horror stories fit a five-part plot paradigm:

1. A relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting is explored.
2. A series of bizarre incidents occur.
3. The protagonist learns the cause of these incidents.
4. Armed with this knowledge, he or she eliminates the source of the bizarre incidents.
5. The status quo returns.

In presenting images of the past and future, the relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting of the present is explored. Stephen King adopts this approach in 'Salem's Lot, as readers follow a newspaper delivery boy through the town as he negotiates his route, the narrator offering comments upon the residents of the community. Not only does this approach describe the normal routines of everyday life in 'Salem's Lot, but it also allows King to introduce both his novel's setting and a good number of the characters who will appear in his story.

In motion pictures, novels, and short stories alike, as opposed to the still images which occur in print advertisements, time is fluid, rather than static. The present is always becoming the past, just as the future is always slipping into the present and then into the past. In movies, time is a stream, not a puddle.

In 'Salem's Lot, as the action is described, the scene occurs in the present, but, of course, as the story progresses, this opening scene has occurred in the past.

In addition to using past-future imagery to show the relatively peaceful, sometimes pleasant, everyday setting of the present, horror fiction also often uses imagery of the past and the future to imply cause-and-effect relationships between present and past events. This use of such imagery is widespread in horror novels and movies, as it is in every other narrative and dramatic genre.

Pyscho starts with imagery of the present, as the audience is introduced to Marion Crane, who, having absconded with her employer's money, is forced by a downpour to rent a room at the out-of-the-way Bates Motel. She attracts the attention of motel keeper Norman Bates, which arouses his mother's ire, and she stabs Crane to death as the motel guest takes a shower in her room. Bates cleans up the murder scene and disposes of Crane's body.

In a future scene, near the end of the movie, the audience learns that, in the past (i. e., before the events shown in the movie), Bates developed a split personality as a result of his mother's psychotic emotional manipulation of her son. She'd projected her own sexual insecurities onto her Bates, whom she punishes, even after her death, as a personality whom he's internalized to the point of dressing, speaking, and acting as she did, as, in his mind, he becomes her. In a sense, it's she who committed Crane's murder (and that of a detective investigating Crane's disappearance); Bates covers up “her' crimes, an accessory after the fact.

Although psychologists continue to debate the true nature of Bates's mental illness (as though he were a real person), the murderer upon whom he is based, Ed Gein, was described, by the psychologists and psychiatrists who examined Gein, as a “schizophrenic” and a “sexual psychopath” who suffered from an 'abnormally magnified attachment to his mother.” After his arrest, Gein was ruled “legally insane” and spent the rest of his life in mental institutions, first Wisconsin's Central State Hospital and then the Mendota Mental Institute in Madison.

Michael Myers, the “Shape” in the Halloween film franchise, is psychotic as well, claiming to hear voices which command him to “hate people.” He dreams of centuries-old incidents that took place during the Celtic feast of Samhain, during which “a disfigured fifteen-year-old boy named Enda who, after being rejected by his true love Deirdre, brutally murdered her . . . on what would later be called Halloween night.”

In the original movie's opening scene, as present events unfold, Myers murders his older sister, Judith, while she has sex with her boyfriend, Danny, instead of babysitting Michael.

Later, (i. e., in the future) his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, seems to believe that Michael is a sociopath full of “evil”:

I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left: no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this . . . six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and . . . the blackest eyes—the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply . . . evil.

The odd “diagnosis,” part psychological, part theological, and grounded in a strange mix of social science and religion, captures Loomis's own inability to account for the boy's murderous ways. In the case of Myers, the psychiatric expert, reviewing his patient's past, seems unable, in the present, to explain the nature or origin of Myers's psychopathology.

Some of the moviemakers associated with the franchise seem to have understood Myers better than Dr. Loomis. Daniel Farrands, who wrote The Curse of Michael Myers, regards the character as a sexually repressed, incestuous “deviant” who, in having killed Judith and in killing other women who resemble his older sister, seeks to murder her again and again. However, unable to stop at this point, because of Myers's seeming ability to return from the dead, Farrands also describes Myers as somehow “supernatural.”

Rob Zombie focused on the development of Myers's psychopathic personality disorder, including the boy's penchant for torturing animals, one of the three factors, according to psychiatrist J. M. Macdonald, indicate violent tendencies which could be related to repeated criminal offenses, such as serial murder. (The other two factors are arson and bedwetting, or enuresis.) When two or all three factors appear, Macdonald considers them to indicate such violent tendencies. However, Macdonald's theory is controversial, some researchers suggesting it is more indicative of past parental neglect or abuse, and John Carpenter, who created the Halloween franchise, directing the original, 1978 film.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the science fiction and horror genres were sometimes combined as gigantic insects, animals, monsters, or aliens threatened the earth. Scientists were the true heroes of these movies, because it was their knowledge that empowered the protagonists to hunt down and destroy or otherwise neutralize the menaces. In these movies, the present typically showed the predatory or invasive creatures' attacks. As the stories unfolded, however, these present moments became past incidents, as the “new” present showed how scientists discovered the origin or nature of the threat and the means to eliminate it. Armed with this knowledge, the movies' protagonists then defeated the attackers and saved the planet.

One example of such a film is The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. At the outset of the film, the audience learns that an experimental explosion of an atomic bomb north of the Arctic Circle has awakened a 200-foot-long carnivore, the Rhedosaurus. Scientists later speculate (i. e., in a subsequent, “future” scene) that the animal, moving south along the Canadian-US eastern seaboard, is returning to the site at which fossils of its species were first located. Army troops' attempts to kill the beast are ineffective, although a rocket burns a hole through the predator's throat, causing it to retreat into the ocean. During its flight into the sea, its blood infects the population of New York City with a deadly disease. Unable to kill the dinosaur with an explosion or by fire, without further spreading its disease, the military fires a radioactive isotope into its wound, and the poisoned Rhedosaurus dies.

The use of imagery of the past and present appeals to several of the basic needs Fowles identifies, including the need to satisfy curiosity, the need to escape, the need to feel safe, and the need for guidance. It seems highly likely that such appeals attract horror movie audiences and horror novel readers as much they do consumers who peruse the print advertisements in which these same appeals are evoked.

Alfred Hitchcock on the Importance of Style in Cinematic Storytelling

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, horror Movies don't expect much from their audiences. Typically, there's nothing philosophical or theological about them. As a rule, they don't offer social criticism. If they mix science with their horror, the science is likely to be dubious. Psychology, when it's included, as an explanation for a character's bizarre behavior, is apt to be simplistic or patently absurd. History is usually general and vague or wrong altogether.

Audiences don't mind. They're happy to overlook such discrepancies. They're not interested in factual or political correctness. They want to see death and destruction, blood and guts, and a naked scream queen or two. Give them that, and they'll consider their $10 well spent.

Nevertheless, some horror movie directors want to give audiences more bang for their buck. They have something to say, and they want to say it. In addition to merely entertaining viewers, they want to share their visions, their understandings, their insights with audiences concerning evil, society, heroism, the human psyche, art, filmmaking, or what-have-you. Alfred Hitchcock is one such director. Stanley Kubrick is another. Both Scott Derrickson and William Friedkin are other horror movie directors whose films deliver more than fear, as is David Rosenberg.

Some of the points Hitchcock makes is about filming per se. In an interview with Cinema magazine, the director defines cinema as “pieces of film assembled.” The individual pieces of film, he adds, mean “nothing”; it is their combination, in such a way as to form a “mosaic” of them, whereby their “combination creates an idea” (or, he adds, later, “an emotion”), that they become meaningful. Part of the forming of the mosaic is the selection of the images; another part, in Psycho, in particular, is the “juxtaposition of angles” and the rapidity with which each piece of film appears, for only a fraction of a second, on the screen, resulting in the assembly of a “montage” suggestive of the stabbing of Marion Crane (Jennifer Leigh), while, in fact, “no knife ever touched any woman's body in that scene.”

In the same interview, Hitchcock also speaks of how he maintained and intensified suspense while avoiding a cliche in North by Northwest. The cliche was “a place of assignation [taking] the form of a figure under a street lamp at the corner of the street,” which is often used to “put [a] man on the spot.” Besides the boredom that results from the use of a cliche, another problem is that cliches set up predictable situations. The audience has seen them so many times before that they know what will follow.

To avoid this hackneyed device, Hitchcock “take[s] the loneliest, emptiest spot I can so that there is no place to run for cover, no place to hide, and no place for the enemy to hide, if we can call him that,” having the protagonist disembark from “the bus . . . , a little tiny figure,” standing in the middle of a “complete wasteland.”

Then Hitchcock seems to threaten the man. Just as he intends, the audience thinks, “Well. This is a strange place to put a man.” As cars pass, the audience begins to suppose, “"Ah, he's going to be shot at from a car,'” but Hitchcock frustrates this expectation by showing “a black limousine go by.”

Next, a car approaches from a different direction, stops, and “deposits a man,” before returning from the direction it came. Just as the director intends, the audience imagines the man may be the protagonist's assassin. When the main character approaches him, engaging the stranger in conversation, it's clear to the audience that the new arrival is not a killer. For a second time, Hitchcock has raised the audience's expectation as to what will occur, only to frustrate their prediction.

Now, as “the local bus” approaches, the stranger to whom the protagonist is speaking says, “That's funny.” He points out that a crop-dusting plane is “dusting a place where there's no crops.” The stranger gets onto the bus and leaves. Hitchcock says, “The audience says . . . 'Ah, the airplane.' Now, what's gonna be strange about the airplane, and you soon know. And from that point on you have a man trying to find cover. There is no cover until he gets into the cornfield. Now, you do in the design a very important thing.”

By avoiding a give-away cliche, and repeatedly arousing and frustrating his audience's expectations about what will happen, Hitchcock creates and maintains suspense. Then, when the threat they suspect is coming finally arrives, Hitchcock makes sure the action continues, as the protagonist scrambles “to find cover,” as he is chased by the menacing airplane. The entire scene, from beginning to end, is carefully designed before it is ever filmed. As Hitchcock explains, “This sequence is very carefully designed step by step both visually and to some extent in its menace . . . . So that's production design, exemplified in terms of its function.”

Any author of horror fiction should take the same pains as Hitchcock did in planning the action of his movie's scenes, remembering that the images created on the page, like those filmed on the sound stage or on location, are, when properly combined, in such a way as to form a “mosaic,” the means by which the writer “creates an idea”—and the way that he or she manipulates readers by causing them to draw inferences as to what will come next—inferences which the writer must then frustrate as he or she introduces new possibilities or plot twists.

Now that he has explained how to design combinations of images to create ideas, Hitchcock explains how to use the same process to create an emotion in his audience.

Hitchcock offers two examples. The first, from Psycho, involves Detective Milton Arbogas entering the Victorian house occupied by Norman Bates and his “mother.” As Arbogas steps onto the upper-story hallway floor, after having ascended the staircase, “Mother” rushes from her bedroom, knife in hand, and stabs him across the face. A close-up shot shows the bloody gash in his forehead and cheek and registers his shock as he begins to fall backward, down the stairs, pursued by his killer. Hitchcock explains how he captured this horrific sequence:

. . . When he got to the top of the stairs, I took the camera very high, extremely high. So that he was a small figure. And the figure of the woman came out, very small, dashed at him with a knife. And the knife went out, and we're still very high, and as the knife started to come down, I cut to a big head of the man. And the knife went right across the face, and he fell back from that point on. Now the reason for going high—and here we're talking about the juxtaposition of size of image. So the big head came as a shock to the audience, and to the man himself. His surprise was expressed by the size of the image. But you couldn't get the emphasis of that size unless you had prepared for it by going high.

As an example of how an effect can be varied, he refers to Rear Window, whose main character is L. B. “Jeff” Jeffrey, a photojournalist convalescing after having broken his leg. A voyeur, he spends much of his time peering at his neighbors across the way.

Mr. Stewart is sitting looking out of the window. He observes. We register his observations on his face. We are using the visual image now. We are using the mobility of the face, the expression, as our content of the piece of film. Let's give an example of how this can vary, this technique, with whatever he is looking at: Mr. Stewart looks out. Close-up. Cut to what he sees. Let's assume it's a woman holding a baby in her arms. Cut back to him. He smiles. Mr. Stewart likes babies. He's a nice gentleman. Take out only the middle piece of film, the viewpoint. Leave the close-ups in—the look and the smile. Put a nude girl in the middle instead of the baby. Now he's a dirty old man. By the changing of one piece of film only, you change the whole idea. It's a different idea.

When Jeffrey smiled at the baby, the audience thought him a “nice gentleman,” but were a nude woman substituted for the baby, the audience would have imagined Jeffrey is a pervert, and their emotional response to him would have been quite different.

Every piece of film that you put in the picture should have a purpose,” Hitchcock says, which means each sequence of images should be planned in detail and be combined so as to encourage the audience's ideas and emotions while depicting whatever action is called for by the scene. Style is the means by which Hitchcock says he accomplishes these goals, insisting, “I put first and foremost cinematic style before content . . . . Content is quite secondary to me.”

Alexander Pope defined style, with regard to writing, as “proper words in their proper places.” If “images” were substituted for words, so that, so amended, Pope's definition reads that style, with regard to film making, is proper images in their proper places, Hitchcock, no doubt, would agree. By substituting one image for another, Hitchcock can change the context of a scene and, as a result, the audience's reaction, or feelings, about Jeffrey.

Note: In future posts, we will consider the messages Stanley Kubrick, Scott Derrickson, William Friedkin, and David Rosenberg express through their films:

Building Horror and Suspense Tobe Hooper’s Way, Part 2

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, John Kenneth Muir explains some of the narrative and symbolic devices that Hooper uses in his film, Invaders From Mars (1986) to build horror and suspense.

According to Muir, Hooper is “quite expert at using the background and foregrounds of shots to convey important, frightening information” (109). In support of his contention, Muir offers a couple of especially instructive examples, worth quoting in their entirety:

Tobe Hooper’s use of film language in Invaders From Mars is the most impressive it’s been since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His always-on-the-prowl camera not only records David’s nightmare of alien invasion, [but] it [also] successfully expresses his situation, his mood, and his feelings of isolation. The opening shot of the movie, that of David and his Dad [sic] lying flat on their backs in the grass, stargazing, should be a peaceful, idyllic one. Instead, forecasting the horror to come, the high[-]angle perspective (always the harbinger of doom in the cinematic lexicon) grows increasingly disturbed. As the camera nears its objects, it commences a fast spin, rolling over and over as it nears David and his Dad [sic]. This spin reveals that David Gardner’s world is about to be turned upside down, and that below the surface of perfect suburbia, trouble exists.

Throughout the film, Hooper’s well-placed camera continues to express the plight of the film’s dreaming protagonist. On the school playground, David is farmed inside a metal jungle jim [sic], a surrogate jail cell of sorts, and the message is clear: he’s trapped like a caged animal. Of all the children on the playground, only Davis is “trapped” in this fashion, simultaneously indicating his special status (as the star of his own dream) as well as his knowledge of his isolation. Later, David is literally surrounded by cages, by stuffed, mounted animals in miniature cages in his teacher’s van, and the blocking is very much the same, expressing the identical point: this is a nightmare David cannot escape from. Instead of relying on art design, [William Cameron] Menzies [the director of the original film of which Hooper’s version is a remake] staged many shots, nay entire sequences, in minimalist oversized sets to achieve similar results: feelings of entrapment and isolation. Instead of relying on art design, Hooper falls back on his thorough understanding of film grammar, mise en scene and cutting (108-109).

Writers of short stories and novels, it may be argued, do not have the resources at hand that filmmakers do, and, even if they had, their medium is pen, ink, and paper (or, more likely, a computerized word processor and printer). What good, therefore, does it do the short story writer or the novelist to examine the narrative techniques of movie directors and cameramen? The short answer is that it’s not only possible, but desirable, to learn artistic techniques from as many artists as possible, without undue concern as to their form or genre, always with an eye as to how to adapt their methods to one’s own work. After all, filmmakers have certainly helped themselves generously to quite a few literary techniques as well as to the methods of other artists, visual, plastic, musical, and otherwise.

Instead of a camera, the writer has description. Description, it may be truly be said, is the writer’s camera. Using its powers, he or she can create symbolic images, just as Hooper does, with his spinning camera and high-angle camera perspective, and images of the Jungle Jim and the caged animals. (A literary master of such technique is Stephen Crane; consider his use of symbolic imagery in The Red Badge of Courage, for example, in which he describes the clearing in a forest near a battlefield in terms of a cathedral.) What a writer can learn, more specifically than merely the use of symbolic imagery, created through description, to express theme, convey a character’s emotion, suggest the narrative‘s tone, or to effect foreshadowing, perhaps, is what Muir points out concerning Hooper’s employment of mise en scene’s blocking out of the critical elements of a scene so as to exploit the background and the foreground of each separate shot. Before writing a scene, an author should write out, in a few sentences, as specifically as possible, the answers to such questions as:

1. What is the purpose of this scene?
2. Can a special perspective (camera angle, as it were) be used to heighten the reader’s interest and to emphasize key information (or maybe to shift the reader’s focus away from a bit of information--a clue, for example, in a murder mystery) in the scene?
3. What should the scene’s lighting be? Should it be direct, indirect, partial, full, from above, below, from one side or the other, from behind? (Anyone who has ever held a flashlight below his or her chin in an otherwise dark room knows what valuable tricks light can play in creating horror, fear, or suspense.)
4. What properties (“props”) should the scene include, and why? To what use should they be put?
5. What link is there between this scene and its predecessor, and what link is there between it and the next scene?
6. What colors will be used to describe the characters’ hair, eyes, clothes, the “props,” and other items contained in the scene?

In other words, start to think off scenes not as so many words on a page, sandwiched between other segments of words on other pages, but as an image (or a series of connected images) within the continuous flow of many other, related images which, together, tell a unified, coherent, and meaningful story. At the same time, though, consider how the scene can best perform its function, or purpose, within the whole of which it is a part, using symbolism, irony, composition, and other elements, both narrative and visual.

The result will be a more artistically told story, and a story that is apt to be taken more seriously. At times, it is enough, perhaps, to tell a story, but it is always better to tell a story well.

Building Horror and Suspense Tobe Hooper’s Way

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, John Kenneth Muir explains some of the narrative and symbolic devices that Hooper uses in his film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), to build horror and suspense. First, Muir says, Hooper sets the tone of the film by using symbolic images that suggest that the world exists within an indifferent, or even hostile, universe in which human life is not only meaningless but also endangered. A corpse is shown, posed as if it were a work of art (55). Then, Hooper shows “close-ups of violent eruptions on the surface of our sun,” the red shade of which “belies a kind of anger,” the whole image implying, again, that “the universe is disordered, anarchic, even cruel.” Indeed, the sun and the moon may represent the eyes of the “cosmos,” suggesting that the cosmos is “watching from a distance” (56). One might even wonder if the heavenly orbs might suggest that God is observing the bizarre and hideous actions that transpire in the film. If so, the God who watches such horrors is obviously not a loving God, but a voyeur who is something along the lines of a sadist. A third image is that of armadillo road kill. It is important to observe that the armadillo “is overturned, upside down,” because such a position, Muir points out, “is a long-time signifier of death in the language of the cinema” (56). This image accomplishes a double task, Muir says. First, it reinforces the idea that “the ordered universe has become topsy-turvy” because although “the highway is a symbol of man’s intelligence and his need to connect one place to another,” the presence of the dead armadillo suggests that “above and beyond man’s sense of self-imposed order (the road), is the overriding chaos of the universe” (56). Second, the image of the dead armadillo heralds a similar image of a homeless man, “signifying. . . the death and horror to come”:

Not long after the shot of the armadillo, a drink is seen in the cemetery to be lying in the same position as the road kill. . . . In fact, this is the film’s second “armadillo” shot: the drunk’s face is upside down in the frame too, out of order, signifying again the death and horror to come (56).

So far, three images have conspired, so to speak, to indicate that the world exists within an indifferent, or even hostile, universe in which human life is not only meaningless but also endangered. Next, sound--or, more specifically--music is used to further underscore the universe’s cosmic indifference to humanity:

The music in the film. . . is distinctly unpleasant, all cymbal crashes and echoes; highly discordant and jarring. There is no lyrical theme running through the music, no recognizable leitmotif, only a jumble of ugly, seemingly random sounds strung together. Like the eruptions on the surface of the sun, the music reflects the absence of equilibrium, sanity, reason, and order in the universe” (56).

This sense of an unintelligible, meaningless, and possibly hostile universe comes across even more clearly when there is, as it were, a “theme” or “leitmotif” to man-made sounds, such as, for example, the news report to which one of the film’s characters is listening at the moment that he is struck and killed by a passing truck while he is busy reliving himself into a cup while standing at the edge of the road. The report is full of seemingly random events of a “discomforting” character, which, taken together, indicate “a disordered, uncaring universe” (57). Having used both images and sound to symbolize such cosmic indifference to humanity, Hooper now turns his film’s attention to its characters, eliminating, from the very outset, first the group of victims’ “alpha male,” followed, in short order, by the elimination of the second male, which leads the female character on her own, with “no ‘male’ figure to cling to at all” (57-58). Hooper ratchets up the film’s horror and suspense by refusing to grant the character’s experiences any meaning; what happens to them--and, vicariously, to the audience, has no cognitive or epistemological significance; they learn nothing from it. Therefore, their experience is without value:

He denies his viewers the critical act of learning. . . . an audience usually learns important facts from the story’s structure or through the expositional dialogue of the main characters. . . . Knowledge does not pass from one protagonist to the next and no acts are explained or even rationalized. . . . They are killed without learning anything. . . and so the audience doesn’t learn anything either (58).

The failure to explain the bizarre, violent incidents lends the film verisimilitude, Muir suggests, because, in moviegoers’ own lives, similar events transpire, without readymade answers (58). By setting up a series of expectations on the parts of both his characters and the audience and then frustrating or “overturning” them, Hooper maintains the horror, the randomness, and the suspense of his movie’s action, Muir adds: “They go to the gas station expecting gas, but it’s out of gas. They go to the swimming hole expecting water, but it’s dry. They go to the friendly looking farmhouse down the lane expecting help but find only insanity and death” (58). Likewise, the characters are dwarfed by their surroundings, which suggests that they are of comparatively little significance whose lives are often on the verge of extinction, whether they are aware of their danger or not:

Hooper takes special pains to accentuate the vastness of the universe around his young characters. . . . Hooper sees [them] much as those very characters view the spiders in the web or the cows locked away in the slaughterhouses. They’re little, meaningless creatures, running around in their lives with a sort of tunnel vision, unable to see that they inhabit a much larger and terribly frightening domain. As human beings, we. . . do a hundred “normal” and “routine” things . . . while unaware that a tornado could be approaching, or that a serial killer could be roaming the very neighborhood where we live. But we impose a false sense of order (and hence security) in our everyday existence and Tobe Hooper’s modus operandi is to strip all that away. . . . We‘re victims of a universe that unfolds randomly (59-60).

According to Muir, Hooper is not necessarily an atheist. It could be that “the universe has a plan”; it’s just that “humans don’t know what it is, or even if they’re important to it” (60), a point that Hooper underscores through imagery, camera angles, and his characters’ dialogue:

Under the uncaring eye of the distant sun, Jerry’s van picks up the Hitchhiker. . . . Under a giant blue sky, the Hitchhiker [one of the film’s antagonists] and the van itself might as well be ants on a hill or cows in the slaughterhouse. . . . Hooper and cinematographer [Daniel] Pearl make inventive use of the low angle perspective. . . . [to reveal] the inherent hierarchy (or disorder) of the universe. High above his oblivious characters stand outer space, suns, and galaxies. And those cosmic entities could not care less that five teens are about to meet their makers in a backwater corner of some place called Texas.

The film’s dialogue reinforces many of these themes (60).

The film’s central antagonist, the cannibalistic, transvestite, serial killer name Leatherface, is himself an embodiment of Hooper’s view of the universe as an uncaring, hostile place: “Ultimately, the very nature of Leatherface’s villainy is a prominent part of Hooper’s thesis about the universe, too.” For example, “he doesn’t want to have sex with the lovely Sally.” Instead, as if she were nothing more than a cow in a slaughterhouse, “where her grandfather once worked,” Leatherface would rather slaughter and eat Sally and wear her face as a mask (60).

The sole survivor, Sally survives merely by chance: she “happens to get a break, to escape the crazies and make it to the road beyond the farmhouse but none of that is part of a design or intentional strategy on her part. It’s just the law of averages” (66); the universe remains impartial in its indifference to all humanity. Moreover, as Muir points out, Sally’s escape may not have left her unscathed emotionally: “her sanity is in serious question at the end of Chain Saw” (66). Finally, Hooper uses even seemingly random business and road signs to reinforce his movie’s horror and suspense:

Also interesting is Hooper’s appropriate use of signage at just the right times to provide the audience with subconscious clues about the horror to come. At the gas station, there is a sign reading “Gulf,” quite an appropriate brand for a half-way place between two regions, in this case the normal and the insane. Shortly thereafter, another sign reads “STOP” as the protagonists near the old Franklin place, a visual warning that is ultimately ignored (67).

It should be obvious that Hooper is a consummate director of horror films, adept in the use of symbolic imagery, instrumental music, the denial of thematic meaning to his characters’ experiences, frustrated expectations, irony, size discrepancies between characters and their vast surroundings, dialogue, business and road signs, and other forms of non-verbal communication to suggest both horror and suspense. Any storyteller, whether of film or literary fiction, interested in the horror genre would do well to study the techniques of such a master. Fortunately, Muir’s study of precisely this topic, in Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre, helps one to do just this.