Ray Bradbury's "The Island"

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Although The Cat's Pajamas, published in 2004, may not be one of Ray Bradbury's finest collections of short stories, it does contain some good ones.

“The Island,” in which a family of four (Mrs. Benton, her daughters Alice and Madeline, and her 15-year-old son Robert) live in a large house, isolated from the larger world and imprisoned by their paranoia, may not be an altogether successful story. It does, however, show Bradbury's talent for indirection.

It seems that Mrs. Benton's fears have infected her children. Bedridden, the matriarch fears that her home may be invaded, either by robbers seeking to steal the $40,000 she's hidden beneath her bed, to rape her and her daughters, or to do both before killing them all. The children share her fears. Their defenses are to arm themselves and to ensure that “the house was locked and bolted” (15).

They have also discontinued their telephone service, except for a battery-powered “intercommunication phone circuit” (18) that lets them talk to one another in their separate rooms. Preferring not to rely upon the world beyond their own house, they've also discontinued the electric service, opting for “oil lamps” and the light and heat of logs blazing in the house's fireplaces (20). To protect themselves, each of the family members, except Mrs. Benson, keeps a pistol at hand in his or her bedroom. These decisions add to their jeopardy after they hear one of the downstairs windows break and fear that a stranger has invaded the sanctuary of their isolated home.

 

Their maid does not live in the family home, and she does not share the family's fears: “She lived but a few hours each day in this outrageous home, untouched by the mother's wild panics and fears. [She had been] made practical with years of living in the town beyond the wide moat of lawn, hedge, and wall” (20).

According to the omniscient narrator, everyone hears the breaking of the window. The family responds as the reader might predict, based upon Bradbury's characterization of them: “Rushing en masse, each [to a] room, a duplicate of the one above or below, four people flung themselves to their doors, to scrabble locks, throw bolts, and attach chains, twist keys” (20). (Bradbury makes a mistake in having his omniscient narrator declare that “ four people flung themselves to their doors,” etc., since Mrs. Benton is bedridden. Confined to her bed, she would not be able to rush back to her room or lock her door; indeed, she would never have gotten out of bed to begin with.)

By contrast, the maid does the sensible thing, as she performs “what should have been a saving, but became a despairing gesture”: she rushes from the kitchen, where she'd been cleaning and putting away “the supper wineglasses,” and “into the lower hallway,” where she calls the family members' names (20). After the family hears her “one small dismayed and accusing cry,” the mother and her children wait “for some new sound” (21).

They seem to want to confirm their worst fear (the invasion of their home) the same way that they earlier confirmed, to their own satisfaction, that their house had been invaded, by taking the sound of “metal rattling” as proof that the earlier sound of a breaking windowpane was not due to “a falling tree limb” or to a snowball (19). In other words, the residents interpret a succession of incidents as confirming one another (or as failing to do so), whether the incidents have anything to do with one another or not.

The Maid as Killer

Has the maid been killed by an intruder, someone who'd entered the house, perhaps to steal the money hidden under Mrs. Benton's bed, to rape her and her daughters, or to kill the family?

Or is the maid really dead? Has she only faked her own murder? Is she herself the killer?

The maid might have a motive: the $40,000. As the person who cleans the house, she might have found the cache, although, since Mrs. Benton is bedridden, it seems unlikely. The maid could have heard of the money, perhaps when, “in the years before,” Alice and her mother debated the wisdom of locking the house and of keeping the large sum of money on hand:

“But all a robber has to do,” said Alice, “is smash a window, undo the still locks, and—”

 

“Break a window! And warn us? Nonsense!”

 

“It would all be so simple if we only kept our money in the bank.”

 

“Again, nonsense! I learned in 1929 to keep hard cash from soft hands! There's a gun under my pillow and our money under my bed! I'm the First National Bank of Oak Green Island!”

 

“A bank worth forty thousand dollars?!”

 

“Hush! Why don't you stand at the landing and tell all the fishermen? Besides, it's not just cash that the fiends would come for. Yourself, Madeline—me!” (17)

All the maid would have to do is to break a window. Then, as panic ensues among the members of the family, she could visit the room of each, individually, and murder them, one by one. Neither Mrs. Benton nor Robert is said to fire a weapon at their killer. Madeline does and miss her aim. Alice also fires at her attacker—three times, in fact—but with her eyes closed, so it is easy to imagine that Alice misses her target, as the omniscient narrator verifies for the reader, stating that one bullet penetrates “the wall, another . . . the bottom of the door, [and the] third . . . the top” of the door (26).

The failure to fire a gun or poor aim protects the maid. As a result, the money is hers, and she can retire from the “outrageous home.” In 1952, the year in which Bradbury wrote this story, $40,000 was a lot of money, after all. As a suspect, the maid has the same three requisites for murder that a stranger would have: means, motive, and opportunity.

Alice as the Killer

Three of the family members are attacked and killed (or otherwise dies) in their respective bedrooms. Alice, who is in the library, alone survives. Shooting three times at the stranger who seeks to enter the library—and missing each time—Alice falls from the window she's opened, the sill of which she straddles, and makes good her escape through the snow. Was the maid also murdered? Is Alice, the sole survivor, the killer?

Because of the indirect style that Bradbury employs, which often describes actions, frequently in fragments without much context, and offers only snippets of conversation, while flitting from one character to another, either possibility seems to exist: either the maid or Alice, it appears, could be the killer.

Either could have broken a downstairs window, thereby precipitating the family's panic, and picked the victims off, one by one.

If Alice is the murderer, she certainly has the means (her gun) and the opportunity (she lives in the same house as the victims, her family), but what about the motive? What reason would she have to kill her mother, her sister, and her brother? After all, as a member of the family, she already enjoys the benefits such status confers upon her: food, clothing, shelter, even luxury.

However, she also must suffer the isolation, the deprivation (there is neither telephone service beyond the house nor electricity; nor is there much companionship, and there is no normalcy) in the “outrageous house,” which is occupied by eccentric and paranoid family members. With $40,000, she might start life anew. She alone is in the library, which suggests she has an interest in the wider world and in art and culture, articles which are in short supply in the madhouse in which she lives.

At the end of the story, objectivity appears in the figure of “the sheriff and his men” (26). Finally, there are individuals from the wider world, authorities trained to respond to emergencies and to solve crimes. Alice has been away; she has escaped; now, “hours later,” she has returned “with the police” (26).

The sheriff, observing the open front door, is surprised by the audacity of the intruder: “He must have just opened up the front door and strolled out, damn, not caring who saw!” (27)

The sheriff and his men also confirm the second set of footprints leading “down the front porch stairs into the white soft velvet snow.” The footprints are “evenly spaced,” suggesting “a certain serenity” and confidence (27).

Alice is amazed at the size of the footprints and the implication of their dimensions: “Oh, God, what a little man” (27).

But are the footprints those of a man?

Could they be the maid's footprints? Alice thinks they are the footprints of a man, but Alice never saw the person at the door to the library who'd sought to get to her; she'd fired at the library door with her “eyes shut” when she'd observed the doorknob turning, and all three of “her shots had gone wide” (26).

If the maid faked her own death, prior to killing the other family members, maybe the footprints are the maid's and not those of a male intruder. Maybe Alice has merely supposed the footprints are those of a man. After all, her mother often warned that rapists could assault them: “Besides, it's not just cash that the fiends would come for. Yourself, Madeline—me!” she'd told Alice (17). In this case, the maid left the footprints descending the front porch stairs and parading from the house “neatly” and “evenly spaced, with a certain serenity,” and Alice left the other set of footprints, those that begin outside the library window and run “away from silence” (26-27).

The first set of footprints could also be those of Alice herself. But what about the other set of footprints that Alice sees when she returns with the police, those “in the snow, running away from the silence” of the house? They are not the same set of footprints that she sees and calls to the attention of the sheriff and his men, those which lead down the front porch's stairs and across the lawn, “vanishing away into the cold night and snowing town” (27). Does this second set of footprints constitute an insurmountable problem for the idea that Alice is the killer?

After opening the front door, she could have left it open and run down the porch stairs and across the lawn to notify the police of the alleged intruder's dastardly deeds. This would be the reason that the footprints are small for a man; they were not left by a male intruder at all, but by Alice herself. The footprints that Alice sees fleeing from the library's open window could be imaginary footprints, which only she alone sees, possibly as a means of supporting her fantasy that an intruder, rather than she herself, murdered her family.

If this is the case, it makes sense that, suffering guilt, she would try to obliterate the only set of footprints at the scene, those of the “little man” (Alice herself): “Alice bent and put out her hand. She measured then tried to cover them with a thrust of her numb fingers.” And it makes sense that she stops crying only after “the wind and the winter and the night did her a gentle kindness. . . [by] filling and erasing” the incriminating evidence “until at last, with no trace, with no memory of their smallness, they were gone” (27).

Interestingly, the omniscient narrator states only that Alice saw the set of footprints leading from the open library window, but acknowledges that both she and the police see the footprints descending the front porch stairs and heading across the lawn, toward the distant, “snowing town.” Is one sight a hallucination, the other a reality?

Thanks to Bradbury's indirect communication, maybe not. The omniscient narrator does not tell the reader that the police see this second set of footprints. The omniscient narrator states only that “she [Alice] saw her footprints in the snow, running away from silence.” If Alice is the killer, after dispatching the maid, her mother, her brother, and her sister, she could have “fallen” out the library window and run to the front porch, covering her footprints as she went, the same way the wind eliminates the “small” footprints of the presumed intruder, by “smoothing and erasing them until at last . . . they were gone” (27).

An Intruder as a Killer

Alternatively, the killer could be a stranger, an intruder, come to rob or rape the women of the house, as Mrs. Benton has long imagined and feared might happen. This is the story's straightforward interpretation, and, despite a few incredulities, such as the intruder's remaining alive despite being the target of several shots fired by different individuals, the small footprints said to be his, the unlikelihood of his knowing about the cache of cash, and his breaking and entering without knowing what he risks he might face from the family inside the house, is a plausible—and perhaps the most plausible—interpretation of the plot.

Thee Family Are the Killers

Finally, another interpretation is possible concerning the killer's identity—or identities.

Maybe neither an intruder, the maid, nor Alice is the murderer. Perhaps the family members each killed him- or herself or died of fright. They are paranoid. Each has a loaded gun at hand. Although panicked by the breaking of a window, they allow (at first) that the broken window could have resulted from nothing more sinister than “a falling tree limb” or a thrown snowball. It's only after they hear a second sound, that of “metal rattling,” that they irrationally conclude that a window has been raised and that an intruder has entered their home (19). Their frantic telephone calls to one another fan the flames of their panic, as do the sounds of each successive gunshot, as the family members suppose one of their own seeks to defend him- or herself against the intruder.

While such defenses are possible, it's also possible that the disturbed, terrified mother and children, afraid of being robbed or raped and murdered, dispatch themselves, preferring a bullet to the savagery that the intruder might unleash upon them. Certainly, Bradbury's omniscient narrator impresses their terror upon the story's readers. Each is shut up alone, behind a locked door, separated from each other and from society at large.

Mrs. Benton sees (or imagines) her door opening, and she does not respond thereafter to Alice's frantic pleas over the telephone (24). Did she somehow take her own life?

Robert expires with a groan, perhaps dying of fright: “His heart stopped” (24).

Madeline says the intruder is at her door, “fumbling with the lock,” and the others hear “one shot and only one” (25). Has Madeline shot at the intruder—and missed? Or has she killed herself?

Only Alice now survives (unless the maid faked her own death and is, in fact, the killer). When Alice sees the knob to the library door turn, she also shoots, with her eyes closed—three times—and also misses the intruder (if there is an intruder).

How unlikely is it that two armed, terrified, paranoid people—Madeline, and Alice—would fail to kill their attacker or that Madeline would fire only once at someone she feared was trying to rob, rape, or kill her? Yet precisely this happens!

But what about the maid? In this scenario, how is her death explained? She is not like the family for whom she works. She does not share their paranoia. She is not isolated by choice, but lives in the town and works only a few hours each day in the family's home. She is “practical.” As far as we know, she is unarmed. Besides, even if she has a gun, why would she kill herself? The story is all but silent as to her demise (if she does die). All the omniscient narrator tells readers is that the maid has entered the “main lower hallway,” calling the names of the family members, apparently trying to get them to assemble.

Previously, however, readers have learned that Mrs. Benton objects to and discourages shouting, afraid that it could attract the attention of “fiends” (17). Alice thinks, as, in their panic, the others begin to scream, “I hear . . . . We all hear. And he'll hear . . . too” (22). Using their intercommunication phone service, Alice tells Mrs. Benton, “Quiet, he'll hear you” (23). Later, she is more direct: “Mother, shut up” (24). After her mother's death, Alice thinks, “If only she hadn't yelled. . . . If only she hadn't showed him the way” (24). Alice is downstairs, as is the maid. Could Alice have shot the maid to silence her and protect herself and her family?

As we've seen, there are at least four possibilities for interpreting Bradbury's story. So, what does happen in “The Island”?

Does an intruder actually enter the house and kill its occupants?

Does the maid fake her own death and then execute the members of the family, except Alice, who escapes?

Does Alice kill everyone else, the maid included, before she “escapes” an imaginary killer?

Do the family members kill themselves, while Alice kills the maid?

Thanks to Bradbury's indirect style, the possibilities multiply. While some may seem less likely than others, each is apt to have its own subscribers. 

 

Among the other stories in The Cat's Pajamas that I found particularly interesting are “Ole, Orozco! Siqueiros, Si!” and “The Completist,” each of which will be murdered and dissected in future Chillers and Thrillers posts.

Horror Settings

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror story settings often play upon the limits of human perception and the effects of such limitations upon human self-esteem, safety, and security.

Fog blinds, and blindness makes one helpless. A forest’s density of trees makes one feel trapped. An island or a space station is isolated, which cuts one off from others and the aid that they could provide. A cavern is dark; darkness blinds; blindness makes one helpless. A cavern’s passages are tight, which could make one feel trapped, and the passages are labyrinthine, suggesting that one may become lost and, therefore, cut off from others and the aid that they could provide. An unfamiliar place is unknown, and the unknown blinds one mentally, or cognitively, thereby making him or her vulnerable to potential injury or harm.

The antidotes, as it were, to the effects of such settings are, respectively, self-reliance; escape or rescue; being located; and knowledge (especially practical knowledge).

Therefore, some horror stories start at one of these extremes and end with the other extreme. For example, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” starts with the sentencing to death of the protagonist and his imprisonment in his intended death chamber, the “pit” of the story’s title, and ends with the main character’s rescue by his enemy’s foes.

However, a horror story (or a thriller) might also start with the positive character trait--self-reliance, for example--and end with its destruction, as James Dickey’s novel Deliverance does. In this narrative, macho, self-reliant outdoorsmen are sodomized by a group of sadistic mountain men whom they encounter during a canoeing trip. Likewise, the adversary of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist seeks to destroy Father Damien Karras’ faith when he attempts to exorcize an alleged demoniac. Another of my posts, “A Descent into the Horrors of Extreme Feminism,” discusses at length the importance of the cavern setting of the movie The Descent on both the film’s plot and characters.

Few contemporary horror stories succeed in exploiting a forest setting’s dark and foreboding character as well as The Blair Witch Project. As anyone who has ever gone camping overnight in a forest knows, campers are almost certain to hear furtive sounds, breaking twigs, and perhaps even snarls or growls. Unable to see what one hears, one can quite easily let his or her imagination run wild, and his or her imagination is able to picture horrors and terrors beyond anything reality is likely to offer. The forest, in this film, is a symbol of man’s helplessness before nature--especially a forest that, cutting the band of students off from the rest of humanity, leaves them not only to their own devices but also to their own wild imaginings. 

Regardless of the setting an author may select, he or she should examine it carefully for its symbolic, metaphorical, or other rhetorical significance, for by playing upon these implications, the writer can enhance the depth and richness of his or her story. In analyzing the proposed setting, the author may, in fact, find that another setting than that which he or she originally envisioned works better for his or her story in part, perhaps, because the alternative setting is more symbolically, metaphorically, or otherwise rhetorically profound than the first location that he or she considered for the narrative’s milieu. (The same is true for the story’s props: Poe, for example, originally envisioned a parrot as the foil to The Raven’s narrator, rather than the raven he subsequently selected as the poem’s avian adversary.)

Ironic Settings

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

In my series concerning “How To Haunt a House” and my critical review of the movie The Descent, “A Descent into the Horrors of Extreme Feminism,”  I discuss the symbolic significance of setting as a means of conveying themes. A house can represent its resident’s soul or personality, with various rooms corresponding to aspects of the person: the attic, his or her mind; the kitchen, his or her instincts and appetites; the living room, his or her persona; the basement, his or her unconscious; and so forth. In the movie The Descent, the underground cavern in which the female spelunkers are attacked by subterranean monsters, the cave, I argue, represents the womb, and the monsters represent the fetuses that liberated women have aborted in favor of childless independence from their traditional and, indeed, biological, roles as mothers and wives.

As Nicholas Ruddick points out in Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction, a symbol can involve a long history of philosophical development. The idea of the island as a symbol of insular individual identity followed, he says, the loss first of the geocentric worldview and then of anthropomorphic notions which left each man and woman an isolated subjectivity, or island, as it were, cut off from the mainland, which is representative of the rest of humanity:

The idea of an individual island has become associated with that of the individual psyche, though the metaphor of the insular Self. The decline first of geocentrism and then [of] anthropomorphism as a result of scientific discovery has led to the rise of individualism, the philosophical privileging of existence over essence. . . and [the idea of] a universe in which the human domain seems an insignificant speck--at best an island--in the oceanic immensity of the spatiotemporal macrocosm (56-57).

Symbolism can be far richer than one imagines!

According to the teleological argument, which is also known as the argument from design, the existence of the universe, as a created artifact, implies the existence of a Creator. Natural theology suggests that we can learn of the nature of God, the Creator, from His creation, nature. This theology, unlike that which is based upon divine revelation that includes the doctrine of humanity’s (and the cosmos’) fall from grace, doesn’t explain (or, some might argue, explain away) the existence of evil, but accepts it as part and parcel of God’s creation and as, therefore, in some way, indicative of God’s own nature as well. As Herman Melville’s Queequeg declares, in Moby Dick, “de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”

Whether one accepts the portrait (or, possibly, the caricature) of God that natural theology paints, one may apply its insight to the artifacts of human technology: whether microscopes or atomic bombs, the things that we create suggest something about us, their creators. Writers, especially of horror, do well to remember this lesson--and to apply it in their work by consciously and deliberately suggesting the symbolic nature of their central properties, or props, and settings by using them as thematic motifs.

As usual, contemporary writers can take a lesson in doing so from Edgar Allan Poe. The house of Usher (in “The Fall of the House of Usher”) is identifiable with its resident, protagonist Roderick Usher; the fall of the former is also the fall of the latter. Indeed, even physically, the house resembles its resident. According to Walter Evans, the windows of the house are Usher’s eyes, the sedges his mustache, and the white tree trunks his teeth (“‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Poe’s Theory of the Tale” in Studies in Short Fiction, 14.2).

Poe also uses the wine cellar in “The Cask of Amontillado” to great symbolic effect. Wine is the drink of camaraderie and friendship; indeed, in Christianity, wine is an element of communion, representing the sacrificial blood of Jesus Christ. In Poe’s story, the significance of wine, as represented by the titular cask of Amontillado, is subverted through irony. The libation of friendship becomes the means by which a mad and vengeful Montresor lures his victim Fortunato to his doom.

Appealing to Fortunate’s friendship as much as to his expertise in wine, Montresor succeeds in getting him to follow him through catacombs, where, after expressing concern for Fortunato’s health while plying him with wine (the catacombs are damp, Montresor says, and Fortunato is coughing), the villain walls up his victim alive, leaving him to die. Half a century later, Montresor, in recounting his tale, brags that he has never been caught.

Wine, which normally cements relationships, here helps to destroy a man who was once at least ostensibly a friend. In the story, the Amontillado, it may be argued, thus represents friendship itself, albeit, in this story, friendship more feigned, on the part of the protagonist, anyway, than real.

Poe’s masterful use of irony to undercut symbolic images and motifs enriches his narratives and, indeed, adds a subtle subtext to the story's overt horror. In learning from the masters, contemporary writers of horror can accomplish similar wonders in their own works of fiction.

Setting and Plot

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror story settings often play upon the limits of human perception and the effects of such limitations upon human self-esteem, safety, and security.

Fog blinds, and blindness makes one helpless. A forest’s density of trees makes one feel trapped. An island or a space station is isolated, which cuts one off from others and the aid that they could provide. A cavern is dark; darkness blinds; blindness makes one helpless. A cavern’s passages are tight, which could make one feel trapped, and the passages are labyrinthine, suggesting that one may become lost and, therefore, cut off from others and the aid that they could provide. An unfamiliar place is unknown, and the unknown blinds one mentally, or cognitively, thereby making him or her vulnerable to potential injury or harm.

The antidotes, as it were, to the effects of such settings are, respectively, self-reliance; escape or rescue; being located; and knowledge (especially practical knowledge).

Therefore, some horror stories start at one of these extremes and end with the other extreme. For example, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” starts with the sentencing to death of the protagonist and his imprisonment in his intended death chamber, the “pit” of the story’s title, and ends with the main character’s rescue by his enemy’s foes.

However, a horror story (or a thriller) might also start with the positive character trait--self-reliance, for example--and end with its destruction, as James Dickey’s novel Deliverance does. In this narrative, macho, self-reliant outdoorsmen are sodomized by a group of sadistic mountain men whom they encounter during a canoeing trip. Likewise, the adversary of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist seeks to destroy Father Damien Karras’ faith when he attempts to exorcize an alleged demoniac. Another of my posts, “A Descent into the Horrors of Extreme Feminism,” discusses at length the importance of the cavern setting of the movie Descent on both the film’s plot and characters.

Few contemporary horror stories succeed in exploiting a forest setting’s dark and foreboding character as well as The Blair Witch Project. As anyone who has ever gone camping overnight in a forest knows, campers are almost certain to hear furtive sounds, breaking twigs, and perhaps even snarls or growls. Unable to see what one hears, one can quite easily let his or her imagination run wild, and his or her imagination is able to picture horrors and terrors beyond anything reality is likely to offer. The forest, in this film, is a symbol of man’s helplessness before nature--especially a forest that, cutting the band of students off from the rest of humanity, leaves them not only to their own devices but also to their own wild imaginings.

Regardless of the setting an author may select, he or she should examine it carefully for its symbolic, metaphorical, or other rhetorical significance, for by playing upon these implications, the writer can enhance the depth and richness of his or her story. In analyzing the proposed setting, the author may, in fact, find that another setting than that which he or she originally envisioned works better for his or her story in part, perhaps, because the alternative setting is more symbolically, metaphorically, or otherwise rhetorically profound than the first location that he or she considered for the narrative’s milieu. (The same is true for the story’s props: Poe, for example, originally envisioned a parrot as the foil to The Raven’s narrator, rather than the raven he subsequently selected as the poem’s avian adversary.)

The Others: A Masterpiece of Situational Irony

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

The Others is a virtually perfect exercise in horror by way of situational irony. The viewer is led to believe that any (and possibly all) of three bizarre events are taking place: one supernatural (the house in which the protagonist, Grace Stewart, and her children, Anne and Nicholas, live is haunted) and two natural (Grace may be losing her mind and/or Grace’s live-in servants Mrs. Bertha Mills, the housekeeper; Mr. Edmund Tuttle, the gardener; and a young mute woman, Lydia, are involved in a conspiracy against the family). Evidence is given, as it were, in support of each of these possibilities.

That the house may be haunted is suggested by Anne’s seeing and speaking to ghosts. She draws a picture of four of the spirits she’s seen: that of a boy about her own age, named Victor; Victor’s parents; and an “old woman.” Next to each figure, she writes the number of times she has seen each of the ghosts: she has seen each parent twice, Victor five times, and the “old lady” fourteen times. The “old lady” has harsh features and wild hair, and she scares Anne, the girl confesses. Anne also talks to Victor, once in the presence of her younger brother, with whom she shares a bedroom. When Nicholas accuses her of “teasing” him, she asks Victor to touch her brother’s face to let Nicholas know that he, Victor, is present. Later, Grace, who, at first, denies the existence of ghosts, refusing to believe that her house is haunted, hears a piano playing downstairs. When she goes to investigate, she learns that the music room is not only locked but that it is also unoccupied. However, when she leaves, an unseen force knocks her to the floor. Grace also experiences other ghostly phenomena. She hears disembodied voices talking about her when she visit’s a “junk room”--a spare bedroom used for storage--and she hears heavy thumping sounds upstairs, which she attributes to Lydia--until she sees the servant conversing with Mrs. Mills outside the house as the thumping continues upstairs. A headstone on the premises indicates that a body has been buried on the estate. Is the ghost the spirit of this person? Later, Grace finds a “book of the dead,” an album of family members’ corpses, photographed as mementoes for the surviving loved ones. Perhaps one or more of their spirits haunt Grace’s house. Not only do Anne and Grace see (and hear) ghosts, but Mrs. Mills tells Anne that she, like Anne, also sees them. Although both Anne and Nicholas have potentially fatal allergic reactions to sunlight, requiring that the curtains on the windows be closed whenever the children pass from one room to another, they have all been removed overnight, as the children’s panic-stricken screams alert Grace. None of the servants admits to having taken down any of the curtains. Perhaps the ghosts did so. When Anne and Nicholas discover the graves of the servants and Grace herself sees their likenesses in a photograph of the dead, the viewer is apt to suppose that Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and Lydia are themselves the ghosts who haunt Grace’s house.

A case is also made for the supposition that Grace is losing her mind. She is fragile and high strung, as Nicole Kidman, who portrays her in the film, says in an interview featured on the DVD release of the movie says, and her husband has gone off to fight in World War II, leaving Grace alone to care for their children. She has poor coping skills, and caring for the two children by herself is more, perhaps, than she can handle. She takes great comfort in the Bible, as the Word of God, and in the rosary, which she says, banishes her fears. She has a simple, unquestioning faith. When her children question the credibility of the such Biblical claims as God’s creation of the universe in only six days and that two of every animal could fit on Noah’s ark, Grace is angered. She tells her children that their doubts may land them in limbo, which she distinguishes from both purgatory and hell. These concepts, like the rosary, suggest that she and her family are Roman Catholics, rather than Protestants. Her dependency upon the Bible, like her generally anxious manner, her quickness to anger, and her impatience toward her children and the servants suggest that she is tottering on the edge emotionally. It is not difficult to imagine that her seeing the “old woman” wearing the veil and dress that she made for her daughter’s confirmation, instead of Anne wearing it, as if, having possessed the girl, the “old woman” is now impersonating Grace's daughter may be the result of Grace’s hallucinating, rather than an instance of a perverse supernatural masquerade. Likewise, Grace may have only imagined that she’d heard the disembodied voices in the “junk room.” She may have had other hallucinations as well, hearing thumping when there was none, for example, and imagining that she’d heard a piano playing in the locked, unoccupied music room. She herself may have done some of the things that seem simply to “happen,” such as the taking down of the curtains in the house. Even the visit of her husband, who, until his sudden appearance, was presumed dead, a casualty of the war, could be attributed to her tendency to hallucinate, especially since, while he is home, he is eerily distant, lies motionless in bed for hours and days on end, refuses to eat anything, and is soon gone again, off, he says, to the battlefront. Indeed, after Grace attacks Anne, thinking that her daughter is the “old woman” in disguise, Anne tells Nicholas that their mother has “gone mad.” All these incidents, individually, and collectively, suggest, rather strongly, that Grace may be going mad or may already have gone insane.

On the other hand, maybe Grace’s house is not haunted, any more than she herself is insane; instead, the servants may be involved in a conspiracy against Grace and her family. They claim to have appeared at the house as the result of their "passing by," a mere coincidence, despite the fact that Grace’s house is located on an island and, for that reason, would not be a place where anyone--especially experienced servants--would be apt to seek employment. At Mrs. Mills’ direction, Mr. Tuttle dumps leaves on a headstone to prevent Grace from discovering the marker, despite Grace having given him a directive to find the headstones of all those who are allegedly buried on the estate. Mrs. Mills confides in Anne that, like the girl, the housekeeper has herself also seen the ghosts. Does Mrs. Miller do so to convince Anne that the ghosts are real in the hope that Anne will, in turn, influence Grace’s belief that her house is haunted and that it is safest to leave the mansion? Did the servants pose for the picture of the dead in which their corpses were supposedly photographed as a memento for their surviving loved ones? Mrs. Mills more than once hints at secrets that she and the other servants are keeping from Grace, and the housekeeper tells Grace that the living and the dead sometimes get “mixed up” with one another. Grace herself supplies a possible motive on the part of her servants for their conspiracy: they want to “take over” her house, she charges. Grace’s thoughts and behavior, at times, seem rational and appropriate, but, at other times, her ideas and actions are obviously groundless and even bizarre, suggesting that she is either insane or nearly so.

The Others is ambiguous on purpose, suggesting three possible explanations for the strange goings-on at the mansion in which she and her children and the servants live: the house is haunted, Grace is insane, and/or the servants want to drive Grace away so that they can lay claim to the mansion . However, the end of the movie, during which, at a séance, Grace finally learns that she has murdered Anne and Nicholas before committing suicide, upsets all three of these expectations concerning the movie’s plot, for the medium reveals that the children are dead and it is their ghosts and the ghost of their murderous mother and the loyal household servants who are the actual ghosts. Those whom Grace suspected of being ghosts are actually the members of the family who have bought the house. Grace and her family are, it appears, in purgatory, reliving Grace’s murder of her children and her murder of herself over and over again. It is only because of the careful planning of the film’s feasible, but ambiguous and bizarre incidents, that the movie succeeds in leading the audience down one path of expectations so that, at the end, it can deliver a wholly different conclusion to the story that ties up these previous storylines: the house is haunted, but by Grace and her family and servants; Grace has gone insane, killing her own children and herself, because she proved incapable of coping with and handling the stresses of everyday life without her husband’s assistance; and the servants, in fact, were conspiring, but not to steal Grace’s home but to confront her with the truth about herself and her actual situation as a soul in purgatory. Like any story that hinges upon situational irony as the means by which to effect a surprise, or twist, ending, The Others performs a bait-and-switch routine, setting up and maintaining viewers’ expectations along one line of development so that the grand finale can deliver an altogether different conclusion than the one that the previous action has painstakingly and deliberately suggested as the culmination of the whole. In doing so, The Others reveals itself to be masterful, indeed, and, therefore, a suspenseful and frightening thriller well worth watching again--and again.

Location, Location, Location!

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In series of stories which are related to a central theme, a plot device for generating new types of antagonists and, therefore, conflicts, is necessary. Writers have come up with a large, and growing, variety of such devices, which tend to fall into a few categories, some of which may, occasionally, overlap. Horror writers, like authors of other types of fiction, should be acquainted with such devices and, when possible, create new ones of their own.

The plot device of which I speak, which we may call an “antagonist generator,” is based upon a simple, but irrefutable, truth. Either the main character occupies a relatively stationary position and antagonists come to him or her, or the protagonist travels, encountering antagonists in the process. Therefore, depending upon whether the generator moves or remains stationary, it is either a mobile or a fixed one.


Mobile Antagonist Generator




Vehicle: A vehicle is any moving object, mechanical or natural, that transports the protagonist (and usually other characters) to a place in (or upon) which he or she encounters an antagonist with whom to engage in a conflict. The vehicle could be an airplane, an automobile, a bicycle, a boat, a bus, a comet, a planet, a ship, a spaceship, a train, or even a wagon train. Various vehicles are used in horror fiction to transport protagonists to rendezvous with hostile antagonists, including an automobile (Stephen King’s Christine), a ship (Ghost Ship, directed by Steve Beck), a train (Terror Train, directed by Roger Spottiswoode), and a spaceship (Alien, directed by Ridley Scott).


Fixed Antagonist Generators




Station: The station stays in place; it doesn’t travel. It performs a specific task or mission of commercial use or military significance. Within these broad guidelines, the station can be almost anything: a dentist’s office, a factory, a fort, a hospital, a library, a museum, a nursing home, a store, or a space station. It can be terrestrial or extraterrestrial. It might be natural, but it could be paranormal or supernatural. Examples of stations in horror fiction include Jurassic Park in the film of the same name (directed by Steven Spielberg), the island in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining, and the Hellmouth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (created by Joss Whedon). In these stories, the generator is stationary, and the protagonists, whether John Hammond and his guests, Edward Prendick, Jack Torrance and his family, or Buffy Summers, respectively, come to it, where they encounter their respective adversaries--dinosaurs, a mad scientist, ghosts, and whatever happens to crawl out of the Hellmouth on any given day.




Site: Like the station, the site is a fixed location; it does not move. Instead, it brings the antagonist to it--and, thus, to the protagonist. However, unlike the station, the site is not the location of any task or mission or, if it is, the task or mission is not commercial or military in nature and is, in and of itself, unrelated to the story’s conflict. An example of a site, as opposed to a station, is the body of young Regan McNeil, which is possessed by the devil in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. Although Regan’s physiological processes may be considered tasks, her acts of ingestion, mastication, digestion, elimination, breathing, and so forth have nothing to do, in and of themselves, with the conflict that takes place between the devil and the story’s protagonist, Father Damien Karras, who comes to Regan’s house to exorcise the demon that possesses her. The jungle in Predator (directed by John McTiernan) is another example of a site, as is the Marsten House in Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot. The teleportation device on Star Trek (created by Gene Roddenberry) does not qualify as a vehicle, as it might seem to do, because it moves people, including Captain Kirk and his crew, but, remaining motionless, it does not move itself. Personnel can enter the teleportation device and leave it, and it serves a military mission, so it‘s not a platform (see below), but a station.




Platform: A platform is a stationary object (rather than a location). It may or may not perform a commercial task or serve a military mission, but, in any case, it is a thing which, as such, cannot be physically (that is, bodily) entered or exited by the protagonist, the antagonist, or any other character. An example of a station is the cellular telephone in Stephen King’s Cell, which performs a commercial task but doesn’t go anywhere--or, rather, it goes only where its owner is already going, under his or her own steam--but it brings antagonists to its user. It is a thing, which cannot be entered of exited. A trail or highway may also be a platform, since the path or the road itself does not move, although it is a means of facilitating the movement of the protagonist or the antagonist and may provide a commercial task or serve a military purpose. The trail is used to great effect in Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan’s Song. Both a trail, of sorts, and another object--a ring--are platforms in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.


Additional Examples


To identify other antagonist generators, think of specific, individual stories you have read or watched. They need not be exclusively horror stories. For example, in C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia’s first volume, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, contains a magic wardrobe. The wardrobe's location is fixed, and it doesn’t perform a particular commercial task or serve a specific military mission. In other words, it’s a platform.


In Bentley Little’s novel The Resort, the family of victims comes to the resort mentioned in the book's title, which does perform a commercial task, making it a station.


Needful Things, the curio shop in Stephen King’s novel of the same name, attracts the protagonist and others, causing them to come to it, and it performs a commercial function, so it is also a station.


The Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland, which attract film students to film a documentary concerning the local legend of the Blair Witch is another example of a site (Blair Witch, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez).


The museum in Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Relic is a station.


The retreat to which Karen Beatty repairs to recuperate after being sexually assaulted and suffering a miscarriage in Gary Brandner’s novel The Howling is a fixed location that serves a commercial task and, incidentally, as it were, introduces her to her antagonists, a colony of werewolves, so the resort qualifies as a station.


Other categories


Other categories besides the (mobile) vehicle and the (fixed) station, site, and platform antagonist generators may well exist, and this post isn’t intended to be exhaustive. It’s intended simply to get the basic idea across and maybe crank the engine of one’s own generators.

What’s So Scary About. . . .

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Too often, writers write the way people too often speak: without thinking or, more specifically, without planning. They hope for inspiration as they put pen to paper or (more typically fingertips to keyboard). However, a bit of forethought could go a long way, in horror writing or in the writing of any other genre of fiction. By brainstorming as to what’s so scary about a potential or chosen setting, the horror writer is better able to capitalize upon features of the locale that are uniquely or especially eerie, frightening, or repulsive. Here are a few key settings for horror stories. The aspiring horror writer can add more of his or her own and update the list as new elements of the horrible and the terrible occur to him or her concerning such places.

Attic

It is seldom visited, and its contents, to some extent, are apt to be forgotten; therefore, the attic is more or less unfamiliar and may house dangers, such as bats, rats, spiders, rabid squirrels, or human intruders.

It is unlit or dimly lit and full of shadows in which dangers may lurk or be concealed.

Its contents may be old or unused and may, therefore, represent mementos of death.

It is not spacious, and it lacks headroom, making one feel trapped.

Depending upon the weather, it could be hot, humid, musty, or damp.

It could smell of mold decay (if the body of an animal that has died in the attic’s walls or elsewhere has begun to rot).

Because of the boxes, crates, and other containers it often contains, the attic features many potential hiding places from which one may be ambushed.

It may lack continuous flooring, which impedes movement and escape.

Its being little visited and kept locked suggests that the attic is a “forbidden” place.

It seems unnaturally quiet.

Noises, lights, and smells, in a closed or locked attic suggests that something is amiss (i. e., that the attic is occupied by an animal, a human intruder, or a ghost, perhaps).

The ladder or the narrow, steep flight of steps leading to the attic suggests the unusual character of the attic.

It is isolated from the rest of the house and, therefore, from the rest of the family.

Its floorboards and hinges may creak.

It is likely to be unfurnished, undecorated, and unadorned; it may be unfinished as well, suggesting a place that has been abandoned and lacks the typical comforts of home.

Note: Flowers in the Attic is set, in large part, in an attic.

Basement

Many of the eerie elements associated with an attic are also associated with a basement, making a basement scary for the same reasons that an attic may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a basement:

The knowledge that, in descending a ladder or a flight of steps, one is going underground (where things are often buried) enhances the uneasiness one may feel
in entering a basement.

Its windows, if any, are apt to be small, perhaps mere vertical slits, which obscures one’s vision to the outside world and makes escape impossible.

It may contain a furnace, the fiery grate or interior of which, in the otherwise relative darkness, may appear eerie or even hellish.

Its cupboards, if any, may contain unusual odds and ends or “secrets” that are better left unknown.

Its walls may be stained or discolored or in disrepair.

Note: The movie The People Under the Stairs is set mostly in a family’s basement.

Crawlspace

Many of the eerie elements associated with an attic are also associated with a basement, making a basement scary for the same reasons that an attic may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a basement:

It is even more cramped and inspires claustrophobia even more than an attic or a
basement, reducing movement to a slow, even potentially painful, crawl.

It is dirty and may be stuffy or musty.

Its pipes, joists, beams, and other obstructions impede movement and/or escape.

Animal carcasses could be present or their bones may be scattered inside the crawlspace. (John Wayne Gacy buried the bodies of many of his victims in his house’s crawlspace, and a lesbian stalker lived in her victim’s crawlspace.)

Tunnels from the crawlspace could lead elsewhere.

Note: As its title implies, the movie Crawlspace featured this setting.

Hotel

It is large, both in space and in the number of rooms, allowing multiple possibilities of ambush, for being trapped, or for having one’s escape cut off.

It is full of strangers, some or all of whom may be hostile or untrustworthy.

As a guest, one is in a dependent role.

Others have keys to one’s room or suite.

It could be haunted.

It operates on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week basis, even while one is asleep and, therefore, vulnerable).

One could get stuck in an elevator, between floors.

Who knows what extra ingredients could be added to a drink in the hotel’s cocktail lounge or to a meal served in the hotel’s restaurant or delivered by room service?

One or more of its employees could be replaced by imposters.

Any weakness in its security could be exploited.

Its surveillance cameras are watching guests all the time, everywhere.

It could be isolated; even when it is not, it is a self-contained and relatively self-sufficient world unto itself (a total institution) of great resources.

It can feature fountains or statues in its lobby and courtyards or grounds.

It can harbor strange sights and sounds (and smells).

Its floor plans could be like a mazes, and, behind each door, a possible threat could wait to ambush a guest.

Power may fail.

Fog or other atmospheric or meteorological effects may occur.

Insects, animals, or humans may intrude.

Note: Stephen King’s short story “1408” takes place in a hotel, as does the movie, 1408, based upon it; King’s novel (and the movie based upon it), The Shining also takes place in a hotel.

Mansion

Many of the eerie elements associated with a hotel are also associated with a mansion, making a mansion scary for the same reasons that a hotel may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a mansion:

Things look different in the dark than they do in the light.

It is isolated behind walls and iron gates, obscured by trees and other vegetation.

Its ornamentation and decoration may be odd (demon doorknockers, gargoyles,
bizarre statues or portraits).

It is associated with an ancestry and heirs (in other words, the house has a past, as it were, which may be filled with guilty secrets).

Its library may contain forbidden books.

“What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?” What, indeed!

It may have an evil-looking façade or aura (as does the House of Usher, the
Amityville house, and Ed Gein’s house).

Its grounds may contain the family’s private cemetery.

It can be personified (“if these walls could only talk!”).

Almost by definition, abandoned houses are scary (they suggest the fragility of life, or relationships, of stability, and a person, too, as a former resident, may be fragile, unstable, or abandoned.)

It could be really haunted or it could become “haunted” (e. g., as a Halloween fund-raiser), attracting real ghosts or demons.

Its various rooms symbolize various aspects of the personality, as dream dictionaries indicate.

An ascent can become a descent.

What was left behind in an abandoned mansion (a mirror, a birdcage, a cabinet, an organ) could be demonic.

Abandoned and in a state of disrepair, it is apt to be unsafe because of weak floors or stairs or crumbling ceilings or walls.

Note: Many horror stories, both in print and on film, including The Amityville Horror, Rose Red, ‘Salem’s Lot, Psycho, and The Haunting of Hill House being but a few of the better known among them, are set, in full or in large part, in mansions.

Island

It is remote and inaccessible.

It may be inhabited by “savages” and/or strange and dangerous plants and animals.

It is at the “mercy” of the sea.

It may contain caverns, mountains, or forests that are habitats for unusual, or even bizarre, and threatening menaces of a vegetative, animal, or human nature.

It may have an odd shape (Skull Island) that is frightening in itself.

It may have been used for nefarious purposes.

It may be volcanic.

It may suggest an alternative evolutionary origin.

Note: The Island of Dr. Moreau, King Kong, Jurassic Park, and many other novels and movies take place upon islands.