Monsters in Our Midst

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In horror fiction, monsters originate from only a handful of sources:

• Natural
  • Physiological (e. g., mutation or birth defect)
  • Natural catastrophe
  • Human
    • Psychological
    • Social
    • Scientific/Technological
• Supernatural
  • Angelic/Demonic
  • Divine

Within this framework, the specific contents of these categories change, sometimes vanishing (at least for a time) or being replaced by newer understandings of the concept of the monstrous.

For example, among the ancients, hermaphrodites were considered omens from God. Signs of his displeasure, humans with both male and female sex organs were viewed as warnings form God. Their existence bespoke His wrath and the punishment that He would soon visit upon his sinful people.

Today, hermaphrodism is understood as an effect of male hormones, an adrenal glans disorder, or aromatase deficiency. In other words, the condition results from natural, not supernatural, causes. In male-to-female or female-to-male transgender transgender cases, the cause of gender dysphoria is corrected through hormone therapy, gender-confirmation surgery, and other surgical or medical procedures. Its cause is psychological; its remedy is medical and surgical.

With the change in the understanding of the causes of hermaphroditism and transgender conditions, intersex individuals are seldom cast as “monsters” in contemporary horror fiction, and, when they are cast as such, as in Sleepaway Camp (1983), critics, like much of the general public, movie-going and otherwise, are offended by such representations.

Likewise, zombies, as they are depicted today, more often result from radiation, mental disorders, pathogens, or accidents during scientific experiments than from voodoo or magic. These fundamental changes, both in the way we view the world and the basis of epistemology, have led to changes in the nature and origin of the zombie.

In short, the category of horror “monster,” which once included hermaphrodites as omens of God's displeasure and imminent wrath, are now more frequently seen as having experienced a hormonal or glandular problem or as having experienced gender dysphoria. Their conditions are caused by physiological or psychological, not supernatural or divine, agencies. Zombies, likewise, have been given a natural, rather than a supernatural, origin.

Frequently, horror movie monsters are seen as representing metaphors for political, social, or cultural events typical of particular time periods:

Godzilla (1954) has been seen as representing the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Them! (1954) ends with a caution about the dangers of “the Atomic Age,” as myrmecologist Dr. Harold Medford warns, “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.”

The 1966 science fiction-horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which people were replaced with alien look-alikes, has been regarded as an allegory for both McCarthyism and communism.

Some critics regard The Fly (1986) as a metaphor for AIDS, although director David Cronenberg said he intended the horror movie to be a metaphor for “aging and death.”

Although no horror movie seems to sum up more recent decades, a film in which political figures instigate armies of ordinary citizens to go to war against one another might be just the type of film to symbolize the current state of affairs in the United States, wherein Antifa and Democratic protesters, encouraged and emboldened by otherworldly or demonic, hypnotic versions of Senator Maxine Waters, who exalts the public confrontation of individuals who disagree with her party, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who claims civility is impossible between Democrats and those who oppose them, attack their opponents in the street, confront political appointees during meals in public restaurants, disrupt Senate hearings, and attack the Supreme Court Building, eventually precipitating a war that endangers the entire country. Such an allegorical film, called, perhaps, Demonic Uprising would certainly capture the spirit of our age.

Setting: More Than Merely Time and Place

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In horror stories, as in other types of fiction, setting may be, and often is, more than merely time and space. A setting may provide a situation, evoke atmosphere, supply a context, suggest a character's inner world, or imply a metaphor.

In Luis Llosa's Anaconda (1997), the Amazonian rain forest provides the situation upon which the film's plot is based: the search of a documentary film crew for the Shirishamas, a lost tribe, which is replaced by their hunt, under the leadership of Paul Serone, a Paraguayan snake hunter, for a giant anaconda. The documentary film crew's expedition, which is hijacked by Serone, allows the plot of Llosa's movie's to unfold in a new direction, one involving horror and suspense far beyond that which the documentary crew might otherwise have encountered, including murder, humans being used as live bait, and multiple attacks (most fatal) by the giant reptile.

Alejandro Amenábar's 2001 film, The Others, takes place immediately after World War II. With her young children, Anne and Nicholas, Grace Stewart has retreated to a remote country house on one of the Channel Islands. She hires a trio of caretakers who mysteriously appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Soon after, Grace and her children discover that the house is haunted—or so it appears. Throughout their stay, Grace orders her servants, Bertha Mills, Edmund Tuttle, and Lydia, to keep the curtains drawn; her children, she explains, suffer from photosensitivity and cannot bear direct sunlight.

The darkness, like the heavy fog that often obscures the yard and the woods beyond the estate, create an atmosphere of dread. Symbolically, the darkness may represent ignorance (specifically, that of Grace and her children concerning their true state of existence); the fog, confusion and an inability to understand clearly; and the woods, the wilderness of nature, both human and otherwise. These elements of the setting, like the large house in which mysterious events transpire, create a disturbing atmosphere that adds to the movie's horror and suspense.

The vast Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) provides a context for the film. The isolated hotel represents the emotional distance that the caretaker and would-be novelist Jack Torrance maintains between himself and others, including his wife Wendy and their son Danny, just as the cold weather, the ice, the snow, and the drifting fog represent Jack's cold nature. His emotional coldness isolates him from himself and from those whom he claims to love. Although, outwardly, he can appear to be an amiable person, as he does during his interview, he is, in fact, a deeply disturbed man who's given to rage and violence.

The hotel's rambling corridors, its many closed doors, and its emptiness, like the remote, isolated landscape surrounding it, provide the context that allow viewers to understand Jack's true character as someone who is irrational. Outwardly, he, like the Overlook Hotel, seems sane and stable; inside, both the hotel and its caretaker are mad and anything but stable. The hallways seem to lead in all directions, but go nowhere, returning back upon themselves; the closed doors to the rooms are locked, providing no access; the vast, empty chambers available to Jack and his family echo with their footsteps. The hotel and Jack mirror one another so well that it's difficult, if not impossible, to say for certain whether the hotel is haunted or its “ghosts” are hallucinations produced by Jack's own madness.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Edgar Allan Poe's remote mansion doubles as an outward representation or expression of the inner world of Roderick Usher's tormented mind. Its fall, at the end of the story, reflects the “fall” of Usher into madness, although his insanity clearly occurs some time earlier, perhaps before the incidents of the story itself take place, as his madness causes many of these incidents. Poe himself suggests that Usher's madness precedes the incidents of the story; his narrator's description of a disturbing crack in the front wall of the house reads:

Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

As Kevin J. Hayes, the editor of The Annotated Poe, points out, “Many readers note the corollary between this barely perceptible but nonetheless worrisome fissure and Roderick Usher's broken, increasingly unstable mind. They are a source of considerable tension in the story” (99).

Even the furnishings of the house, Hayes observes, suggest a relationship between the House of Usher and Usher himself: “Roderick's weird, creepy painting of an underground vault, illuminated by a sourceless light, offers a glimpse into the terrible, frightening terminus—madness or despair—into which the artist has fallen.”

It is Usher, of course, who commits the insane act of entombing his sister Madeline alive in the house's family tomb, but it is inside the house that Usher commits this despicable deed. Throughout the story, the house and its estate depict the inner world of their owner's mind, a mind “fallen” into the madness that besets it.

As pointed out in a previous post, the cave explored by the characters of Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) is a metaphor for the uterus. In descending into the womb-like cave, the feminist female spelunkers are exploring their sexual selves, exploring womanhood itself, but female sexuality and womanhood as they are viewed through the lens of extreme feminism:

The contours of the cave they explore resemble the shape of the womb. Wide at the entrance (vagina), it narrows toward the middle (cervix), and then opens again, into another wider space (uterus, or womb). As the women negotiate their way through the womb-cave, Sarah, the wife and mother, gets stuck and, suffering from claustrophobia, panics. As subtext, her becoming trapped seems to represent pregnancy, which causes a woman to get “stuck,” physically and, to some extent, both emotionally and socially, if not vocationally, as well, for nine months in a process that, for many, epitomizes femininity. Beth, her best friend, plays the role of the midwife, delivering Sarah, but the birth process represented by Beth’s freeing Sarah from the cave’s narrowed passageway goes awry: the womb-cave collapses, burying the women inside a womb-become-a-tomb. Their gender, especially as it is involved in pregnancy, has not only trapped them, but it has also, in fact, buried them alive.

Since this metaphor is explored in detail in the previous post, there's no need to revisit it further in this post.

Clearly, setting need not be limited merely to representing a particular place at a specific moment in time. Skillfully employed, setting can represent or evoke, among other things, a situation, an atmosphere, a context, a character's inner world, or a metaphor.

"The Cone": Style, Sentence by Sentence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” Wells is a master of style. He makes every word count toward the creation of the final effect he designs his stories to create. Style, as Jonathan Swift defines it, is “proper words in their proper places.” Mark Twain, like other writers, agrees that “the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” AlfredHitchcock says something similar concerning images, the lexicon of film. It is not any single image that matters, he says, but the way in which they are assembled to evoke thought and feeling. On the importance of style, a science fiction writer, a satirist, a humorist, and a master of suspense agree, as does any serious writer or producer. Style is not a small thing; it is everything, for it shapes and invigorates everything: character, including dialogue, action, plot, setting, theme.

With a single phrase or sentence, Wells often accomplishes several narrative or rhetorical purposes at once in his exemplary short story, “The Cone,” as he does in his other tales. The story is a true tour de force, the literary equivalent of expressionistic and surreal paintings, but, as I discuss this aspect of the story in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” there's no need to repeat it here. Instead, I will concentrate on the effects, literary and rhetorical, he achieves by several phrases and sentences in “The Cone.”

At the outset of the story, his omniscient narrator comments, “They [Mrs Horrocks and the artist Raut] sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there.” This sentence accomplishes three things:

1. It suggests that the air is not “fresher” near the open window, because it is not “fresh” anywhere.
2. The fact that they are “trying to fancy” fresh air near the window means that they are not succeeding. The open window admits no fresh air; like their attempt to imagine fresher air, the open window is a mere prop and, therefore, a failure.
3. The illicit couple's attempt to “fancy the air was fresher” characterizes them. In the face of a reality they find unpleasant, they imagine their circumstances are different. They seek to impose their own preferences upon the world, adjusting what is to what is suitable to them. In this, the sentence's use of “attempt” suggests, they also fail.

Wells gets much out of other phrases, too. In the story's fifth paragraph, his narrator describes an approaching train: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed” not only shows the passing of the cars, but also makes readers count them as they go past: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks.” The counting helps to make the paragraph active, but it also reinforces the number of cars in the train. The ironworks, we think, is a busy, productive place. In the same sentence, the narrator adds that the cars “were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel,” causing readers to imagine each car being “extinguished” as it enters the tunnel's “throat.” This description includes one of the many personifications Wells uses to bring his ironworks to life as an active, vengeful, and menacing entity.

For Raut, the ironworks represents “Gehenna,” meaning “a place of burning, torment, or misery,” or, “(in Judaism and the New Testament, Hell).” The ironworks is impertinent, daring to belch “fire and dust into the face of heaven.” Raut's words suggest that the ironworks is an affront to God Himself, an impious, wicked hell the very existence of which is an insult to heaven. “Fire and dust,” the insults, as it were, which the hellish ironworks belch “into the face of heaven,” are later juxtaposed to the Biblical phrase “pillars of cloud” and “pillars of fire” in which God appears to Moses and the Israelites as He guides them across the desert after their escape from pharaoh: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” (Exodus 13:21). The substitution of “fire” for the more eloquent phrase “pillars of fire” and of sullying “dust” for the more elegant expression “a pillar of a cloud” degrades the poetic language of the Bible, substituting crass terminology for its elevated diction. While Raut accuses the ironworks of insulting God, it is he, through his paraphrases of scripture, who actually does so.

In two clever sentences, Wells creates a sort of reverse-personification. His omniscient narrator describes blast furnaces, which stand “heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron,” as if they are hearts full of passion and rage; Horrocks himself, as their manager, is the mind, or soul, that controls these savage breasts. His “seething” passions and the “incessant turmoil of [the] flames” of his rage are the vengeful hearts that will burn Raut alive. 

 

Throughout descriptions of the ironworks, Wells's omniscent narrator uses phrases suggestive of violence, blood, death, and hell to depict the ironworks, the scene of Raut's eventual demise: “ghostly stunted beehive shapes,” “a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts,” “fitful flames,” “hammer beat heavily,” “palpating red stuff,” “blood-red reflections,” “succession of ghosts,” “blood-red vapour as red and hot as sun,” “white as death,” “fire writhing in the pit,” “sulphurous vapor,” “boil the blood,” and “hot suffocating flame.”

References to Gehenna, “the pit,” “pillars of cloud by day,” “pillars of fire by night,” “sin,” “sulphorous vapor” and “God” give the story a Biblical, if not an expressly Christian, context, as does Horrocks's horror at what he has done when “his sanity returned to him,” following his apparent crime of passion and he observes the effect of his vengeance, the sobbing, “inhuman, monstrous creature” that had been Raut. However, this context is undercut by Raut's reference to Jove and the omniscient narrator's allusion to “half-naked Titans.” Not only does the adulterous behavior of Raut and Mrs. Horrocks and Horrocks's seeking of vengeance against Raut suggest that religion is, for them, merely conventional, rather than sincere and devout, but Raut's use of the expression “by Jove,” like the omniscient narrator's employment of the phrase “half-naked Titans,” also implies that none of the characters is religious. Whether Horrocks' own plea to God at the end of the story is genuine or merely an expression of his horror at the sight of what he has done is open to question.

Through his conscious and deliberate selections of words and constructions of phrases throughout “The Cone,” Wells creates and maintains a style that is not only appropriate to his tale, but one which complements it at every turn, creating ironic contradictions; movement and pace; a religious context; complex characterization through allusions and personification; a sense of violence, blood, death, and hell; doubt concerning the characters' true devotion to the religious faith that is implied by the story's allusions to religious themes and theological concepts; and, overall, the unity of effect that produces a seemingly inevitable resolution of the story's central conflict. Wells' style delivers a great deal, largely thanks to his deliberate use of language—“proper words in their proper places”—a and to his own inimitable artistic genius.

Metaphorical Horror

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Although most of us have a healthy respect for significant incidents, we may dismiss what we see as trifles too quickly. The great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes didn't make such a mistake. Indeed, as he reminded his friend and colleague, Dr. John Watson, “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”

Holmes even gives Watson an example of the importance of so-called trifles: “I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth [to] which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.”

Unfortunately, we know no other details of the adventure to which Holmes refers, for it was not one about which he or Watson wrote. Nevertheless, we can assume it constituted a “singularity,” a unique fact or feature, something that stands out because it doesn't fit or add up and which turns out, in his experience, to be “almost invariably a clue.”

Although no writer should ever imagine the matter of metaphors to be a mere “trifle,” some, no doubt, do. Having forgotten the difficulty they experienced in mastering this basic, but most eloquent, figure of speech (or imagining that they have mastered it), some authors seldom revisit it and cease to practice the art of its creation. As a result, they are likely to write less well than they otherwise could—and should—write. Had Claude Monet, in having first mixed red and yellow, obtaining orange, concluded no other shades and hues of the color could be produced that were worth his time and effort, he might never have painted San Giorgio Maggiore by Twilight. Great writers, like any other type of artist, much practice every technique to perfect it. 

While great writers' work provide many examples worthy of emulation, other sources of inspiration are also useful, especially to the apprentice or aspiring author. For writers of horror fiction, for example, posters created to publicize horror movies offer quick studies of astute uses of metaphor to advertise, or “sell,” these products. If copywriters, painters, and photographers can sell a film, partially through their use of metaphors, an author of horror stories should be able to “sell” a phrase, a sentence, a scene, or, in some cases, even an entire story through his or her adroit use of appropriate and emotionally powerful metaphors.

The metaphor, we know, is a figure of speech that compares two things (or abstractions, such as thoughts or feelings) that are not alike. A metaphor may be thought of as an equation. One variable, “A,” is said to be equal to another variable, “B”:

E = MC²

wherein, “E” is energy, “M” is mass, and “C” is the speed of light times itself

We can turn an equation around, writing, for example—

MC² = E

Often, a metaphor makes readers aware of a quality that they might otherwise fail to notice:

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.

World = stage

Men and women = players

Exits = deaths

Entrances = births

Often, we make metaphors by stating them directly, as William Shakespeare does in the above quotation (“the world's a stage”).

However, we can create a metaphor indirectly, by speaking (or writing) of an object in relation to one (or more) of its parts. Consider this poster for the movie Teeth: 

We see a young woman lying supine in a bathtub of soapy water. Only her head appears above the water's surface. The featureless white wall above her head does not distract us with color, patterned wallpaper, paneling, or anything else. The water is also featureless, and the layer of soap lying upon its surface makes it seem one with the tub and the wall. Our gaze remains on her face; we are encouraged, in effect, to consider her, to study her. We see that she is young and beautiful. Her skin is flawless, her cheeks rosy, her lips full and red. She looks at us directly, without fear or shame.

As our gaze wanders down the poster, we see, beneath the dark water, rising bubbles and a single red rose which seems to float at about the position the young woman's genitals would be, were they visible to us. The metaphor is unstated, but suggested: her vagina = a rose. The image of the rose recalls the flower's qualities: delicacy, beauty, fragrance. We might also associate the rose with romantic love, for the flower is traditionally a symbol of erotic passion.

Beneath the flower, we encounter a single word, in the capital letters of a serif font: “Teeth.” The word's blood red color is reminiscent both of the rose above it and of the young woman's vagina, which it represents. The vagina is bloody during the moment of deflowering and throughout each menstrual cycle. This rose-vagina, or vagina-rose, becomes more and more complex, as layers of meanings unfold themselves, much in the manner of a budding rose.

This seemingly simple poster has more to offer: the smaller text, also in the capital letters of a serif font, but white, not red: “EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORNS.” White is often a symbol of purity, or innocence, of virginity. If the young woman is a virgin, transforming her from a state of purity and innocence into a woman of knowledge—and of carnal knowledge, at that—and experience, through sexual intercourse, is apt to result in violence, injury, and, perhaps, death, not to her, but to the man who so transforms her. This young maiden is no passive and acquiescent Galatea, but a vengeful Fury. Such seems to be the warning conveyed by the poster's reference to a vagina with teeth, the legendary vagina dentata.

The front cover of a DVD made for the Spanish-speaking segment of the market bears the same imagery as the movie poster for its English-language counterpart (described above), except, instead of the title Teeth, the Spanish version is called Vagina Dentata, and, in case the front cover's message isn't clear enough, text on the Spanish edition's back cover spells out the meaning of the front cover's iconography:

[Vagina Dentata] es la historia un brusco desperta sexual como nunca se ha visto antes . . . Como nuestra protagonista pasa de liderar un grupo de castidad a experimentar sus primeras experencias sexuales de manera traumatica . . . un extrano habita en su cuerpo. Adivine que pasa cuando Dawn O'Keefe descrubre una dentadura en el lugar mas espantoso que usted puedo imaginar . . . Cuidado las chicas buenas pueden morder.

(English translation): [Teeth] is the story of a sudden sexual awakening unlike any ever seen before. . . As our protagonist goes from leading a chastity group to experiencing her first traumatic sexual experiences. . . a stranger lives in her body. Guess what happens when Dawn O'Keefe uncovers a set of teeth in the most frightening place you can imnagine. Beware: good girls can bite.

It may seem that we've gotten away from the original topic of our essay, but we haven't. The text on the back of the Spanish-language version of Teeth merely spells out the consequences, according to the movie's treatment of the topic represented by the double metaphor, “rose = vagina; thorns = teeth”: a young woman's first sexual experiences are traumatic; she responds by murdering her partners, using her vagina's teeth to effect bloody vengeance. For her victims (and for male members of the audience—yes, pun intended—the location of the young woman's second set of teeth is “the most frightening place” they can envision.) The effects presented by the movie are made possible by, if not contained within, the double metaphor.

One can create a metaphor directly, as Shakespeare does with his “all the world's a stage” trope, but a metaphor can also be created indirectly, by associating the qualities of one term (“A”) with the other term, “B,” with which it is linked by comparison. As we have seen, a well-conceived metaphor can accomplish a lot more than simply making us see something in a new light; it can become a vehicle for an entire movie's basic situation. In the case of Teeth, the screenwriters (and the poster's creators) have taken a leaf from Edgar Allan Poe, whose narrator, at the opening to his story “Berenice,” speaks of his having “derived from beauty . . [not only] a type of unloveliness,” but also a situation ripe with horror.

Note: For those who are inclinded toward psychoanalytical, or Freudian, interpretations of literature (as a rule, I am not), Teeth might also be seen as symbolic of the so-called castration complex and as rife with all sorts of unconscious significance.

Subtext: The Key to Greater Storytelling Sophistication

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In the past, when same-sex love dared not name its name, filmmakers whose movies, horror or otherwise, featured gays or gay themes had to rely on coded messages to convey their messages. While such a tactic is not necessary now that mainstream society has embraced, or is beginning to embrace, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender men and women, the approach can be adapted to other uses, offering a subtler, more indirect way of communicating that could help make horror films more nuanced in their presentation of themes in general.

The group of editors who co-wrote an Advocate article, “17 Horror Films Only LGBT People Understand,” identify several of the ways by which gay filmmakers “coded” their homosexual content.

In The Black Cat (1934), Christopher Harrity observes, Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) “keeps dead women in glass cases.” Extreme misogyny, he notes, was a shorthand way, back in the day, to suggest a character's homosexuality.

In The Haunting (1963), Trudy King identifies the “Mary Quant outfits” that Theo wears and points out how she rejects a male character's “advances” while she “coyly” flirts with another female character, Eleanor. A brief mention, in a Metro article, “The V&A is holding a Mary Quant retrospective to celebrate the iconic designer’s work,” suggests their significance in the movie's disguised same-sex context: “defiant 60s hemlines were a symbol of young women shrugging off the more traditional and repressive gendered expectations of previous generations, and embracing a new world where they had more impetus to take control of their bodies and their futures.” Theo (note the ambiguity of the nickname, which could stand for either Theodore or Theodora) wears clothing that signify her unconventional lifestyle. Precisely how, or in what manner, she is unconventional is indicated by her style of dress, her rejections of the male character's advances, her sexually ambiguous nickname, and her surreptitious flirtations with another member of her own sex. Although the evidence is circumstantial, it is also fairly substantial. 

Tracy E. Gilchrist sees the clothing that Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) wears—a “formfitting sage skirt suit and glamorous fur that would make Cate Blanchett’s [awakening lesbian] Carol Aird swoon”—and her “impeccable hairdo that The Birds just can't help dive into”—symbolic of her latent saphhic desires. She is a straitlaced lady, but her beauty and sex appeal don't seem to escape the notice of “sumptuously husky-voiced” Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) who opts for male attire (pants) over feminine clothing. Gilchrist detects a “sizzling . . . tension” between the two women, who appear to represent the butch-femme pairing typical of the sleazy pulp novels of the day. (The movie was released in 1963). But there's more, as infomercial announcers like to say:

Beyond the calculable lesbian energy set off when Melanie and Annie interact, and Melanie’s fabulous wardrobe, there’s an argument to be made for those lovebirds (they’re called lovebirds, after all) as an allegory for forbidden love shaking things up. Bodega Bay was perfectly fine and set in its ways before Melanie, with her progressive ideas and those winged outsiders, turned up and created a feathered maelstrom.

For Gilchrist, it's warrant Officer Ripley's personal characteristics (“laconic sensibility, competence, strength,” not to mention her “cheekbones”) that establishes the Alien (1973) character as a butch lesbian. A lesbian context for the female Marine (who's a middle-management fighting woman, halfway between the ranks of commissioned officer and that of enlisted personnel) is created by the presence of the alien eggs and by the “feminist iconography of tunnels and dark spaces evoking vaginas, ovaries, and wombs, and . . . recurring primal scenes of birth and rebirth.”

According to writer David Chaskin, Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (1985) contains a gay subtext because he promoted the movie's “gay themes.” These elements—“leather bars, male shower scenes, and a 'final boy' who is more interested in hanging out with his cute guy friend than making out with the beautiful gal pal”—were directed, Chaskin admitted (after initially denying the “gay themes” were present in the movie at all), at “teenage boys' rampant AIDS-era homophobia.” 

“Subverting gender roles” can also mark a movie as bearing a gay theme, as The Descent (2005) does, claims Neal Broverman, in the film's depiction of women without men as “strong women,” rather than “helpless girls” who must face monsters on their own in the remote cave they're exploring.

In Teeth (2007), the protagonist, Dawn O'Keefe (Jess Weixler) fights “male aggressors” with a weapon unique to her sex—her vagina, which, unlike those of ordinary women, is armed; she possesses an actual vagina dentata. The movie “is a tale about empowering women,” Daniel Reynolds contends. 

Writers can learn from moviemakers who wanted to imply certain themes before it was socially acceptable even to mention such topics in a public forum. Their solution was to use subtext to suggest, rather than to communicate about forbidden lifestyles directly. As a result, they used indirect communication to get their points across to an audience who was in the know or who could relate well enough to the implications of the subtext to figure out its overt significance. This approach doesn't have to be limited to the expression of same-sex themes. The use of subtext can enrich any movie by suggesting, rather than stating openly, by intimating rather than declaring, by connoting rather than denoting.

By exemplifying the behaviors characteristic (or believed to be characteristic) of a group of people—in other words, stereotyping—writers can imply that an individual character is a member of the group whose characteristics he or she expresses. Sometimes, to drive home the point, writers may exaggerate such characteristics or behaviors.

A person who masquerades as a member of a race, nationality, or ethnicity other than his or her own could be shown as speaking and acting as members of the group he or she is imitating generally speak or behave. In short, such a character could impersonate a member of the group. A particular manner of dress, which is associated with a specific group, can help to create the illusion that the character belongs to the race, nationality, or ethnicity he or she is impersonating. Of course, it is likely that an actual member of the group could recognize the character as fraudulent, possibly with violent or even deadly consequences—we're talking horror here, after all.

Just as a character's sex and gender can be disguised by a sexually ambiguous or androgynous nickname, a nickname can suggest that a character belongs to a group of criminals, especially if “Guido,” “Scarface, or “Cool Daddy” uses criminal cant, or “gangster talk”; “The Colonel,” “Jarhead,” or “Sarge” uses military jargon (complete with plenty of acronyms); or “Doc,” “Sage,” or “The Professor” employs the argot of a particular profession, such as medicine, philosophy, or higher education. 

Symbolism can create the impression that something stands for something else. Symbolism often works on the basis of metaphor, the comparison of two unlike objects—and, in fiction, the second object is apt to be the story's setting. In a sense, a metaphor is an equation of sorts, suggesting that one thing (A) = something else (B). If Alien used a “feminist iconography of tunnels and dark spaces evoking vaginas, ovaries, and wombs, and . . . recurring primal scenes of birth and rebirth” to create a lesbian subtext, another subtext can be created by using an “iconography” (visual images and symbols) appropriate to it. To develop such an iconography, use a metaphor. Alien's iconography might have been based on the metaphor Spaceship's Interior (A) = Woman's Body (B). What if a writer wanted to suggest that a Lake (A) is a Mouth (B).

What iconography—which images and symbols—could be used to accomplish this end? Perhaps a wave (tongue) caused by an underwater disturbance rumbling (like a stomach) near a cave (open jaws) could curl over a boat, lifting it upward and backward, into an eddy down which the occupants (food) would swirl (as if being swallowed). Then, a big bubble might form on the surface of the lake, get bigger and bigger, and then pop (as though the lake had belched). A line of cone-shaped buoys could represent teeth. Before and after, people on the shore could be seen eating picnics and people aboard boats on the lake could be seen drinking—one or two might even pour a beverage into the lake, and the water could carry it toward the cave-jaws. When victims die violent deaths on the lake, as surely they would in a horror story, their blood could follow the same pathway as the poured-out beverages.) 

Deception can also suggest that things are other than they appear. Members of organized crime are famous for using legitimate businesses, such as restaurants or warehouses, as “fronts” for their criminal activities. Mafia members have held meetings in restaurants, where, in a basement room, they've committed murders, even cutting up the body so its parts could be parceled out and dumped throughout the city. A mortuary did double duty, conducting legitimate burials during which a double-decker coffin allowed the disposal of both the dearly departed in the upper berth, so to speak, and a murder victim in the lower berth. The restaurant employed a chef, servers, and assistants, and it served meals to the public, just as the mortuary provided actual services to the community. Were a novel written or a film produced with such a plot, saving the truth about what is really happening until the end of the story would make the horror all the more shocking when it is finally revealed. 

Sex-role and gender reversals can occur in horror fiction whether there is an LGBT dimension to the story or not. 

Since horror is a type of fantasy fiction, anything can happen. A woman's vagina can grow teeth. Alternatively, inanimate objects may come to life or, through personification, nature can be embodied by a giantess with the power to create an earthquake simply by shaking her body, grow plants and trees out of her torso, and become solid rock, loose sand, or running water.

By using the same techniques that filmmakers employed in less tolerant times to convey LGBT themes in mainstream movies, today's writers can imply meanings that transcend the literal text, enriching their stories while making them more sophisticated than they'd be without such an approach.

Metaphorical Monsters

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

In high school, we learned that a metaphor is a figure of speech that explicitly states a comparison between two different things. Metaphors help us to unify experience, showing us how A and B, although mostly quite different, are also alike in some way.

I prefer a different definition for the term. I like to think of a metaphor as a verbal, or linguistic, equation. In this view, the metaphor isn’t simply stating that there’s a likeness, or similarity, between two different persons, places, or things. Instead, the metaphor is asserting that the two mean the same thing. If the metaphor is “fog blinds,” we’re saying fog = blindness, as, for instance, in math, 2 + 2 = 4.

One reason that I prefer the equation to the figure of speech concept is that the terms in an equation can be swapped with one another. If 2 + 2 = 4, then 4 = 2 + 2. Likewise, if a metaphor is considered an equation, fog = blindness can be recast as blindness = fog. This way of thinking helps a writer to remember clearly the significance of his or metaphors. When monsters are involved, remembering what one is about is important!

In horror fiction, monsters = metaphors; therefore, metaphors = monsters. This chart shows some of the metaphors that writers have employed to suggest comparisons between one thing and another:




There are many others as well, of course. Perhaps we will explore some of the others in future installments.

Some metaphors operate at several levels at the same time, creating a sort of chain of associations. These associations may be literal, symbolic, existential, and spiritual. Here’s an example, using fog:
The symbolic, or metaphorical, term in the first equation links fog with blindness. Fog, if it is thick and pervasive enough, can rob us of our ability to see clearly. It can blind us, as it were. Therefore, fog can be equated with blindness, as it is in the implied metaphor, fog = blindness. Notice, however, that these associations can be extended so that the literal-metaphorical becomes existential as well: blindness = fear of the unknown. What do children fear when the lights go out at night? We say that they are afraid of the dark, but what they actually fear is what may be there, unseen, with them in their bedrooms, invisible in the darkness. They fear the unknown. Therefore, blindness (a form of darkness, in a sense) = fear of the unknown. The chain of associations can be carried further, as the chart demonstrates. Why do we fear the unknown? We fear it because it may threaten us with harm or even death: fear of the unknown = death. Depending upon one’s religious convictions or lack thereof, death, in turn, equals either annihilation or, possibly, damnation--an eternity of torment in hell, cut off from both man and God: death = annihilation or death = damnation. (Of course, it could also equal an eternity of bliss in heaven [death= heaven], surrounded by fellow souls in the presence of God, but we are talking horror here, and, therefore, loss, not gain.)

The same way that some metaphorical equations can be extended so that they form a chain of associations, literal, metaphorical, existential, and spiritual, others can as well. The vampire is an especially rich and evocative possibility. Usually, those equations that can be so extended are the most effective ones for literature, whether of the horror genre or otherwise, because they furnish a broad plain upon which to explore the literal, the symbolic, the existential, and the spiritual aspects of the themes they involve.

Visual Metaphors?

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Of the five senses, the primary one has always been sight, but until the advent of audio-visual technology, humanity has been able to use sight (and sound) as a communication tool only in rudimentary ways, one of which has been to agree with others that certain letters should represent particular sounds and that these sounds, voiced or unvoiced (that is, written), should signify the things that the sounds were intended to represent. Such communication is not only imperfect, but also indirect and abstract, rather than immediate and concrete.

However, with the advent of audio-visual technology, especially motion pictures, some of these limitations have faded and, today, audio-visual media, especially motion pictures, have become the main way by which humans communicate ideas. Progress marches apace, leaving the poor storyteller who is dependent upon the mere use of words behind. The best he or she can hope to do is to create word-pictures, or images, through descriptions.

However, if one cannot “beat them,” he or she may “join them,” and authors of fiction can learn, from their brothers and sisters in the film business, how to use images more effectively than, perhaps, they have done in the past, when readers were not as inundated by filmmakers’ sophisticated and subtle dramatization, rather than narration, of stories.

Trevor Whittock’s Metaphor and Film is a study in this and other aspects of the use of language, both linguistically and cinematographically. His book opens with three examples that indicate the nature of his text’s concern, one from “a director,” Alfred Hitchcock, another from “a scriptwriter,” Paul Schrader, and a third from “a film critic,” James F. Scott, before inviting his own readers to consider whether it makes sense to speak of “visual metaphors” at all and, if so, in what way and to what extent. The examples, like Whittock’s book in its entirety, are both interesting and enlightening.

Hitchcock declares:

“At the beginning of the film [The Birds] we show Rod Taylor in the bird shop. He catches the canary that has escaped from its cage, and after putting it back, he says to Tippi Hedren, “I’m putting you back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels.” I added that sentence during the shooting because I felt it added to her characterisation as a wealthy, shallow playgirl. And later on, when the gulls attack the village, Melanie Daniels takes refuge in a glass telephone booth and I show her as a bird in a cage. This time it isn’t a gilded cage, but a cage of misery . . . . It’s a reversal of the age-old conflict between men and birds. Here the human beings are in cages and the birds are on the outside. . . (1).

Schrader points out:

In the case of Taxi Driver, the theme was loneliness. Then you find a metaphor for the theme, one that expresses it. In Taxi Driver, that was the cabbie, the perfect expression of urban loneliness . . . (1).

James F. Scott observes:

White-light fog is used in the underwater sequence of The Graduate in which Benjamin, donning flippers and goggles, flees to the bottom of the family swimming pool, presumably to escape the overbearing camaraderie of his parents and their circle of friends. As the camera assumes his point of view, the world becomes a gloomy blur, shimmering but indistinct, agitated by the motion of the water and toned in a bilious, washed-out green. While the metaphor of diving reflects Benjamin’s introversion and retreat, the color quality of the image indicates the psychic cost of his escapism. He has ducked away from the plastic gewgaws of suburbia but only to set himself adrift in a turbid world of ghastly color and uncertain shapes (1).

Are the examples of visual metaphors or are these devices more akin, as W. B. Stanford believes, to “symbolism, parallelism, analogy, anything but metaphor”? (2). It is precisely this question, and others associated with it, that Whittock takes up in his fine study of Metaphor and Film, to which I will return in future posts.

Whittock, Trevor. Metaphor and film. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Learning from the Masters: Ian Fleming, Part 2

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy novels are thrillers. A clever as well as a talented author, Fleming uses diction (word choice) to reinforce, in an almost subliminal manner, the genre in which he writes. His adjectives, images, and metaphors remind readers, in subtle and inconspicuous ways, that they are reading an action-packed thriller. Horror writers can learn to use the same techniques and methods as Fleming uses, adapting them to their own genre.

The protagonist of The Spy Who Loved Me, Vivienne Michel, a young Canadian woman who seeks to escape her own past, describes the setting of the novel, the pine forest in which The Dreamy Pines Motor Court that she manages stands. “Wild maples flamed here and there like shrapnel-bursts” (003), she writes in her diary. It seems unlikely that a young woman would use military terminology to describe the fall foliage of maple trees, but Fleming’s description of these trees as looking like “shrapnel-bursts” reminds readers that the novel they are reading is not a romance--or not merely a romance--in which boy meets girl, but a thriller, in which there is likely to be gunplay, death, and destruction. The description is both a reminder that the book is a thriller and a promise of thrills to come.

In the first part of the same sentence that provides this stark military image, Fleming’s protagonist offers readers another, an implicit metaphor that compares the forest to a marching army: “Now, in the billion-strong army of pine trees that marched away northwards towards the Canadian border, the real, wild maples flamed here and there like shrapnel-bursts” (003). The forest is an army at war, its artillery bursting in bright autumn foliage.

Military imagery is combined with police imagery, word pictures that are a bit closer, perhaps, to Bond’s own vocation as an espionage agent, or spy: “And I felt that I, or at any rate my skin, had changed just as much--from the grimy sallowness that had been the badge of my London life (004). Did you notice the subtle reference to the “badge”?

Vivienne continues to pepper her descriptions of the pine forest with military images and metaphors, finding that “the way” the “jagged shapes” of the trees “mass closely together gives” her “the impression of an army of spears barring my passage” (005). She also uses adjectives that refer to either military or to police objects, or to both, describing “a longer gust” of wind, during a gathering storm, as bringing “with it the whisper of a metallic squeak” and “the gunmetal surface” of an agitated lake (007).

Other phrases extend the basic military and police references, again and again, reminding the reader both that he or she is reading a thriller and implying that thrills of the sort that are familiar to Bond’s admirers will be forthcoming: “sentinel trees,” a “camp-fire” (008), a “guard dog,” “thunder“ that executes an “ambush,” “one, single, colossal explosion. . . [that] might have been a huge bomb” (009), and thunder that sounds like “a furious cannonade” (010).

By using words that create images and metaphors that convey a sense of horror, as Edgar Allan Poe does, for example, in nearly all his stories, and as such other masters of the genre as Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, and Ray Bradbury typically do, a writer of horror stories can remind his or her reader that he or she has trespassed upon the realm of terror while, at the same time, promising ghastly and dreadful chills to come. Diction, carefully selected and employed, is a rhetoric of tone and mood.