Truly Monstrous: The Alligator Snapping Turtle

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

An apex predator is at “the top of a food chain” and itself has no “natural predators” (except, of course, human beings). A food chain is a hierarchy of the eaters and the eaten. Each higher link up the “chain” is occupied by a superior predator, until the top link is reached, which is occupied by the apex predator. Each lower link is occupied by a predator-become-prey. For example, this food chain depicts the hierarchy of predators and prey in a Swedish lake, in which “Osprey feed on northern pike, which in turn feed on perch which eat bleak.”

Some well-known apex predators include alligators, the alligator snapping turtle, bears, the Cape wild dog, crocodiles, the dhole, eagles, the electric eel, the giant moray, the giant otter, the great horned owl, the great skua, the great white shark, the grey wolf, the jaguar, the killer whale, the komodo dragon, the lion, the reticulated python, the snow leopard, and the tiger.

We can guess some of the abilities that contribute to such animals' status as apex predators: size, strength, armament (e. g., teeth and claws), speed, and agility. Others have unique, highly specialized abilities, such as an armored hide (alligators and turtles), flight (eagle, great skua), electric shock (electric eels, giant moray), enhanced swimming (electric eel, giant moray, great white shark, killer whale, snapping turtle), constriction (reticulated python), and an unbreakable bite (snapping turtle).

But what other abilities do apex predators have that give them an advantage over lesser predators (i. e., their prey)?

Knowing the answers to these questions can help us to create monsters that are truly monstrous!

Often, one ability, such as armament, combines with another, such as biting, so that an ability that would be mundane becomes extraordinary: the alligator snapping turtle has such a strong bite that it can snap a broom handle.

It is also equipped with a worm-shaped extremity “on the tip of its tongue” that it uses “to lure fish, a form of aggressive mimicry.”

Although such prey isn't typical of their diet, alligator snapping turtles have been known to eat not only snakes and other turtles, but also “small alligators.” (Their consumption of alligators didn't inspire their name, however; they were named because the sharp edges of their shell resemble the “rugged, ridged skin of an alligator.”

Their superior biting ability, the worm-shaped lure at the end of their tongues, and their alligator-like shells give them advantages that other animals in their freshwater habitat lack, making alligator snapping turtles the apex predators of their food chain.

While the abilities of apex predators are themselves important, other facts also contribute to their success. In future posts, we'll consider these other factors.

In addition, while surveying all the apex predators is a bit too ambitious a project for blog-size articles, we'll take a look at several, so that, when we finish doing so, we can compile a decent list of some of the most effective or commonly employed abilities of apex predators and suggest how horror authors can use these amazing abilities to create truly monstrous monsters of their own.

A Monster Scale

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

One way to energize a genre of fiction is to introduce into it a hierarchy, or some other type of analytical or descriptive scheme, that is commonly used in a different type of narrative literature.

As Don Lincoln, author of Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos, observes, science fiction employs the scale “popularized” in J. Allen Hynek's “1972 book The UFO Experience,” which identifies three types, or “kinds,” of “close encounters” with extraterrestrial spacecraft or beings:

1st Kind: UFO sighting

2nd Kind: UFO sighting supported by "physical evidence"

 

3rd Kind: Encounter with alien beings

These original “kinds” of “close encounters” have been extended, says Lincoln, by four other types, although these additional levels “are “not universally accepted”:

4th Kind: Abduction with "retained memory"

 

5th Kind: "Regular conversations"

 6th Kind: "An encounter" resulting in a human's "death or injury"

7th Kind: Hybrid progeny resulting from human-monstrous mating

Although hybrid horror-science fiction narratives or dramas sometimes include extraterrestrial beings (e. g., Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and such films as Alien, The Thing from Another World, and Invaders from Mars), space aliens are primarily a staple of sci fi fiction. Monsters, on the other hand, are more often antagonists in horror fiction.

Hynek's scale, and its extension, provide a means of re-imagining monsters:

1st Kind: Monster sighting

2nd Kind: Monster sighting supported by "physical evidence"

3rd Kind: Encounter with monster(s)

4th Kind: Monster's abduction recalled (or recovered through the discovery of a lost film or video

5th Kind: Periodic communications with the monster, vocally or otherwise (e. g., through mental telepathy)

6th Kind: "An encounter” with the monster which results in a human's “death or injury”

7th Kind: Human/monster mating resulting in a hybrid progeny

Many of these types of “close encounters” with monsters have already been depicted in horror novels, short stories, or movies. There have been many sightings of monsters, as in Frank Peretti's 2006 novel Monster; encounters with monsters (as in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein), periodic communications with the monster (as in Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire), encounters with monsters that end in human's deaths (so many there's no need to cite an example), and even matings between women and monsters that result in births of hybrid human-monster children (as in Ira Levine's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby).

However, an imaginative use of this extended scale of “close encounters” with monsters, rather than with aliens—which, it could be argued, represent simply another type of monster) can still introduce innovations into the horror genre. For example, the scale could be used to structure a novel or, for that matter a heptalogy, or series of seven works, each of which is inspired by one of the seven types of “close encounters” with monsters listed in the “monster scale” adapted from Hynek's hierarchy.

"Here There Be Monsters," But There Needs to Be More

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

The short horror film “Here There Be Monsters,” directed by Australian filmmaker Drew MacDonald, tells a simple, straightforward story. Elki (Savannah Foran-McDaniel), a bullied girl, falls asleep on a school bus and awakens inside the vehicle after the driver parks in the bus lot at the end of her shift.

Elki finds herself locked inside the bus. She cannot open the doors, and the windows open only a few inches. She is trapped. Worse yet, she realizes, when she looks out the window, there is a monster in the otherwise abandoned lot. She hides, but the monster, undeterred by her tactic, breaks a rear window. The girl hides in place, behind a seat, watching the monster's cloven hooves approach her position.

As the beast, a shaggy figure reminiscent of a Minotaur, comes nearer, Elki removes a pair of scissors from her book bag. Finally, she takes flight, throwing her shoulder repeatedly into the door at the front of the bus. With the monster in hot pursuit, she manages, at the last moment, to force open the doors and to flee.

The monster pursues, trapping her in a dead end, between abandoned buses and stacks of debris. She tries to scale a chain-link fence, but is unable to do so. As the beast closes in on her, she holds her scissors. Finally, she screams her defiance, and the scene shifts to the house of one or Elki's tormentors.

The bully steps outside her house to smoke, only to encounter Elki, who has not only survived her encounter with the monster, but, armed with her scissors, also manages to take revenge upon her tormentor by killing the aggressor.

The film accomplishes a lot in its approximately thirteen minutes and eleven seconds (which doesn't count the credits). Although the plot is simple and predictable and the theme rather moralistic, production values are first rate, as is Foran-McDaniel's acting.

The script is dialogue free, and her role calls mostly for her to project fear, which she does masterfully through her expressions, gestures, sobbing, and emoting. She is very believable, both as a victim of bullying and as a monster's quarry. Her petite size helps to suggest vulnerability. At the end of the film, she also conveys aggression; her emotionless stare, especially after the tears and fear she displayed throughout the rest of the film, is chilling, indeed.

Foran-McDaniel is a talented actor who, in the right feature-length motion picture, should be a major player not only Down Under but in Hollywood as well. She just needs a film that does her justice.

“Here There Be Monsters” is not a bad film; in fact, there's a lot to like, including the camerawork, production values, and earnestness of the creative people both before and behind the camera. It's just not a vehicle for stardom. It might well open some doors for Foran-McDaniel, however, and her screen presence, her credibility, and her impressive talent deserve more.

Grade: B

Monsters and the Monster Makers Who Make Them

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Transformation is the changing of a person, place, or thing from one state into another. (In this post, we're limiting our consideration of transformation and its effects to concrete entities, although, of course, abstractions, such as ideas, moral principles, emotions, attitudes, values, and beliefs can and are often also transformed.) Such transformations, as might be expected, often, in turn, produce sometimes dramatic effects.

Some transformations, such as that of a caterpillar into a butterfly or a fetus into an infant) are natural. Others are induced. In times past, magic was the means by which transformations were evoked; today, science is likely to be the means of effecting such changes.

 For example, according to Ovid's account of the myth concerning Hermaphroditus, the god Hermes, in answer to the prayer of the nymph Salmacis, transformed the fifteen-year-old youth Hermaphroditus and his admirer, Salmacis herself, into a single person who possessed the adolescent's male sex and the nymph's female sex.

Today, such a “metamorphosis” would, of course, result from hormone therapy and surgery, and its cause wouldn't be a nymph's desire to be united forever with the object of her love (or passion), but gender dysphoria (at least as the cause of the condition is presently understood).

In some instances, sexual transformations are central to horror films. In such movies, a transvestite or a transgender person is frequently the villain, and he or she (usually she) is not typically portrayed with compassion or sensitivity. Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, and Insidious: Chapter 2 are some of the better-known horror movies that feature transvestite or transgender “monsters.”

But transformations need not be sexual. They can involve genetic mutation (a male scientist becomes a fly in The Fly), age and physical appearance (the succubus in The Shining changes from a beautiful young woman into an old crone), animality (men and women transform into werewolves in The Howling), insectoid (Debbie changes into a cockroach in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4), multiple personalities (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and many other types of change.

Ovid himself suggests various types of transformations in his Metamorphoses. Such changes include changes of inanimate objects into human beings; men and women into divinities or other supernatural beings; a youth into a hermaphrodite; a woman into a man; men and women into animals, birds, stones, flowers, and a cloud; and a supernatural being into a plant.

 

Some of the metamorphoses of which Ovid writes were likely intended as rewards: Galatea's transformation from a statue into a woman; a fisherman's transformation into a sea god; Chiron's transformation into a celestial constellation. Other metamorphoses, however, were probably meant to be punishments of hubris or some other offense, as were those in which human beings were turned into stone. In some cases, as that of Syrinx, the metamorphosis was for protection. Regardless of the reason for such extreme changes, however, it seems such transformations would not be entirely devoid of horror.

In horror fiction, such changes are always extreme and, well, horrifying. They are horrifying for several reasons. They are

• beyond control, making those who are transformed helpless;
• usually for the worse—something more valuable—or, at least, more valued—is lost than that which is gained: humanity, youth and beauty, oneself;
• either irreversible or recurrent (that which is lost, in other words, is irretrievably lost or can be regained only for a time and is constantly under threat);
• sudden, often without warning, and do not, therefore, allow their victims time to reflect upon their fate or to “adjust” to a change that will have monumental and lasting effects on them throughout their lives as well as those who love—or even simply know—them;
• likely to alter the victim's self-image, self-confidence, and self-esteem;
• apt to endanger the victim, subjecting him or her to scorn, ostracism, incarceration, physical or sexual assault, or even murder.

Imagine that you are an adolescent boy who is suddenly neither a boy nor a girl and, paradoxically, both; that you are a beautiful young woman transformed into an old crone; that you are a man become a fly, a wolf, or a cockroach; or that you now have two personalities. Imagine that this astonishing change occurred instantly, only a moment ago, without warning or anticipation. You are yourself, but you are also, most assuredly, not yourself. You are a freak, a monster, who will be treated as such by others, feared and shunned, hunted and stalked.

That is the true nature of the monster who becomes monstrous through metamorphosis, whether the change is effected through magic or technology. A successful horror story that derives its horror from the existential transformation of a character succeeds when it shows that the true horror of this situation is not in the change itself but in the effects of the metamorphosis—and then portrays those effects so well that the audience or the reader, vicariously experiencing them, feels the “monster's” pain, suffers with the monster, and, in effect, becomes the monster, helpless, overwhelmed, the worse for wear, irretrievably altered, suffering losses of confidence and self-esteem; scorned, ostracized, incarcerated, physically or sexually assaulted, or even murdered.

The monster is redeemed, if redeemed at all, by the knowledge that those who make monsters are more monstrous than the monsters they make.

NOTE: The author does not mean to imply that transgender individuals are "monsters." He is alluding to Hermaphroditus, as this mythical figure's metamorphosis is described in Ovid's poem, and to the concepts of the ancients regarding conditions that are now explained and understood scientifically. Transgender individuals are certainly not monsters or in any sense monstrous.

Shhh: The Making of Monsters (and Short Horror Films)

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

The equivalent of flash fiction (or, in some cases, short stories), short films have simple, linear plots; minimal characters, and a single conflict. However, the use of symbolism and metaphor can enrich the possible interpretations of many of these exercises in independent filmmaking.

Shhh (2012) stars Sean Michael Kyer as asthmatic, stuttering Guillermo, a young boy beset by a monster, and Ilze Burger, as his teenage sister Helleana. Guillermo draws pictures of monsters, earning Helleana's scorn.

She regards her younger brother as a “freak” and goes out of her way to be snide, insulting Guillermo about his drawings, his apparent incontinence, his stuttering, and whatever else crosses her mind. Lately, he's been cutting off his own hair, a lock or two at a time, and concealing the results under a knit cap.

Although the children share the same wash room, only Guillermo sees the monster. Of hideous appearance, the monster is creepy, but its behavior is rather lame, as the conduct of monsters goes: the goblin-like creature with an extensible, tubular proboscis, eats hair, which explains why Guillermo has been cutting off his own tresses.

Once he faces the monster, feeding it hair from his sister's hairbrush, it disappears, and Guillermo is able to set aside his inhaler, leaving it, with his sister's brush, in the wash room. In bed, he holds his finger to his lips and says “shhh!”

At the end of the picture, half of a drawing that Helleana had torn in half, which shows the monster in attack mode, has been taped to a picture of Helleana who looks terrified as the attacking monster approaches her. In the original drawing, the monster had been attacking Guillermo. By facing down the monster and leaving his sister's hairbrush in the wash room after promising the monster that he could provide more hair for it to eat, Guillermo seems to have substituted Helleana for himself as the monster's prey.

The filmmakers offer several clues concerning the true nature of the monster that confronts Guillermo, most of which relate to the boy's behavior. However, the movie begins with a series of dark drawings, by Guillermo, many of which are devoted to the monster.

The first two pictures depict subjects Guillermo and his relationship with his family:

• He lies supine on the floor, apparently content, sketching Saturn, the sun, and a star. As this picture is displayed, the narrator informs the audience, “This is the tale of an extraordinary child . . . ”

• The next picture shows Dad, Helleana, and Guillermo. Dad tips a bottle to his lips, and Helleana strikes Guillermo repeatedly on the head with a round object. Dad and Helleana look slightly monstrous, while Guillermo looks miserable. The narrator's commentary continues: “ . . . raised in such a way that you would have thought he never smiled . . .”

Several of the next drawings concern the monster:

• Guillermo tells Helleana about a monster in the bathroom. The narrator states, “. . . for every night he fought a lurking fear.”
• As he stands before the toilet, a monster parts the shower curtain, lunging toward the boy. The narrator, something of a poet, it appears, adds, “His passage to the bathroom, [sic] locked away a creature would appear.
• Guillermo loses control of his bladder, a sight that Helleana finds hilarious; she laughs as she points to him, standing in a puddle of his own urine.
• He dared not even wonder [at] the horrors that await,” the narrator advises the audience. The monster leans over Guillermo, its mouth gaping. “The children who defied his terms, he could only imagine their fate.”

The next two drawings focus on Guillermo himself:

• Guillermo holds a hand to his forehead. “And what you wonder were the terms asked of our dear boy.”
• As Guillermo takes a pair of scissors to his head, the narrator answers his own question: “Clumps of hair from off his head, the creature could enjoy.”

The final picture is text: “Shhh . . .” as the movie begins.

During the movie's action, we learn these facts about Guillermo:

• He is neglected (left alone) much of the time.
• He is artistic and imaginative.
• He cuts his hair to feed the monster.
• His sister is emotionally and abusive toward him.
• He stutters.
• He is incontinent.
• He is asthmatic and relies on an inhaler.
• He finds the monster both frightening and disgusting.
• Earlier, when he called to his father to rescue him from Helleana, she put her finger to her lips and commanded, “Shhh!” At the end of the movie, he does the same thing.

To understand the monster, we must understand what Guillermo's behaviors represent.

Consulting psychological theory, we discover that pulling (or, we assume, cutting) and trichophagia, or the compulsive eating of hair (we are also assuming that the monster represents a psychological condition of some sort; as such, it is an inner state, a dimension of the self) is a way of relieving stress, anxiety and loneliness.

 
Although stuttering can have physiological and genetic causes, it can also be caused by “stress in the family,” “problems communicating with others,” and “low self-esteem.”

Urinary incontinence can also be caused by physiological issues, but emotional stress that impairs the fight-or-flight response precipitated by the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine can also cause urinary incontinence.

Although asthma is a physical condition, “research has also shown that the body’s response to stress triggers the immune system and causes the release of certain hormones,” thereby leading “to inflammation within the airways of the lungs, triggering an asthma attack.” His ability to discard his inhaler after overcoming the monster seems to underscore the idea that his asthma attacks are attributable to the severe stress he experiences on a regular basis.

It appears that the alcohol and general unavailability of his father and his sisters' emotional and physical abuse of him accounts, in large measure, for Guillermo's heightened stress. These traumas, which affect a young child, are obviously severe, giving rise not to one expression but to a number of severe symptoms: trichophagia, stuttering, urinary incontinence, and asthma. Possibly, he also has low-self esteem as a result of being neglected and abused.

There seems to be another cause of Guillermo's heightened stress. In none of the pictures he draws does his mother appear. She is neither seen nor heard in the movie, and no one speaks of or otherwise refers to her. The disappearance of the mother, possibly as a result of her demise, could explain not only Guillermo's stress but also the alcoholism of his father and the abusive behavior of his sister. Each in his or her own destructive manner, the surviving family members appear to be attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to cope with the grief and loss of the adult female member of the family.

 The monster appears, then, to be a personification of the stress, low self-esteem, loneliness, and fear that Guillermo experiences as a result of his father's emotional abandonment of him, his father's alcoholism, his sister's emotional and physical abuse of him, and, quite possibly, his mother's “abandonment” of him through her death and the grief he feels for her passing and his loss of her, the presumed nurturer of the family.

The narrator tells the audience that Guillermo is “extraordinary.” What makes him so, the film suggests, is his artistic ability. The dark drawings he creates objectify his fears, allowing him to put into pictures what he may not be able to put into words. He can picture himself contented; he can picture his father's alcoholism and his sister's violence and cruelty; he can picture his helplessness, his humiliation, and his fear.

He can also picture an adversary, the monstrous form upon whom he projects the harsh treatment of his father and his sister; they, as much as his own low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief, are the monster he sees in the bathroom, or the wash room, the place to which he goes to divest himself of waste and dirt, to relive himself and to cleanse himself.

His artistic ability allows him to project an enemy, to imagine an adversary. Having accomplished this feat, he can now devise a way to attack and conquer his foe and all that it stands for, all that it represents. By overcoming the monster, he rids himself of his low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. By gaining confidence in himself, he overcomes his sister's power over him and he does not need his father's love and protection. In vanquishing the monster, he becomes a hero. He does not need his inhaler. He does not need his scissors. He can enjoy, but he does not need, the refuge of his room.

He overcomes the part of the monster that is Helleana by imagining her as the monster's victim. In restoring the drawing she'd ripped in half, he replaced his own image with an image of her as the monster's prey. Henceforth, she is the one who must feel low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. He is no longer the scapegoat that she had made him. Without him in this role, she herself must bear the weight of her own problems, without him as her whipping boy.

Instead of picturing himself as the monster's prey, he escapes this fate by imagining his sister in the role of the monster's victim. She who was his tormentor becomes the tormented, the tortured victim of the monster that she helped to create. His father, meanwhile, is the victim of the monster he embraces, the bottle of whiskey that suppresses the low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief that he feels, even as he feeds it not the hair of his head, but the essence of his soul.

Friedrich Nietzsche warns, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” This cautionary declaration also seems to inform the short film.

In the final analysis, there is more than a bit of the monster in Guillermo, too, for he is willing to sacrifice his own sister to the monster, even going so far as to deliberately leave her hairbrush in the bathroom before telling her just where to go to find it. Then, as he lies in bed and she, presumably having gone to get her brush, begins to scream, he holds a finger to his lips and says “shhh.” There is an emotional abyss as deep, apparently, as that of a sociopath, for he seems to feel no qualms about having sent his sister to the same fate as that which had been his own.

Whether his father and his sister helped to make him the monster he has become, the fact remains that he himself has had a part in the making of the monster, for he has contributed to its creation, both by his own actions and through the exercise of his imagination.

Shhh is not without flaws (what is?). The verse in which the narrator speaks is amateurish, at best, and it's often an unnecessary distraction. The drawings, although well executed, are a bit too didactic. The psychology, although suggested, rather than overtly stated, is alternately implausible and too broad. The horror is tepid.

Nevertheless, the short film, overall, is intriguing and offers a lot to discern, analyze, and appreciate.

Horror Movies Are Mysteries, Too

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Many horror stories are mysteries which typically follow a well-established format:

1. An unknown monster is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The monster is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the monster is used to neutralize or eliminate it.
5. The status quo returns.

 

This same formula can apply to plagues:

1. An unknown disease is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The pathogen is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the pathogen is used to neutralize or eliminate it.
5. The status quo returns.

 

Of course, many a detective story also follows this path:

1. An unknown murderer is killing people.
2. Often, as the killings continue, the protagonist, sometimes aided by friends or others, investigates; intelligence is gathered, clues are solved.
3. The murderer is identified; it is known.
4. Knowledge about the murderer is used to neutralize or eliminate him or her.
5. The status quo returns.
   
   
   
   
   

Where does variation come into play? The same variables that make the structure of fairy tales, as this structure is defined by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale, makes the particulars fresh and intriguing, despite the sameness of the underlying formula's structure.

What is the monster? How is he, she, or it different than others of his, her, or its kind? Physically different? Emotionally different? Behaviorally different? Volitionally different? What motivates it?

Whom are the victims? Why are they targeted? How does the monster kill them?

Where do the killings occur? Why here and now, rather than elsewhere at another time?

What theme does the story suggest, and how does it do so?

A dictionary definition can help us to answer the question, What is the monster?

A dictionary definition does two things: it classifies, or groups, and it distinguishes, or differentiates. First, a dictionary definition tells to which group the term being defined belongs. What type of person, place, or thing is it? Then, a dictionary definition explains how it differs from the other members of its group. The group is the genus; the differences, the differentia.

Monster (n.): an imaginary creature (genus) that is typically large, ugly, and frightening (differentia).

 In what way is your monster “large”? Height? Length? Weight? Strength? Intelligence? Tall? Godzilla fills the bill. Long? What about the worms in Tremors? Heavy? The Blob! Strong? There's a reason King Kong was king of the jungle on Skull Island. Intelligent? The computer in Demon Seed or, for that matter, the extraterrestrial of Species sure turned out to be to die for.

What makes your monster “ugly”? Appearance (but be specific)? Behavior? (but, again, be specific)? Lack of emotion or twisted emotions? Other (specificity counts, always!)? Although Michael Myers, of Halloween, wasn't a bad-looking guy—some say he looks a lot like William Shatner, in fact—his penchant for murdering randy teens and sexually aroused young adults made him a lot less attractive, to be sure.

Why is your monster frightening? It's hard to defeat, perhaps? It has amazing powers, maybe? It is absolutely relentless, possibly? It is supernatural or otherworldly? Other (specificity counts, always!)? The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, like the alien in Alien, had all these characteristics and more.

The same process applies to other characters, such as the protagonist, victims, experts, warriors or soldiers . . . . How do they differ from everybody else's? What makes yours unique? The expert in The Sixth Sense, the psychiatrist, differs from his peers (or most of them, at any rate) by his being dead.

A setting should be integral to the story's plot, of course. If it is, it can be used not only to frighten—it's a spooky place, after all—but also to symbolize, to suggest, and to reveal, even as it conceals. In The Descent, for example, the caverns through which the female spelunkers spelunk may symbolize the female reproductive system itself; the cave-creatures they encounter, their aborted fetuses. On the literal level, the underground passages also add to the characters—and the audience's—claustrophobia.

 

Plug your own versions of these characters and an appropriate setting of your own into the horror-movie-as-a-mystery formula and you, too, can offer a new wrinkle to the subgenre.

Freaks of Nature (and Applied Science)

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movies of the 1950s often feature bizarre freaks of nature, in the films' titles as well as in the movies themselves: The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), giant ants (Them!) (1954), Godzilla (1954), Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), Tarantula! (1955), The Mole People (1956), Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), The Alligator People (1959), The Wasp Woman (1959), The Return of the Fly (1959), and on and on . . . and on.

Victims include scientists' assistants, the expedition ship's crew members, and scientists, (The Creature from the Black Lagoon); a store owner, a state trooper, an FBI agent and most of his family (Them!), ships' crews, islanders, and residents of Tokyo (Godzilla), a diver (Monster from the Ocean Floor), a scientists and a laboratory assistant (Tarantula!), an archaeologist (The Mole People), an adulteress and her lover (Attack of the Giant Leeches), a hermit handyman and a newlywed bridegroom (The Alligator People), a cosmetics company owner (The Wasp Woman), a spy, and a scientist (The Return of the Fly).

Although some victims are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, others are attacked because, as investigators or scientists, they play integral roles in the campaigns to stop the monsters or support such individuals, as the ships crews and lab assistants do. They are troops, as it were, in the perpetual war of science vs. nature.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon succumbs to massive gunfire. Sub-machine guns and flamethrowers dispatch the giant ants in Them! Godzilla is asphyxiated by a secret weapon that destroys oxygen molecules. A napalm attack, courtesy of a squadron of Air Force fighters, kills the giant tarantula of Tarantula. The Mole People find it difficult to withstand the debilitating effects of natural sunlight. Dynamite explosions end the menace of giant leeches. A faceful of carbolic acid and blunt trauma from a fall from a height is too much for the wasp woman. The Return of the Fly's human fly reverts to being only a human after the process that transformed him into a human fly is reversed. Only the fate of the alligator people is ambiguous.

These films suggest that freaks of nature are overcome—that is, annihilated—in one of two ways. Nature kills them, or they are destroyed by an application of human technology. While the Mole People are subdued by nature, the Creature of the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, the giant tarantula, the giant leeches, and the human fly are destroyed by human technology. The wasp woman is destroyed by both human technology (carbolic acid) and nature (gravity).

Interestingly, these films' freaks of nature are the spawn both of nature itself and of human technology. More often than not, the latter both produces and destroys these freaks. The theme of these movies seems to be that, yes, technology can backfire—it can produce monsters—but so can nature itself. In either case, though, technology can be counted on to destroy monsters, whether they are of natural or technological origin (or both). Through technology, even when meddling with nature itself causes monstrous results, science saves!

Scientists may not be gods. They err, because, well, to err is to be human. But they also know how to fix their mistakes. That's not ideal, these films imply, but it's the best we can do, and being a demi-god isn't half bad.

The Etymology of Horror

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

The Online Etymology Dictionary is not only interesting in itself, but it is also a reminder of the beliefs, attitudes, and, yes, fears (among other influences) that inspire words associated with language and, in the case of the topic for this post, horror.

 

“Troll,” for example, originally alluded to a “supernatural being in Scandinavian mythology and folklore and derived from the Old Norse troll, referring to a “giant being not of the human race, evil spirit, monster.” Its first recorded use, the Online Etymology Dictionary states, was in a court document concerning a case associated with witchcraft and sorcery. Allegedly, “a certain [witch named] Catherine” witnessed trolls rise from a churchyard in Hildiswick.” First conceived as giants, they were later believed to be “dwarfs and imps supposed to live in caves or under the ground.” Moreover, these formerly fierce beings became “obliging and neighbourly; freely lending and borrowing, and elsewise keeping up a friendly intercourse with mankind,” their thieving ways notwithstanding.

The dictionary's entry concerning the werewolf indicates that belief in these creatures, as people “'with the power to turn into a wolf' . . . . was widespread in the Middle Ages.” Apparently, it was also widely believed in Persia, where present-day Iran's ancestors named the October Varkazana, or the month of the “Wolf-Men.” 

Teratology, once the study of monsters, is now the study of physical abnormalities, such as those resulting from birth defects and “reproductive and developmentally-mediated disorders.” Its previous subject matter provides some interesting and, indeed, surprising insights into the origin of the concept of the monster as a horrific figure. Originally, a monster was an omen, sent by God to warn humanity (or a nation) of his displeasure; if the people didn't repent of their wickedness, God would follow his warning with punishment. Thus, for example, a pair of conjoined twins or a hermaphrodite would be taken as an admonitory message to be ignored at a people's own peril. As the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for this term reads, in part, “monster” derives from “Latin monstrum,” referring to a 'divine omen (especially one indicating misfortune), portent, sign; abnormal shape; monster, monstrosity,' [and means a] figuratively 'repulsive character, object of dread, awful deed, [or] abomination.'” Writers and readers of contemporary horror fiction might do well to keep this history of the word's meaning in mind the next time they take up a copy of Frankenstein or The Island of Dr. Moreau. Couldn't the scientists' monsters have been warnings sent by God, through the labors of Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau?

The lamia first seems to have been envisioned as a mermaid-vampire hybrid, but was later envisioned as a half-woman, half-serpent vampiric creature. Interestingly, the transformation of the lamia from mermaid to serpent-woman might have been suggested by the word lamia's association with “swallowing,” just as her erotic charm might have been suggested by the word's original link to lechery and her sorcery to the term's original connection to sorcery: “female demon, late 14c., from Latin lamia [meaning] 'witch, sorceress, vampire,' from Greek lamia [meaning] 'female vampire, man-eating monster,' literally 'swallower, lecher,' from laimos 'throat, gullet.'” The snake-like form of the lamia might have been based upon the idea that she was something of a personified gullet, since a snake has such a form.

Alluring, the lamia enthralled men with her charms (and, perhaps, with a bit of witchery, but, when her beauty and magic were no longer strong enough an attraction, she would kill and devour him, as the following passage suggests:

Also kynde erreþ in som beestes wondirliche j-schape, as it fareþ in a beest þat hatte lamia, þat haþ an heed as a mayde & body as a grym fissche[;] whan þat best lamya may fynde ony man, first a flatereþ wiþ hym with a wommannes face and makeþ hym ligge by here while he may dure, & whanne he may noferþere suffice to here lecherye þanne he rendeþ hym and sleþ and eteþ hym. [Bartholomew Glanville, c. 1360, "De proprietatibus rerum," translated by John of Trevisa]

Translation: An error among some kinds of animals sometimes results in a wondrous shape, such as that of the lamia, which has a woman's head and the body of a horrible fish. When a lamia finds a man, it flatters him with its beauty and makes him linger beside her until her charms no longer enthrall him, whereupon she slays and eats him. [Bartholomew Glanville, c. 1360, the Property of Things, translated by John of Trevisa]

Many other words associated with horror fiction also have interesting origins and histories, some of which could suggest new takes on old topics or altogether new approaches to such fiction.