Evolution, Psychology, and Horror, Part IV

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

Source: videobuster.de

Note: This post assumes that you have seen the movie Final Girl (2015). If you have not, Wikipedia offers a fairly detailed, accurate summary of the plot.

What distinguishes the final girl of chillers and thrillers from other characters in such films. Which of her “evolved adaptations,” or traits, enables her to survive when many others in her situation and in similar environments have not?

Source: YouTube

The movie’s protagonist, Veronica, benefits from twelve years of martial arts training she receives from William, who takes her in after her parents die, when she is five years old, and from drug-induced hallucinations which result from the drugs William injects into her system so that she can experience her greatest fear, which turns out to be her dread of failing to accomplish her mission. As a result of William’s mentoring, Veronica learns both that she is a “special” person and how to fight.

She accepts a date with one of William’s targets, Shane, and Shane and his friends take her to a forest, where the seventeen-year-old boys hunt her, as they have hunted—and killed—other girls on previous occasions.

Source: regarder-films.net

 Given a head start after tricking three of the four hunters into drinking whiskey laced with a hallucinogen, she dispatches the predators, one by one, as, thanks to the hallucinogen they have ingested, the boys face their greatest fears, just as Veronica had, years ago.

So, what makes Veronica the film’s final girl?

In his article “Evolution, Population Thinking and Essentialism,” Elliot Sober distinguishes between “adaptive traits” and “adaptations.” The human appendix, for example, is an adaptation that is no longer adaptive.

Sober also distinguishes between “phylogenetic adaptations” and “ontogenetic adaptations.” The former “arise over evolutionary time and impact the fitness of the organism,” whereas the latter are “any behavior we learn in our lifetimes, [which] can be adaptive to the extent that an organism benefits from them but they are not adaptations in the relevant sense.” Clearly, the martial arts skills that Veronica learns from William are ontogenetic adaptations. As is true in regard to many other claims, these assertions are controversial and have met with several criticisms.

 Source: earth.com

In providing concrete examples for their points, evolutionary psychologists often refer to the morphological and physiological traits of animals, such as “clutch size (in birds), schooling (in fish), leaf arrangement, foraging strategies and all manner of traits.” This explanatory method can help us to see how Veronica’s fighting skills, her self-image as someone who is “special,” and her fear of failing at her mission promote her survival as a final girl.

 Source: reptilescove.com

As a World Atlas article points out, “Mimicry is an evolved resemblance in appearance or behavior between one organism and another.” Usually, a harmless animal mimics a predator to protect itself from the attack of other, lesser predators. For example, “non-venomous milk snakes appear brilliantly colored like venomous coral snakes [to] deter predators from approaching.” Veronica adopts this same strategy in reverse. A martial artist of the first rank, she is a dangerous predator, but she pretends to be simply a harmless, vulnerable teenage girl. Her attackers learn, too late, that they are the harmless snakes, as it were, and she is the deadly predator, a tactic she has learned from William.

e: pinterest.com

Veronica is also predatory in other ways. She uses her beauty and her sexuality to attract her victims, the way an orb-weaving spider lures its victims (bees in search of nectar) with “web decorations” and the “spiders' [own] bright body colorations.” Veronica’s beauty attracts the attention of Shane and his friends, and, like the beauty of the orb-weaving spider, prove their undoing. While her physical appearance is not a behavior, her use of it as a lure certainly qualifies as an ontogenetic adaptation, or trait, which she learns, again, from William.

Source: inaturalist.com

In giving her would-be victimizers whiskey laced with a hallucinogen, Veronica adapts a defense mechanism used by certain animals, making it an offense tactic. The “large granular glands on the neck and limbs” of the Sonoran desert toad (aka “psychedelic toad”) “secrete [a] thick, milky-white, neurotoxin venom called bufotenine,” which is a “potent hallucinogen.” Although this compound is often fatal in dogs, it can cause hallucinations in humans and, perhaps, in canines, since its symptoms in dogs include a “drunken gait” and “confusion.” Obviously, since William injected Veronica with a hallucinogenic substance so that she could feel what her enemies would experience when she gave them the same hallucinogen, her knowledge of its properties and use as a weapon result from his training and is, therefore, an ontogenetic adaptation.

Source: 7esl.com

The nature vs. nurture controversy is as important (and as controversial) to evolutionary psychology as it is to other disciplines. The question of “what matters more when it comes to personality, nature or nurture?” is important, although it may, ultimately, prove unanswerable. As both Backcountry and Final Girl suggest, we are products of both our genes and our surroundings, of our nature and our nurture.

Source: the-other-view.com

Veronica survives for the same reason as Jen: she is better adapted to her environment than the other characters. Her traits (self-esteem, ruthlessness, and duplicity), coupled with her deadly martial arts skills, make her, not her stalkers, the apex predator, just as her attacker’s traits (sexism, misogyny, perfidy) make them her prey.

Next post:Evolution, psychology, and The Exorcist

Horror Fiction: The Need to Nurture

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Jib Fowles, adults, male and female alike, have a need to nurture children, animals, and other helpless creatures. In discussing this need, psychologist Henry Murray refers to feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing such dependents.

Horror fiction, like advertising, often taps this basic need, either by showing its neglect or by perverting it. In addition, such fiction frequently depicts the nurture of children or pets as a way to set up the later reversal of such care when a villain disrupts or destroys familial or relationships or relationships based upon friendships or, indeed, kills family members or friends.

In the film Rosemary's Baby (1968), based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel of the same name, Rosemary Woodhouse is raped by Satan after her neighbors, a cult of Satanists, drug her. She believes that her vision of having been raped by the devil was a delusion and that her husband, Guy, is the true father.

After her baby is born, she is told that the child died, but she refuses to believe this and discovers the infant son in her her satanic neighbors' apartment, surrounded by the their fellow members of their cult. She is asked to accept the child as her own, and, reluctantly, she does so, rocking the baby's cradle as she smiles.

This plot involves the need to nurture, a drive so strong, especially when it is combined with the maternal instinct, the movie implies, that it can overcome even the fear and disgust that having delivered a son of Satan inspires. No matter what level of nurture Rosemary provides to her son, the child will not fare well; according to the Bible, her son, the Antichrist, or “the beast from the earth,”will be defeated and cast into hell, wherein he will suffer eternal torment (Rev. 19:19-20).

The plot addresses two questions: who (or whom) is to be nurtured and why?

Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption, which originally appeared in his 1982 collection, Different Seasons, presents, as its subtitle suggests, a perversion of the need to nurture. Having discovered that an elderly German immigrant, Arthur Denker, is a Nazi war criminal, Kurt Dussander, a teenage boy, Todd Bowden, threatens to expose him if Dussander does not recount the atrocities that Dussander committed during the Holocaust.

The need to nurture is perverted in two ways: it is forced upon the nurturer, rather than freely given by him, and it involves teaching about atrocities rather than virtues. It also results in catastrophes, as, separately, Todd and Dussander murder homeless vagrants and Todd shoots a rifle at motorists on a freeway before he is killed by authorities.

King's 1977 novel The Shining also involves the need to nurture, this time addressing it negatively, by denying it to five-year-old Danny Torrance. His father, Jack, an alcoholic subject to fits of rage, broke his son's arm and was fired from his teaching position after assaulting a student. After accepting the position of caretaker of the vast, remote Overlook Hotel, Jack is possessed and, under the influence of a former caretaker's ghost, driven to murder his wife, Wendy, and Danny. 

King acknowledges that his own alcoholism and his anger and frustration concerning his own children's behavior was an inspiration for Jack's character. He also insists that Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel, the 1980 movie The Shining, departed from his novel's theme of a family's “disintegration” and objected to Kubrick's suggesting that Jack is influenced from within, by his own psychological demons, rather than externally, by the ghosts of the haunted hotel.

Scottish broadcast journalist Laura Miller takes issue with King's criticism of Kubrick, pointing out that, in King's novel, Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family, whereas, “in Kubrick’s The Shining, the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a choice.”

King's Point of View

King's Novel	King's Criticism
Theme = family's “disintegration”	Film departs from novel's theme
Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences	Film suggests Jack's own psychological demons cause his downfall

Miller's Criticism of King's Point of View

King's Novel	Kubrick's Film
Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family	Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences
Domestic violence results from Jack's own choices	Domestic violence occurs

In short, Miller argues that King's novel is psychological, rather than theological, in its identification of the cause of the domestic abuse Jack commits, whereas Kubrick's film suggests that Jack's behavior, including his domestic abuse, results from supernatural influences—the opposite of King's own point of view and basis of his criticism of Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel.

King's criticism of Kubrick's film has been inconsistent, with King first damning and later praising the movie. In one comment, he attributes the filmmaker's sometimes “flat” scenes to a failure of imagination and religious faith:

. . . a visceral skeptic [concerning the existence of the supernatural] just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked instead for the evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others. What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little . . . .

Critic Mark Browning suggests the opposite is true: King “feels too much and thinks too little.”

King's criticism of Kubrick and Miller's and Browning's criticism of King's criticism of Kubrick seem to suggest that romanticism tends to promote an emotional and psychological view of the problem of evil, such as King's, while a rationalistic outlook tends to advance a rational and theological or idealistic perspective regarding the existence of evil, such as Kubrick's.

If nothing else, the controversy between King's perceptions of Kubrick's movie and Kubrick's own point of view concerning his film suggest that stories that involve the need to nurture can address much larger issues, such as the romanticism, rationalism, and the nature of both evil and ultimate reality.

King approaches the need to nurture from a different perspective in It.

Not only do many of his adolescent characters lack a nurturing home environment, but one of them in particular, Beverly Marsh, is abused both by her father Alvin, and, later, her husband, Tom Rogan, among other, previous romantic partners. As an eleven-year-old girl, she is a member, with six of male friends of the same age, of the Losers' Club.

The parents of another member, Bill Denbrough, treat him with cold indifference following the death of his younger brother. His stuttering subjects him to the bullying of his classmates.

Benjamin Harrison, another member, is obese, which makes him a target of the same school bullies who torment and attack the other “Losers.” 

Edward Kaspbrak is a victim of “smother love” and his mother's Munchhausen syndrome by proxy; he also suffers psychosomatic asthma. 

Michael Hanion, another “Loser,” is African-American; he is persecuted by bully Henry Bowers because of a feud Bowers's father had with Hanion's father.

Bowers also persecutes Stanley Uris, who's a “Loser” by virtue of his Jewish faith.

As Fowles points out, advertisements can allude to the need to nurture by suggesting its absence. In fiction, children who are portrayed as being in need of feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing are naturally sympathetic to readers, who hope such characters will get the care they need.

Nature and Nurture: Character and Setting as Destiny

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Why did you throw the jack of hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck I had left to play. -- The Doors

During the O. J. Simpson trial, observers claimed that, on his defendant’s behalf, attorney Johnny Cochran played the “race card.” Dancing with the Stars critics said that, in an effort to endear herself to the show’s audience and judges, contestant Marie Osmond played the “sympathy card.” Historians claim that the cards that Wild Bill Hickock was playing, which contained aces and eights, comprise the “dead man’s hand,” because he was shot to death while gambling with them.

These allusions are based upon the old analogy that compares one’s personal attributes and assets to the hand that one is dealt at birth. Life, according to this view, is not just any game; it's a card game. It’s a gamble. The stakes may vary, but the goal is always the same: to play the cards one has been dealt to one’s best advantage in the hope of winning the pot.

Even before poker, the life = game equation was popular. The Tarot deck is based upon this notion, and, as a result, its devotees claim, the Tarot hand that one is dealt can foretell his or her future, or fortune.

Beowulf, a poem that is interesting for many reasons, shows us the same thing that a study of Greek mythology discloses: humans, like the gods themselves, were subject to the whims of fate. To paraphrase Alexander Pope, Zeus (or Beowulf) might propose, but it was the Fates (or fate) who disposed of the issues, or determined the outcome of the events, of the day. In the days of ancient Greece, the Fates, envisioned as three sisters, were the ones who decided how events would play out. In Beowulf, the Fates have become fate, an impersonal force, much as the Norse goddess Hel became the impersonal place, hell, in Christian belief. Nevertheless, in both the worlds of the ancient Greeks and of the medieval Norsemen, Geats included, it was not the gods or humans who had the final say as to how incidents or actions, including their own, would turn out. There was a power higher than theirs, to which their own wills were subject.

Beowulf was told and retold for centuries before it was finally committed to paper. The person who wrote it down for posterity was a Christian, and, upon the pagan folkways and beliefs evident in the poem, the scribe overlaid references to Christian faith and doctrine. As a result, there is an uneasy alliance between the pagan and the Christian world views that is incompatible and conflicting. Some may suppose that this duality of vision weakens the poem, but it may be argued that the juxtaposition of these two Weltanschauung, in fact, enriches the narrative. The poem shows what the Norse philosophy of life and social values were before their Christian conversion and what they were becoming during, and would be after, this conversion. For example, before, Beowulf attributed his victories over his foes to fate; afterward, he credits them to God’s will. This twofold attribution of success indicates that, gradually, the idea that it is an impersonal fate that determines the affairs of humans was being replaced by the belief that God’s will is the determinant of such outcomes. In other words, fate becomes God's will. The doctrine of predestination develops this idea with rigorous logic, making humans little more than automatons whose behavior consists of little more than actions that are programmed from the beginning--that is, from eternity--by the will of God.

In the pagan world, the cards one is dealt would have been said to have been dealt by the Fates or by fate. In the Christian world, it is God who deals the cards.

A person might be dealt any of the 22 Major Arcana cards or the 14 Minor Arcana cards of the Tarot deck. All of these cards signified and brought about particular things. Today, people don’t usually think of a person as having any particular set of cards of such a predetermined nature in the hands that fate or God deals to him or her. Instead, whatever personal attributes and assets a person has or accumulates are usually considered the cards that he or she has been dealt. Over time, the cards in a person’s hand may change as one is lost or another is acquired. Were we to apply this concept to Beowulf, we might say that his cards included courage, unusually great strength and stamina, martial prowess, longevity, wisdom, loyalty, compassion, great wealth, popularity, and kingship. When circumstances warranted his doing so, he might play one or more of these cards. In his fights with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon, he played his courage, strength and stamina, and martial prowess cards; as king, he played his loyalty, compassion, and wisdom cards.

Human destiny is complex and impossible to know in advance. Life seems to be a gamble. We also sometimes do not know the full extent of our personal attributes and assets until we are, as it were, called upon by circumstances to use them. We are not always privy to every card in our hands; sometimes, some must be played from a face-down position. Luck (in pagan terms) or divine will (in Christian terms) has a role to play as well. By using such metaphors and analogies as life = gamble, life = game, and one’s personal attributes and assets = a hand of cards, we reduce these complex sets of incidents, circumstances, and actions to simpler, more understandable ideas. Whether any of these ideas is objectively true is perhaps unknowable, but they are, at least, true to one’s sense of how things are and of how things work. They seem to explain. They make sense to us emotionally, if not rationally.

What does all this have to do with character and setting? Writers play God (or fate) when they write stories. The writer is the one who deals the cards that the characters must play, giving or withholding this personal attribute or that individual asset. It was the writer--and the group of storytellers before him--who gave Beowulf his courage, unusually great strength and stamina, martial prowess, longevity, wisdom, loyalty, compassion, great wealth, popularity, and kingship, just as it was Charles Dickens, for example, who gave Ebenezer Scrooge his greed and stinginess, his callous disregard for others, and his capacities--at first unrealized--for compassion, sympathy, and love.

The cards that writers deal to their characters represent the genetic inheritance of these imaginary persons. But genetics is only one influence, as scientists remind us, that affects--and determines--behavior. We’re products of our environments as much as we are the products of our genes. Both nature and nurture make us who and what we are and who and what we become.

If the personal attributes and assets of the individual character represent his or her genetic inheritance, as it were, what represents the character’s environment? In fiction, the setting is the time, the place, and the cultural milieu into which the character is born. The setting may be past, present, or future. It may involve a tyranny, a theocracy, a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a democracy. It may be secular or religious. It may be amoral, moral, or immoral. It may be a universe or the microcosm of a total institution, such as a boarding school or a prison. It may be a metropolis or an island. It may be urban, suburban, or rural. It may be a rain forest or a desert, a castle or a shanty, this world or another planet in a galaxy far, far away; it may even be heaven or hell. Obviously, if a character were born into or lives in any one of these settings, his or her development would differ--in many cases, radically--from his or her development in another setting. Beowulf, both because of the cards he’s dealt and the time and place in which he lives, is a very different character than Ebenezer Scrooge!

By giving characters specific attributes and assets and by setting their lives in particular times, places, and cultural milieus, writers mimic the genetic and environmental aspects of human existence, providing their imaginary people with the gifts of nature and nurture that actual humans receive from evolution, geography, and culture. Whereas, for people, these gifts are likely to be seen as the effects of accident, luck, or grace, there’s no doubt as to who provides them to fictional characters, and they are given deliberately so that each character can fulfill his or her role in the drama the author has determined to create. The writer, depending upon one’s perspective, is, for his or her characters, fate or god.

The Ted Dilemma: Is Evil a Matter or Nature or Nurture, Determinism or Free Will?

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes life is more horrible than horror fiction. In The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule demonstrates the truth of this observation in recounting a nightmare she had as she tried to come to terms with the apparent guilt of her friend, Ted Bundy:

I found myself in a large parking lot, with cars backing out and racing away. One of the cars ran over an infant, injuring it terribly, and I grabbed it up, knowing it was up to me to save it. I had to get to a hospital, but no one would help. I carried the baby, wrapped almost entirely in a gray blanket, into a car rental agency. They had plenty of cares, but they looked at the baby in my arms and refused to rent me one. I tried to get an ambulance, but the attendants turned away. Finally, in desperation, I found a wagon--a child’s wagon--and I put the injured infant in it, pulling it behind me for miles until I found an emergency room.

I carried the baby, running, up to the desk. The admitting nurse glanced at the bundle in my arms. “No, we will not treat it.”

“But it’s alive! It’s going to die if you don’t do something.”

“It’s better. Let it die. It will do no one any good to treat it.”

The nurse, the doctors, everyone, turned and moved away from me and the bleeding baby.

And then I looked down at it. It was not an innocent baby; it was a demon. Even as I held it, it sunk its teeth into my hand and bit me (240-241).

This is the end of her dream. It is horrific. It seems mysterious, too. A baby that’s not a baby, but a demon--what could such imagery mean? Rule is certain that she knows. The baby symbolizes innocence, the demon (its true self), evil: evil is masquerading as innocence, or as she informs her readers: “I did not have to be a Freudian scholar to understand my dream; it was all too clear. Had I been trying to save a monster, trying to protect something or someone who was too dangerous and evil to survive?”(240-241).

To describe Bundy as a monster is an understatement. According to Wikipedia, the law student confessed to thirty murders, but may have committed as many as a hundred, and his modus operandi wasn’t merely cruel; it was savage: “Bundy would bludgeon his victims, then strangle them to death. He also engaged in rape and necrophilia” (“Ted Bundy”). His youngest victim, Floridian Kimberly Leach, was only twelve years old. If the brutality of his crimes, the sexual perversions he committed, and the slaying of a preteen girl are not enough to manifest the evil that was Ted Bundy (and, of course, they are), then his own words, chilling to the bone, concerning morality certainly are:

Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself--what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself--that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring--the strength of character--to throw off its shackles. . . . I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable ‘value judgment’ that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure that I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me–after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.

At about the time of the rise of modern psychology, which is often identified with the work of Wilhelm Wundt, who established the school of experimental psychology at Leipzig University in 1879, more than a decade before Sigmund Freud launched his ill-fated psychoanalysis, Edgar Allan Poe became one of the earliest, if not the earliest, modern writer to include madmen in his stories instead of inhuman monsters. Many other writers of horror fiction have since followed suit, and the human monster is one of today’s most popular types. One of the most widely known contemporary examples is Thomas Harris’ Hannibal (“The Cannibal”) Lecter (Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal).

Perhaps, as they age, aficionados of horror fiction become more interested in human monsters like Bundy than in fantastic creatures such as demons, werewolves, and zombies, recognizing that the true monsters are those in the mirror. Certainly, as the authors of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Monster Book point out, there is no lack of variety for such human fiends, a category of the monstrous that includes not only serial killers, but also Adolf Hitler, murderers, rapists, “monsters and abusers, drug trade predators, the heartless and shallow, and even the bitter, belittling monsters,” concluding “there are so many people whose behavior is unnatural or inhuman that we need go no further” than human nature itself “to find our monsters” (360). Joss Whedon, the creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series seems to agree. It is people, he confesses, who “terrify” him more than anything else (330).

Among the many more traditional (that is, inhuman) monsters that appear on Buffy the Vampire Slayer are a number of human monsters, as the authors of The Monster Book point out, including Billy Fordham (“Lie to Me”), “the Kiddie League baseball coach” (“Nightmares”), Ted Buchanan (“Ted”), Frawley, Frederick, and Hans (“Homecoming”), Tucker (“The Prom”), Coach Marin and Nurse Greenleigh (“Go Fish”), “the lunch lady” (“Earshot”), Kyle, Tor, Rhonda, and Heidi (“The Pack”), “the demon-worshiping fraternity brothers” (“Reptile Boy”), Eric Gittleson (“Some Assembly Required”), Pete Clarner (“Beauty and the Beasts”), Gwendolyn Post (“Revelations”), Maggie Walsh (several episodes), and Jack (“Beer Bad”) (361-362).

There are a number of theories as to what causes human monsters. Are they born and bred or are they made? Is it nature or nurture? Perhaps it is a combination both of genetics and environment. Another way to ask the same question is to pose it as a philosophical issue: is evil behavior determined or does it result from the exercise of free will? The authors of The Monster Book favor nurture (or, perhaps, the lack of it) over nature, arguing that “abnormal brain chemistry may account for certain psychopathic and sociopathic behavior, but most human monsters are not born that way; they are made into what they are by circumstances, by experience and example” (363).

Buffy’s executive story editor and writer Douglas Petrie even offers an etiology for the evil of one of the show’s long-standing human monsters, the rogue slayer Faith. The causes of her monstrosity are parental neglect; feelings of isolation, loneliness, and alienation; and an inability to “compete” against Buffy, but, at bottom, Petrie suggests, the "key" to understanding the wickedness of Faith is her “pain”: “The whole key to Faith is that she is in pain. . . . She’s so lonely and so desperate, and all her toughness comes out of trying to cover that. That’s what monsters are made of.” Her pain, however, he intimates, comes out of her lack of the relationships she would like to have: “You’ve always got a carrot you can dangle in front of her. Mrs. Post was the mother she never had. Buffy and her friends are the best friends she never had. The Mayor is the dad she never had. So she’s always looking for a family and always coming up short and making these horrible choices, and it drove her insane” (368). Primarily, Faith’s monstrosity, then, results from her abuse by her family and by society in general, by the way she has been treated--or, rather, mistreated--but it is also a result of her “horrible choices.” Evil is caused, in Petrie’s estimation, by societal abuse and the exercise of the abused person’s own free will. Secondarily, nature might also have a part to play in human monsters’ origin and development, Petrie seems to admit, tossing in, as if for good measure, the observation, concerning Faith, “Plus I think she was missing a couple of screws to begin with. ‘If you don’t love me, you will fear me’ seems to be her m. o. [modus operandi]” (368).

Paradoxically, Whedon and Petrie appear to disagree with respect to how they view threats represented by human monsters. Whedon admits that “people scare him,” the authors of The Monster Book reveal. “Terrify is the actual word he uses” (330). Petrie, on the other hand, in discussing the rogue slayer Faith, a human monster in her own right, says, “she’s not a stable girl, but a fun one” (368). In their commentary upon human monsters, the book’s authors resolve this paradox, perhaps, when they argue that, because of the number and variety of actual human monsters among us, fictional ones seem to be unnecessary:

There are so many people whose behavior is unnatural or inhuman that we need go no further to find our monsters. We don’t really need vampires or werewolves.

Or do we?

In a world where such real, visceral horrors are so disturbingly commonplace, horrors on the screen or the page may be more comforting than terrifying. We can close the book. We can turn of the television when the show is over. We have control. But in the real world, the show is never over. Nothing is more disturbing or monstrous than that (360-361).

That’s not a bad rationale for the genre.