Everyday Horrors: Plants

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Plants are our friends. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to breathe--or eat. Only they can convert carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy (sugars and starch) using ultraviolet energy (sunlight). Without them, all animal, including human, life would die. Actually, without them, there would be no life to live or die.

Plants themselves, in fact, are food. Their ripened ovaries are hard to beat when one craves a sweet and succulent treat. Plants are also the source of hundreds of products that we sometimes take for granted, but, without which, we wouldn’t live nearly as well as we’re accustomed to do: paper, lumber, fabrics, fuel, medicines, plastics, dyes, soaps, paints, shampoos, perfumes, and a host of others. Without plants, men wouldn’t be able to bribe women into forgiving them or put them in the mood for romance with the gift of a dozen roses or a bouquet of flowers, either, and, of course, gardens would be rather colorless affairs.

So, what’s so horrible about plants?

Like people, many are good eggs, but, to torture a metaphor, there are a few bad apples among them as well. In most cases, the horrible plants are poisonous. Some are horrible for other reasons, though.

Let’s start with the poisonous ones. According to Live Science, the “Top 10 Poisonous Plants,” in descending order, are:

10. Narcissus
9. Rhododendron
8. Ficus
7. Oleander
6. Chrysanthemum
5. Anthurium
4. Lily-of-the-valley
3. Hydrangea
2. Foxglove
1. Wisteria

In no particular order, for pets, these are the five deadliest plants:

• Azalea
• Castor bean plant
• Lily
• Oleander
• Sago palm

The stinging tree is an interesting plant. Indigenous to tropical rainforests, it has thick, hair-like structures on its leaves and stems that, when brushed against, deliver a painful sting. The tips of the leaves and stems penetrate the skin, in which they break off, releasing a poisonous irritant, the effect of which may last for months. There’s no antidote. However, stick insects, weevils, chrisom lid beetles, and even opossums enjoy the taste of them.

In horror fiction, plants can be dangerous--or even deadly--even when they’re not poisonous. In Dean Koontz’s The Taking, demons use a hellish fungus to help to prepare the earth for conquest. In Stephen King’s “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verril” segment of Creepshow, an extraterrestrial fertilizer, delivered by the courtesy of a meteorite, causes an alien fungus to overrun everything--and everyone--in its past, Jordy Verril (played by King himself) included. In Seed People, alien seeds turn humans into zombies. The campy Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978) has mutated tomatoes turning into mad killers.

As “Man-eating Plants”points out out, no carnivorous plant is large enough to threaten humans. These plants’ largest victim, according to this article, was a rat that, dead, was found, partially digested, inside a pitcher plant. However, “Man-eating Plants” suggests that the legends of such plants as the one in Little Shop of Horrors might have been inspired by an actual plant, the Amorphophallus titanum, or corpse flower, which is definitely not recommended for milady’s (or yours) bridal bouquet:

Amorphophallus titanum, which is said to be the biggest, smelliest flower in the world, looks like something that could eat a human being. When it blooms it can reach at height over nine feet in height and smells like a mixture of rotting flesh and excrement. . . .

. . . Although the Amorphophallus titanum looks a lot like you would imagine a man-eating plant to look like, and it even smells like somebody is dead inside, it is not carnivorous.

As horrible as man-eating plants might be (were they to exist), intelligent plants might be even more appalling. For a long time, scientists maintained that animals are not able to reason, and philosophers have always excluded them from such abilities, defining humans alone as “thinking reeds” or res cogitans. If animals were to be denied anything more than sentience, plants certainly weren’t likely to be considered potential Nobel laureates any time soon.

However, this bias may be changing. If Professor Stefano Mancuso has anything to say about the issue, it may not be long before plants are his tenured colleagues. He operates the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV) near Florence, Italy, where he hopes to demonstrate that plants are not only intelligent, but are also capable of solving problems. According to Mancuso, “If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us. Not only are they ‘smart’ in how they grow, adapt and thrive, [but] they [also] do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain.”

According to “Smarty Plants: Inside the World’s Only Plant-Intelligence Lab,” the laboratory is exploring a variety of research topics: “In addition to studies on the effects of music on vineyards, the center's researchers have also published papers on gravity sensing, plant synapses and long-distance signal transmission in trees.”

Plants have been found to be able to distinguish between siblings and strangers, and, perhaps as xenophobic as people, among them, sap apparently is thicker than water. According to Live Science’s “Plants Recognize Siblings”: “Plants can recognize when they are potted with their siblings or with strangers. . . . When strangers share a pot, they develop a competitive streak, but siblings are more considerate of each other.”

In science fiction, plants have demonstrated intelligence for years. As far back as Dante and Virgil, humans dreamed of communing with greenery. However, the desirability of doing so, at least as far as William Hope Hodgson is concerned, might be questionable. In “The Lands of Lonesomeness” chapter of his novel, The Boats of Glen Caring, “evil trees are prone to wrap their branches round the unwary traveller,” and “human souls are somehow sucked into the trees and then beckon for more to join them.”

Intelligent plants also betray evil designs on humans in Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri,” Clark Ashton Smith’s “Seedling of Mars,” and Raymond Z. Gallun’s “Seeds of the Dusk.” Bizarre, threatening plants also appear in H. G. Wells’ short story, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”

Until the discovery of the euglena, scientists believed that there was a hard and fast differences between plants and animals. The main difference was that the former could photosynthesize, while the latter could not. The discovery of the euglena changed this view. Like animals, they can move under their own power, by means of a flailing flagellum, engulf and ingest food using a “phagotrophic. . . apparatus,” “sense light using a red pigmented eyespot,” and change color to match their red or green environment. The euglena also has chloroplasts that enable it to do what only plants can do--photosynthesize. So is it a plant or an animal? Neither--and both. It’s a euglena!

Swamp Thing could be the lowly euglena, writ large. He’s a humanoid vegetable or, if one prefers, a vegetative humanoid, who lives in a swamp and, in the 1982 movie named for him, dated Adrienne Barbeau (a. k. a. Alice Cable).

There’s something else eerie about plants. They’re quiet. They loom. They seem to wait, if not to lurk. They appear to be biding their time, awaiting their chance. To do what? We don’t want to know. What may go on inside those leafy branches and green stems? We don’t even want to guess. Plants are so different from us that, in their majestic, grand silence and their seeming indifference to us, they seem, at times, as when the wind is in the treetops, to whisper of plans that may be not as cool and green and comforting as their stoic postures suggest they are.

If science fiction and horror stories featuring plant-monsters teach us anything worthwhile, it’s to listen to Mom and eat our vegetables--before they eat us!

“Everyday Horrors: Plants” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Everyday Horrors: Zombies

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Suspecting that there might be some truth to the legends of zombies (dead bodies brought back to life through a voodoo spell), Harvard University’s Wade Davis, an ethnobiologist, traveled to Haiti to investigate his theory. Sure enough, he discovered, there is some truth--quite a bit of it, actually--behind the legends of the revenants.

To create a zombie, a voodoo priest, or witch doctor, poisons the victim with a topically applied mixture of frog and puffer fish toxins, which slows both heartbeat and breathing rate to all-but-imperceptible levels. The supposedly deceased person is then buried. Within eight hours, to avoid the “deceased: person’s actual death by suffocation, the body is dug up and the occupant of the grave is administered a Jimson weed paste, which causes a psychotic delirium. The mad revenant is then sold as a slave to a wealthy plantation owner.

The drugs also make the zombies' movements clumsy. They walk in an awkward fashion. They are unable to see well, and they often extend their arms in front of them, feeling their way along to avoid unseen obstacles, just as they are represented as behaving in horror movies.

There's also another type of actual zombie. Known as the philosophical zombie, this version appears in every sense to be just like you and me (well, just like you, anyway), and lives in a world just like yours. There’s only one difference between you and the philosophical zombie. It lacks consciousness, whereas you are a conscious entity (as far as anyone can tell, at least). Its behavior, however, is, or appears to be, just like yours. Philosophical zombies are used in thought experiments concerning the possibility of physicalism and to refine ideas about phenomenalism. As one might suspect with anything pertaining to philosophy, the whole thing become amazingly complicated and rather tedious, but the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains all any sane person (or zombie) wants to know but is afraid to ask, and we direct those with sufficient courage and curiosity to the university’s online reference work (just click the volume’s title; it links to the article), which discusses the “idea of zombies, zombies and physicalism, the conceivability argument,” whether conceivability must involve possibility, and related issues and concerns.


Films which feature zombies, such as Night of the Living Dead (1963), Zombie (1979), Day of the Dead (1985), Re-Animator (1985), Dead Alive (1992), Army of Darkness (1993), Cemetery Man (1994), Bio Zombie (1998), 28 Days Later (2002), and Dawn of the Dead (2004), therefore, are not quite as inane as they might seem otherwise. In fact, you should be careful if you plan to vacation in Haiti any time soon. We hear there’s a labor shortage there, and employers are looking into innovative ways to fill vacancies in the workforce.

Note: A number of zombie movies are in the public domain and may be downloaded free or watched free online. For further information, visit these links:

• Free Horror Films, Part I
• Free Horror Films, Part II
• Free Horror Films, Part III

“Everyday Horrors: Zombies” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Everyday Horrors: Frogs

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “What’s My Line, Part I,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow Rosenberg, during an all-night research session in the Sunnydale High School library, falls asleep. When the librarian, Rupert Giles, awakens her, she mutters something about tadpoles. When he looks puzzled, Willow explains, “I have frog fear.” She’s not alone.

God himself used frogs to terrify his enemy, the pharaoh of Egypt who was holding Moses and the ancient Israelites captive: “And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs” (Ex. 8:2).

What’s so frightening about frogs?

Bible commentaries find plenty to say on the topic:

Concerning Exodus 8:2, quoted above, the Geneva Study Bible observes, “There is nothing so weak that God cannot use it to overcome the greatest power of man,” while the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary comments that “Those animals, though the natural spawn of the river, and therefore objects familiar to the people, were on this occasion miraculously multiplied to an amazing extent, and it is probable that the ova of the frogs, which had been previously deposited in the mire and marshes, were miraculously brought to perfection at once.”
Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary on God’s plague of frogs is not quite as concise as the previous two:

Pharaoh is plagued with frogs; their vast numbers made them sore plagues to the Egyptians. God could have plagued Egypt with lions, or bears, or wolves, or with birds of prey, but he chose to do it by these despicable creatures. God, when he pleases, can arm the smallest parts of the creation against us. He thereby humbled Pharaoh. They should neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep in quiet; but wherever they were, they should be troubled by the frogs. God's curse upon a man will pursue him wherever he goes, and lie heavy upon him whatever he does. Pharaoh gave way under this plague. He promises that he will let the people go. Those who bid defiance to God and prayer, first or last, will be made to see their need of both. But when Pharaoh saw there was respite, he hardened his heart. Till the heart is renewed by the grace of God, the thoughts made by affliction do not abide; the convictions wear off, and the promises that were given are forgotten. Till the state of the air is changed, what thaws in the sun will freeze again in the shade.

But what if you're not Jewish or Christian? What's so frightening about frogs if you're an atheist or a member of another faith?

They’re slimy! Okay, they’re not--at least, not all of them are. Frogs need moist skin and, since they don’t stay in the water all the time, they have a skin coating that keeps them moist. For quite a few people, slime is icky. A lot of folks are both disgusted by it and afraid of it. It’s different and it’s yucky and there’s no telling what might be in it that makes it slimy and yucky and icky.

Frogs cause warts--and they do it by urinating on their handlers! Okay, they don’t, not really. Viruses cause warts, and they’re usually transmitted by other people, not by frogs. But, again, perception is truth for those who won’t do their homework.

They’re poisonous! We’re not going to deny it: some are. In fact, blue poison dart frogs, as their name implies, exist for no other reason than to supply the poison for the blowgun darts that some South American tribes use. According to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, their diet (in the wild, at least) is the source of their poison. They eat such delicacies as “ants, termites. . . beetles, and other. . . insects.” However, in captivity, they’re “fed fruit flies and baby crickets” that are fortified with various vitamins and minerals and, as a result, are themselves “completely non-toxic.” Usually, the poison frogs are brightly colored. (Posion dart frogs may also be red and blue, strawberry, golden, green and black, and other colors.) The bright colors are warning signs that shout, STAY AWAY. Those animals, including people, who don’t are sometimes the victims of these frogs, but, even then, the poison’s usually only enough to make a body sick, not to kill him or her.

Besides, according to psychologists, frog fear isn’t based on reason. It’s irrational. It’s a phobia. Shrinks claim that people fear frogs because they’ve associated them with some sort of traumatic event in which they--the people and the frogs--were involved, probably in the dim past. A rather extreme example is an incident in which a person developed frog fear is that of a woman who ran over several frogs while mowing her lawn.

For those who want their frog fear to sound a little less irrational and a little more clinical, there’s a Latin name for it that confers dignity and culture to the phobia (for those who believe that Latin is a dignified and cultured, if dead, language, at least). The term is ranidaphobia. An alterative term is batrachophobia. The latter term can also apply to the fear of other amphibians, including Newt Gingrich. Folks whose phobia is specific to toads suffer from bufonophobia.

People who fear frogs should stay away from the Goliath frog, for sure!


“Everyday Horrors: Frogs” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.