A Literary Critic Offers Some Tips for Writing Powerful Horror Stories, Part II

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Shock Value; How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (2011), Jason Zinoman offers some insights concerning John Carpenter's 1978 film Halloween.

Jason Zinoman

The movie is an example of what I refer to as an invasion movie, which I define as the invasion of an idyllic community by a corrupting, external evil (think, as a prototype, The Garden of Eden): “Halloween begins,” Zinoman writes, “with a decidedly normal, safe environment, an idyllic middle-class suburb” (178). During the course of the movie, this “familiar” setting and its “ordinary” character “turns into something ambiguous, confusing, and repulsive,” as “middle-class suburbia is [shown to be] the home of unexplainable evil” (208). However, the suburbs is not the only familiar and ordinary environment in such movies; others include “the beach, the hospital, the bedroom, the prom, the highway,” and “right next door” (208).

At the beginning of the movie, the camera views the action from the perspective of “the predator,” as the audience sees what the invisible intruder sees, but the point of view then alternates back and forth, between “the predator” and the “victim” (180). To differentiate the audience from the killer, the director, John Carpenter, shows them the killer's “knife,” which “reminds us that our perspective,” as members of the audience, “is not the same as that of the killer” (180).

Zinoman provides a couple of theories as to why female characters are more often victimized (and killed) than are their male counterparts, including the greater perceived vulnerability of female characters and the established tradition of the presence of a damsel in distress.

“The pleasures of horror are more masochistic than sadistic,” he claims (181), which may be another reason for the tendency of horror movies to feature female characters as their victims. By identifying with the film's victims, rather than with its predator, the audience vicariously becomes victims themselves; if they are males, it would seem (although Zinoman does not say this) that they are also, to some extent, feminized, seeing female surrogates of themselves as vulnerable, weak, ineffective, and helpless. However, viewers, male and female alike, presumably, would also learn, through the survival of the so-called Final Girl, that young women can also be survivors, provided that they possess the personality traits it takes to go toe-to-toe with a monster and win.

Zinoman seems more interested in the nature (or lack thereof) of modern monsters than he does in the implied feminization of male audience members. He contrasts monsters past with monsters present. The former, he suggests, was “a stand-in for some anxiety, political, social, or cultural,” but the latter represent something else entirely.

For example, Zinoman contends, “[Michael] Myers doesn't represent anything . . . Myers doesn't represent the cold calculus of scientific progress or a religious conception of evil” (181), the two sources, traditionally, that are used to explain the monstrous. In the past, the monster has usually been a freak of nature (giant ants or a hostile extraterrestrial life form) (or a freak of the scientific lab [Frankenstein's monster or Mr. Hyde] or a freak, as it were, of the supernatural [the devil or a vampire).

The “New Horror” that was spawned by the likes of Dan O'Bannon, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin, and others, on the other hand, is the face of nothingness. Myers is “defined,” Zinoman says, by “the absence of meaning”; it is “by emptying out all the details from the character [that] Carpenter” creates a monster that contains nothing, a monster of the void, who acts without meaning, without purpose, and “has no motive” (182-183).

Although Zinoman often provides food for thought, he is, at times, a bit Emersonian in his tantalizing vagueness and fails to follow up on some of his intriguing insights, such as the effects of sadism as a perspective and, indeed, a technique of the cinema and his insight that the presence of female characters as victims may tend to feminize male members of the audience. Both ideas are stimulating and rich in possibilities, but they are largely undeveloped. Nevertheless, after Shock Value, readers won't be the same moviegoers they were before they encountered Zinoman's highly interesting and suggestive study of “New Horror.”

A Dirty Little Secret About Horror Movies: They Hurt So Good!

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

We say that we fear death, disability, insensibility, insanity, incarceration, apathy or hatred, poverty, indignity, pain, disfigurement or ugliness, unbelief, and humiliation, but we do not. We fear what these conditions signify: we fear loss. Respectively, we fear the loss of life, of limb, of our senses, of our minds, of freedom, of love, of wealth, of dignity, of pleasure, of beauty (our own or beauty itself), of faith, and of pride.

Horror is about loss.

The threats to loss are the enemies, the monsters, that appear in horror stories to threaten and to seize, to destroy and to eliminate, to ruin and to pervert. The monsters are the creatures, conditions, situations, duties, fates, and other foes that attack us from within or from without--or, in some cases, from both within and from without.

Alternatively, loss can transform us into the monsters we fear. The loss of love or beauty can turn a heartsick woman or a grieving husband into a beast bent upon revenge, as in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

Horror films that play upon--or prey upon--these fears of loss include Silver Bullet (1985) (paralyzed, wheelchair-bound Marty Coslaw is pursued by a werewolf); Jeepers Creepers (2001) (victims are blinded by the villain); Psycho (1960) (Norman Bates is psychotic); Prison (1988) (innocent, convicted murderer Charlie Forsythe is electrocuted, but returns to avenge himself by frying others); Carrie (1976) (Carrie White is bullied before, unleashing her telekinetic powers, she kills her hateful tormentors); Soylent Green (1973) (Soylent Green is people--the have-nots feed the haves--literally); Victim (2010) (first, the victim is stripped of his dignity; then, the pain begins); most of the Saw movies qualify as “torture porn,” in which pain is celebrated for what it is--pain--for no other reason than that pain makes an audience squirm; Darkman (1990) (burn victim--and scientist--Peyton Westlake is just one of the many disfigured characters who appear in a multitude of horror films); The Exorcist (1973) (Father Damien Karras battles his own unbelief as well as the demon who’s possessed preadolescent Regan MacNeil); Last House on the Left (1972) (two teenage girls are not only raped and tortured but humiliated); and, of course, countless horror movies delight in detailing graphic and gory death scenes. Many other such movies also present themes and images of the loss of life, of limb, of our senses, of our minds, of freedom, of love, of wealth, of dignity, of pleasure, of beauty (our own or beauty itself), of faith, and of pride.

We want wholeness. We want soundness. We want happiness. Instead, horror movies give us crippling, fragmenting, and grievous physical and psychological harm. We keep coming back for more, though. We are, on some level, both sadists and masochists. We are, in fact, sadomasochists: we want to inflict pain upon ourselves or others and want, at the same time, to experience the infliction of misery. That is one of the dirty little secrets of horror movies. Like the twisted love that John Mellencamp sings about, horror movies “hurt so good.”

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