Monsters in Our Midst

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Guidance

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles (and psychologist Henry Murray), the need for guidance is universal; everyone experiences it, male and female, young and old—everyone. In promoting their clients' products, advertisements use this basic need, one of the fifteen identified by Fowles, to appeal to potential customers. Since these needs are universal, they pop up, quite frequently, in fiction of all types, including that of the horror genre.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, guidance is provided by two major sources: Buffy's high school's library, a repository of a surprising number of books concerning the paranormal, supernatural, and occult, and her mentor, the Watcher Rupert Giles, himself a human repository of all things metaphysical and mystical. Although the Hellmouth, rather than the Sunnydale High School library, is the plot generator for much of the series, the library's books are often the means of explaining, if not always understanding, the threats the protagonist and her friends face each week.

In Supernatural, the plot generator, the notebook of demon hunters Sam and Dean Winchester's father, John, is also the source of the series's appeal to the need for guidance. Often absent, as he pursues demons and other things that go bump in the night on his own, John later sacrifices his life on behalf of Sam and is killed by the greatest adversary among the demons and other supernatural entities he's hunted. However, his notebook remains a source of knowledge about such threats, often not only describing their origin and nature, but also explaining how to eliminate them. After John's death, his friend, Bobby Singer, himself an experienced demon hunter in his own right, steps in, occasionally, as another source of guidance for the Winchester brothers.

As D. H. Lawrence suggests in his poem “The Snake,” one's culture and education are also “voices” that provide guidance. However, the guidance they provide may not always serve one as well as might be supposed. Such guidance may insist that natural and unconscious sources of wisdom and experience be “killed” as mysterious and potentially dangerous forces (represented, in Lawrence's poem, by the snake). Religion, mythology, philosophy, literature, and, more recently, some forms of psychology, such as Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, are often suggested (although not in “The Snake”) as means of ascertaining, interpreting, and applying such mystical or metaphysical wisdom. The key is that the irrational or the natural must be interpreted in rational terms, often by a trusted intermediary, such as a priest, a philosopher, a poet, or a psychoanalyst. Often, this is the task assigned, in fantasy, to the source of guidance upon which the characters depend.

In horror fiction that includes a science fiction context, the source of guidance is likely to be scientists or researchers. This situation is especially true in regard to the science fiction-horror movies of the 1950s, such as Them!, The Thing from Another World, The Giant Behemoth, The Trollenberg Terror (also known as The Crawling Eye), and The Monolith Monsters, to name a few.

In Them! myrmecologists dispatched by the U. S. Department of Agriculture determine that the giant ants attacking people near Alamagordo, new Mexico, are mutants produced by atomic bomb radiation.

The thing from another world, a biped, appears to be an animal, but scientists examining the tissue from one of its severed arms reveal that the organism is actually a plant.

Scientists determine that the “behemoth” that ravages the greater London metropolitan area was spawned, as it were, by radiation resulting from atomic testing (a major theme of these films) and provide guidance concerning how to kill the creature: subject it to even more radiation to expedite its demise (the creature, the scientists have found, is dying from radiation poisoning).

An astronomer at the Trollenberg observatory explains that mysterious deaths in the vicinity may be connected to an immobile, radioactive cloud hanging over the south face of Switzerland's Mount Trollenberg. Although the cloud, which later moves and splits into four smaller versions of itself, isn't explained in the movie, film critic Leonard Maltin reveals that it's a cloaking device of sorts, which conceals the film's true menaces, “alien invaders.”

After discovering a catatonic girl alive beneath the rubble of her family's farmhouse, doctors determine that she is slowly turning to stone. If the source of her contagion can be discovered, they may be able to save her life. A professor identifies a sample of the stone as having come from a meteorite. The stone is found to have the property of draining silicon from anything it touches. In humans, silicon maintains tissue flexibility. Without it, the girl's body is turning to stone, so she is injected with the element. Researchers discover that the salt in the solution administered to the girl stopped the stone from extracting silicon from her tissues, so a dam is dynamited, allowing local salt flats to be flooded, thereby saving the day for humanity.

Whether the source of guidance is mystical or scientific, horror fiction, whether on the page or the sound stage, often appeals to the need for guidance universal among all human beings. Like other appeals to the fifteen basic needs identified by Fowles, the need for guidance is one of interest to all readers and audiences.

Edgar Allan Poe: Character Studies or Depictions of Aberrant Behavior?

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Egaeus, the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's “Berenice: A Tale,” which was published in the March 1835 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, was considered, by some of the story's “early readers” to suffer from “monomania.” Indeed, Egaeus identifies this malady as the “disease” that afflicts him; the condition, he admits, is aggravated by his “immoderate use of opium,” a drug the use of which, for recreational or other purposes, was legal in Poe's day (although Poe himself did not use the drug):

. . . my own disease . . . . monomania . . . consisted in a morbid irritability of the nerves immediately affecting those properties of the mind, in metaphysical science termed the attentive. . . . I fear that it is . . . in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the general merely reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied, and as it were, buried themselves in the contemplation of even the most common objects of the universe.

Eventually, his gaze falls upon the teeth of his cousin, who suffers from catatonia and who, Egaeus believes, is dying. As he beholds her wasted image, contemplating “her thin and shrunken lips,” Berenice smiles. For Egaeus, her smile is one “of peculiar meaning, [revealing] the teeth of the changed Berenice.” Egaeus reacts with horror, proclaiming, “Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!”

At the time, psychology, as a science (even today, this classification is suspect among many scientists), was considered a division of philosophy. In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) Imamnuel Kant (1724-1804) had recognized that psychology is unscientific because the object of its study (first identified as the psyche, or soul, and then as thought, or cognition, and then, later still, as human behavior) cannot be quantified. Later, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper (1902-1994) suggests that any scientific hypothesis should be falsifiable through experimentation or observation (the empirical method), a test that psychology often fails.

Be that as it may, even today, perhaps for the want of anything else, psychology retains authority in courts of law and other social venues. In Poe's time, the better educated among the general public might have been persuaded by the claims of early psychologists, just as they were by the pronouncements of phrenologists. In general, however, many of Poe's readers would have been ignorant even of the rudimentary psychology of their day. To them, Poe's accounts of the effects of certain clusters of behavior now considered to be symptomatic of particular mental disorders to which contemporary psychologists (but not their predecessors) have put a name would have seemed mysterious, because their causes were unknown (as, indeed, is the case with regard to many such conditions even now), which is why therapy frequently avails little as a method of “treatment.” (Drugs have proven a more effective means of treatment, in some cases, a fact which seems to support Dr. Thomas Szasz's contention, in The Myth of Mental Illness, that “mental illness,” as such, does not exist; what does exist, he claims, is aberrant behavior caused by organic problems.)

We may not understand the workings of the soul or cognition or human behavior or whatever psychologists claim to study any better today than our ancestors did, but many members of the general public are satisfied by their belief that we do. By identifying the symptoms Poe's characters display, some contemporary literary critics and others have diagnosed the mental disorders from which these characters seem to suffer. However, again, these concepts and their bases would have been unknown to Poe and his readers.

The narrator of “Berenice: A Tale,” therefore, was not suffering from monomania. Instead, he suffers “from what is now called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD),” a type of “anxiety disorder” characterized by

. . . recurrent, disturbing, unwanted, anxiety-producing obsessions (insistent thoughts or ruminations that at least initially are experienced as intrusive or absurd) or compulsions (repetitive ritualistic behaviors, or mental actions such as praying or counting, and purposeful actions that are intentional, even though they may be reluctantly performed because they are considered abnormal, undesirable, or distasteful to the subject.) The compulsion may consist of ritualistic, stereotyped behavior or it may be a response to an obsession or to the rules that the person feels obliged to follow. The obsession often involves the thought of harming others or ideas that the subject feels are gory, sexually perverse, profane, or horrifying (Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, ninth edition).

Admittedly, this summary of the disorder describes Egaeus's behavior almost to a “T.” He is undoubtedly obsessed with the teeth of his cousin, Berenice, so much so that, visiting her tomb, he rips the teeth from her jaws. As horrific as this revelation is, it is not the most horrible shock that awaits Poe's reader at the end of this tale of terror. For that disclosure, one must read the story for him- or herself.

In earlier posts, we've considered how an author, by withholding the cause of the bizarre effects he or she presents at the beginning and middle of a story (and continues to depict well into the final division of the narrative), before revealing, at last, the cause of these effects, can repeatedly generate fear while maintaining or heightening suspense. Partly by sheer luck—being active as a writer during a time when psychology had not yet made an attempt to identify, describe, and categorize mental disorders as a way of diagnosing and treating them—and, possibly, by design (Poe often does not identify the causes of his effects, leaving them mysterious through the lack of a complete context)—Poe accomplishes just these ends. “Berenice: A Tale” seems all the more mysterious, macabre, and horrific to those modern readers among us who are not well-versed in psychology. By dint of the narrator's strange conduct, which is not explained by the outdated concept of “monomania,” we are left in the dark as to the cause of Egaeus's bizarre behavior, making it seem all the more mysterious. (The same is true of those who reject the claim that psychology is a science and continue to regard it as little more than unfounded speculation.) There is no reason that writers today cannot, again, follow in the footsteps of Poe, emulating his genius as a storyteller who was given to the creation of horror stories in a class by themselves: present bizarre behavior without explaining (or explaining away) its cause.

For critics of psychology, including disbelievers in its mythological aspects, who reject the study of the soul, or of cognition, or of human behavior, or of whatever psychologists claim to study, as having a scientific basis, such “disorders” as OCD, can still have value, as types of exercises of the sort that the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus (c. 371-c. 287 BC) developed in his Characters. Its pages describe thirty types of characters, including “The Flatterer,” “The Garrulous Man,” “The Boor,” “The Reckless Man,” “The Gossip,” and “The Superstitious Man.” The descriptions summarize the behaviors of these various characters, much as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (now in its edition) describes the symptoms of various “mental disorders.” Indeed, looking upon the DSM not as a clinical source, but as a writing resource similar to Theophrastus's character sketches, can provide a similar useful resource, minus the DSM's psychological trappings.

In future posts, we will consider more of the character types (i. e., “mental disorders”) among Poe's cast of grotesques.

Explaining Vampires

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

In The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s Greatest Cases, E. J. Wagner includes a series of facts that writers of horror stories, seeking to balance claims concerning the supernatural origin and existence of vampires with natural explanations for the belief in such creatures can use in their own stories:

In real life, exhumations of reputed vampires provided helpful information to medical science. In the eighteenth century, during a vampire panic in central Europe, a number of graves were opened by physicians of the occupying Austrian army. Their reports gave a detailed picture of the unexpected effects that burial can have on cadavers--effects that in less educated minds gave credence to the vampire legends. Bodies of males, for instance, were sometimes discovered showing “wild signs,” or penile erections, no doubt caused by bloating from gases. The same gases caused corpses to split open, often with sufficient noise to be heard aboveground. Some burials were in earth so rich in tannin that the bodies were extraordinarily preserved, even after centuries underground. All of this served to immortalize the belief in the “undead.”

. . . In many nineteenth-century country villages the disease [consumption, or tuberculosis] meant that infected descendents of diseased victims often showed the first signs of illness after their progenitors were buried. It was not recognized that the disease was the result of contagion within the household. The symptoms of weakness and anemia caused by poor lung function and bloody coughs suggested to the credulous that the dead had returned to feed on their young.

Opening the graves of suspected vampires sometimes disclosed that the corpses had changed position, a result of effects of decomposition and ensuing gas formation. Insect activity affected the visage of the dead, contraction of the skin made it appear that the hair and nails continued to grow, and what was thought to be fresh liquid blood could be found in the mouths or chest cavities. It was not generally realized that blood, which coagulates after death, can subsequently return to a liquid state, so when a stake was driven into the chest of an exhumed corpse and a plume of blood erupted, it satisfied the observers that a vampire had been quelled (202-203)

. . . The belief that hair and nails could grow after death was taken as evidence of vampirism in some primitive rural communities (207).

Occasionally, unconscious or catatonic men and women were buried alive by accident, and, when they regained consciousness, experiencing claustrophobia and seeking to escape the confines of their buried coffins, they flailed at the lids, tore the linings, and writhed and rolled about. If their bodies were later exhumed for some reason, the damages to the interiors of the caskets and the repositioned corpses might also be taken as signs that the supposedly dead were really the “undead.”

Note: George Washington, who suffered from taphephobia, ordered that he not be buried until twelve days after his death, and others who feared being buried alive ensured that their coffins and graves were equipped with means of escape and egress. Vestal virgins who violated their oaths of chastity were buried alive as a form of torture and execution. The antagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” was likewise immured, and the protagonist of “The Premature Burial” was buried alive. In reality, before modern medical knowledge provided safeguards against live burial, people were accidentally buried alive more often than one might suppose; as Christine Quigley points out, in The Corpse: A History, “William Tebb records 149 such cases, as well as several 219 near misses, ten live dissections, and two awakenings during embalming. “10 Horrifying Premature Burials,“ an Internet article, also describes additional live burials.  Maybe being a vampire wasn’t all that bad, compared to the virgins’ fate!

"The Damned Thing": Commentary, Part 2

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

As I indicated in my previous post, Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Damned Thing” depends, for its effect, upon a fragmented and out-of-sequence timeline, the piecemeal exposition of facts that prevents the establishment of a context sufficiently clear to allow interpretation, the withholding of certain items of information, and the misdirection that results from Bierce’s incongruous, often tongue-in-cheek chapter titles, which have no bearing upon the chapters they introduce and, in fact, may suggest lines of thought that are themselves absurd and irrelevant.

However, Bierce accomplishes more than the generation of mystery and suspense through the use of these techniques. By employing these strategies, he also creates a metaphor by which he implies the theme of his story. The lack of context can be read as the vague, uncertain, and finite understanding of reality that derives from human perception that is itself limited to the phenomena that it perceives.

Bierce’s story’s reference to science is not accidental, for science is the primary and predominant means by which modern individuals ascertain knowledge, if not always truth, and it is science--the science of optics, to be precise--that allows Hugh Morgan to understand the nature of the Damned Thing as being of a color imperceptible to the human eye and thus invisible. However, since science is empirical, resting upon the senses and their perception of phenomena (including colors), it is itself limited to the perceptible world, and, in the final analysis, the nature of the Damned Thing must, therefore, remain essentially mysterious.

Bierce’s fragmented and vague narration, as it occurs in “The Damned Thing,” despite the presence of his omniscient narrator, is deliberate, symbolizing the limits of the scientific method’s reliance upon empirical data and emphasizing the finitude of human perception, cognition, and knowledge by underscoring his story’s victim’s inability to see the invisible adversary that ultimately slays him. Without a context, interpretation is difficult, if not impossible, and Morgan’s (and Harker’s) inability to see the Damned Thing prevents them from understanding it, just as it also prevents the pedestrian and unimaginative “farmers and woodsmen” who make up the inquest’s jury from accepting Harker’s account of the creature’s existence as true. They conclude, despite Harker’s eyewitness testimony, that Morgan was killed by a “mountain lion.” In short, they are unable to think outside the box, so to speak, that the accepted model of reality, based upon science, provides as the basis, or context, for interpreting perception and experience. Therefore, they conclude that Harker’s story demonstrates his madness.

Science tells us how to interpret the things that we perceive (see, hear, smell, taste, or touch), but limits upon human perception and the ignorance that results from such limits make certain knowledge problematic even under the best of circumstances and can (and has) resulted in erroneous and fantastic conclusions concerning even everyday matters. For example, before the invention of the microscope, bacteria and viruses existed, but, unaware of these germs or their functioning, human beings regarded demons, not microbes, as the causes of diseases and mental illnesses. Likewise, the Hubble space telescope has increased astronomers’ understanding of the universe exponentially since its launch in 1990.

Nevertheless, to some degree, we can (and do) hypothesize about experiences, even when knowledge about what we perceive (or do not perceive) is uncertain. For example, no one has seen an actual tyrannosaurus rex, but paleontologists claim to know quite a bit about this dinosaur (even if their “knowledge” is tentative and subject to change in the wake of new discoveries and conjectures). These gigantic animals are considered to have been carnivores with extremely powerful jaws, binocular vision, a bipedal posture, and a highly developed sense of smell. The young, some believe, possessed prototypical feathers, although more as insulation than for flight. In addition, they were believed, by some, to have been scavengers and even cannibals. Although they were once considered too slow-moving and “cold-blooded,” because of their massive size and weight, to be good hunters, scientists later revised this conception and suggested that the tyrannosaurus was more likely than not a fleet-footed predator.

One may argue that some features and abilities of the Damned Thing could likewise be determined by observing its effects on its environment. It is likely to be fast and physically powerful. It is obviously predatory. It is apt to be large, for Morgan’s diary reports that its passing momentarily blocked out the stars. Nevertheless, any ideas concerning the nature of the Damned Thing must remain as vague, uncertain, and finite as humanity’s understanding of reality that derives from perception that is itself limited to the phenomena that it perceives. Bierce’s fragmented and out-of-sequence timeline, his piecemeal exposition of facts that prevents the establishment of a context sufficiently clear to allow interpretation, his withholding of certain items of information, and the misdirection that results from Bierce’s incongruous, often tongue-in-cheek chapter titles, which have no bearing upon the chapters they introduce and, in fact, may suggest lines of thought that are themselves absurd and irrelevant all conspire, as it were, to symbolize and reinforce the epistemological limits of an intelligence that is informed by perceptions of phenomena that, as a rule, cannot be confirmed independently of the senses that detect them.

Implications of the Fantastic

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation. . . [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from “reality” as it exists in the common opinion. . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the works belong to another genre; the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (41).

Indeed we distinguish, within the literary Gothic, two tendencies: that of the supernatural explained (the “uncanny”). . . and that of the supernatural accepted (the “marvelous”) (41-42).

-- Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

Whatever one may think about Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, he or she would likely admit that the philosopher does a good job, for the most part, in defining his terms. The fantastic is either the supernatural or the apparently supernatural, depending upon whether it is resolved as explicable in terms of “‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion” (that is, as the “uncanny,” or “supernatural explained”) or it remains inexplicable (that is, “marvelous”).

One of the terms that is not as explicitly defined is “‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion.” This term is more vague, although, within the context of the other terms’ definitions, its meaning is fairly clear, referring, it seems, to the scientific world view in which the universe is synonymous with nature, cause-and-effect relationships govern all events, knowledge is obtained through the application of the scientific method, and the results of this method of inquiry are codified in theoretical principles often called “laws of nature,” “laws of thermodynamics,” “laws of physics,” and so forth. It is “reality” in this sense upon which the fantastic itself is predicated, Todorov says, and which the fantastic actually supports:

The reader and the hero, as we have seen, must decide if a certain event or phenomenon belongs to reality or the imagination, that is, must determine whether or not it is real. It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.

. . . Far from being a praise of the imaginary. . . the literature of the fantastic posits the majority of a text as belonging to reality--or, more specifically, as provoked by reality (167-168).

It is also for this reason that the literature of the fantastic ultimately reaches its end, or, as Todorov declares:

Today, we can no longer believe in an immutable, external reality, nor in a literature which is merely the transcription of such a reality. . . . Fantastic literature itself--which on every page subverts linguistic categorizations--has received a fatal blow from these very categorizations (168).

In short, as I myself suggest in “Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?”:

The prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

 However, in general, individuals follow, rather than lead, developments in cultural and theoretical paradigm shifts. The cultural Weltanschauung changes, usually centuries before, the individual’s world view, and what is accepted among the elite of specialized communities such as those of academics, scientists, and philosophers usually becomes accepted much more slowly, often centuries later, in fact, if ever, by the general public. For this reason, outmoded views of the “reality” of which Todorov speaks continue to inform and to direct, if not determine, their thoughts, behavior, and, to a lesser degree, perhaps, their feelings. For them, such divisions as those listed below will continue, more or less, to hold sway:

The Fantastic (or what might be called the “supernatural undecided”): The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Shining (film version; directed by Stanley Kubrick), The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King), The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson). 

The Uncanny (“supernatural explained”): “The Red Room” (H. G. Wells), The Island of Dr. Moreau (H. G. Wells), The Food of the Gods (H. G. Wells), The Invisible Man (H. G. Wells), Hide and Seek (film, directed by Ari Schlossberg), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), King Kong (film, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack), Subterranean (James Rollins), Relic (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child), Watchers (Dean Koontz), The Tommyknockers (Stephen King), Swan Song (Robert McCammon), The Funhouse (film, directed by Tobe Hooper). 

The Marvelous ("supernatural accepted" as such): “1408” (Stephen King), “Dracula’s Guest” (Bram Stoker), “A Christmas Carol” (Charles Dickens), It (Stephen King), ‘Salem’s Lot (Stephen King), Carrie (Stephen King), Desperation (Stephen King), The Taking (Dean Koontz), Summer of Night (Dan Simmons), Fires of Eden (Dan Simmons), The Green Mile (Stephen King), Silver Bullet (Stephen King), The Exorcist (William Peter Blatty), Dracula (Bram Stoker), The University (Bentley Little).

Such a division also has the benefit of allowing authors, critics, and readers the ability to discern, in short order, whether a writer’s oeuvre tends more toward the fantastic, the uncanny, or the marvelous.

Heads Will Roll

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Wikipedia’s article concerning the event, “the scientific revolution began with the publication of two works that changed the course of science in 1543 and continued through the late 17th century: Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and Andreas Vesalius’ On the Fabric of the Human Body (“Scientific Revolution”).

Before then, and even as late as the early twentieth century, the supernatural realm often served as the basis for horror stories, novels, and films. Gradually, the principles of science replaced the tenets of theology and the mad scientist replaced the mystic in such fiction. Whereas, before the scientific revolution, what occurred among the heavenly powers, both fallen and steadfast, determined human affairs, afterward, as Shakespeare argues, “he fault” began to lie more “in ourselves” than in “the stars.”

Nature, rather than the supernatural realm, became, more and more, the stage for human affairs and the human being him- or herself, rather than God or demons, increasingly became the actor upon this stage. In horror, ghosts, werewolves, witches, and vampires became less frequent villains (and less respected ones) than mad scientists, just as technology replaced magic. Where creatures such as zombies persisted, scientific, rather than mystical, explanations were offered by authors and filmmakers to explain their origin. Perhaps they were nothing more than human beings who had had the misfortune to have been infected by a bizarre virus or were victims of unscrupulous “witch doctors” who employed a mixture of “tetrodotoxin, a powerful hallucinogen called Datura, and cultural forces and beliefs” to convince uneducated and illiterate men and women that they had been resurrected from the dead and now owed their allegiance to the witch doctors who had performed this miraculous feat (“The Serpent and the Rainbow (book),” Wikipedia). In short, the change from mysticism to science fiction, or from faith to knowledge, as the primary basis for horror fiction is not accidental; it stems from the change in Western culture’s Weltanschauung.

In the past, humans were in danger of losing their souls and becoming demonic parodies of their true selves (images of God), damned forever to hell. With the general acceptance among scientists of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, human beings might fall victim, instead, to the animal nature within, which they had suppressed, more or less successfully, over the millennia since the first human beings emerged from their original, primordial ape-like ancestors. Since the industrial revolution, people have feared their affinity, as so-called ghosts in the machine (of the human body), to automatons, with cyborgs and robots replacing feral creatures as symbolic expressions of human degeneration. In the information, or computer, age, men and women fear that even their very personalities may be replaced by software encoded with artificial intelligence.

The theological has given way to the evolutionary, which has given way to the mechanical, which has given way to the digital or cybernetic. At each point, men and women have become both less and less fleshly and human and more and more incorporeal and inhuman, alienated, literally and figuratively, from both themselves and their world. Such stories (plays, novels, television series, or films) as Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604), H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), the televisions series The Six Million Dollar Man (1970s), and Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed (1973), upon which Donald Cammell’s film adaptation of the same title (1977) is based.

Although utopian fiction sometimes projects a paradisiacal future civilization based upon the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the technological inventions that often results from such a pursuit, horror fiction that is based upon science (or, more often, science fiction) has frequently opposed such an optimistic vision, showing that science, as an invention and enterprise of human origin, is, at best, a morally neutral activity, its beneficial or destructive effects being determined by the scientists (and, more often, the corporations or government agencies that underwrite the scientists’ work).

Horror writers generally take a dim view of human nature, considering it to be corrupted or corruptible, limited, fallible, and, perhaps, even innately evil. Edgar Allan Poe sums up the general view of horror writers as much today as he did in the nineteenth century: “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. an is now only more active---not more happy--or more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.” Often, horror stories tend to be cautionary tales in which the object to be feared is not the mythical box of Pandora but the manipulation of nature, human and otherwise, for individual scientist’s own gain or as a means to the government’s end, which is usually, world domination or the control of nature itself, as H. G. Wells warned: “Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.”

In horror, science has given birth, as it were, to such terrors as aliens; cloned dinosaurs, psychotic cyborgs; disease and pestilence; gigantic plants, insects, and animals; human-animal hybrids; renegade robots; mad scientists; serial killers; super-soldiers; and a host of other menaces representative of the dangers of runaway technology or the application of science without concern for morality; the lust for political, military, or financial power at any cost; and just plain old human hubris. We can’t blame God or nature; as Shakespeare taught us, “The fault. . . lies not in our stars but in ourselves.” The attempt to avoid blame for our own cruelty, stupidity, greed, and callous indifference to anyone but ourselves that was evident in evolutionists’ insistence that we are to expect some such behavior as natural and normal, since, after all, imperfect and fallible human beings are evolving from lower life forms may be logically sound, should one accept the basic primitive that human beings are evolving in such a fashion, but horror writers don’t let their characters off the hook as easily as that, insisting, instead, that a price--and often a brutal one and a collective one--be paid in blood and guts and fear.

Horror fiction is one of the few remaining genres that seeks to hold humanity accountable for its actions toward one another and toward nature itself. Perhaps human behavior is determined, rather than elective, but, even if it is, a price must be paid for immoral or amoral behavior. Even if it doesn’t seem to make sense to punish people for the dastardly deeds that they cannot help doing (if their behavior is determined rather than free), the price must be paid, horror fiction declares. Heads must roll.

Otherwise, if heads do not roll, and everyone is permitted to do whatever he or she likes, without regard to whether an action might be considered by others, and even by a vast majority of others, to be wrong and harmful, or even disastrous, the effect will be much as would follow from a theory of morality (or amorality) such as that which Ted Bundy held and articulated, a monstrous, but perhaps irrefutable, notion of what constitutes the good in a universe devoid of evil.

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.

(On January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy’s own head “rolled,” which is to say, he was electrocuted--for the murder of 12year-old Kimberly Leach.)

Charles Fort

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

At the age of 42, Charles Fort inherited a small fortune from an uncle, which allowed him to quit work and pursue his hobby full time. A year later, his brother Clarence died, and Clarence’s portion of the inheritance was divided equally between Charles and his other brother, Raymond. Charles’ hobby was unusual, especially in 1916, the year that he first inherited his money. Although he wrote ten novels, only one was modestly successful.

Perhaps this lack of success in writing fiction is what caused him to turn his hand to nonfiction. He wrote a series of books in which he recorded bizarre incidents which, today, would be characterized as either paranormal or supernatural in nature. Among such incidents were reports he read in various world-class libraries of rains of frogs, snakes, and other animals; strange disappearances of people; visitations of ghosts and apparitions; unidentified flying objects; mysterious lights in the sky; the occurrence of spontaneous human combustion; and appearances of unlikely breasts.

Recounting reports of such phenomena in The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents, Fort also formulated absurd theories to account for these objects, events, and experiences. His theories were not intended to be taken seriously--or, at least, not any more so than he believed anyone should take scientific theories. The fact that science was unable to explain such phenomena as those he recounted and, indeed, rejected them, suggested to Fort that science was limited in its ability to interpret reality and, consequently, did not deserve the nearly unlimited credit and honor that it arrogantly claimed for itself and its practitioners.

For example, Fort attributed many mysterious incidents to a visitation of extraterrestrial space travelers to the Earth or to their being stranded in a gigantic Sargasso Sea that orbited the planet, occasionally spilling one or another strange artifact upon the Earth. He likewise suggested that Martians were controlling events on Earth. These theories, he claimed, tongue in cheek, had as much explanatory value as (and possibly more than) scientific theories that rejected inconvenient facts as “damned.” He compiled such data, rather than reject it out of hand, in The Book of the Damned and subsequent volumes of different titles. Today, The Fortean Society, named in his honor, continues his work, publishing its results in the Fortean Times.

Admittedly, Fort was something of a crackpot who didn’t fit well into the society--or the science--of his day and is, as such, an interesting person in his own right, but why is he interesting to readers of Chillers and Thrillers, who are concerned with the theory and practice of writing horror stories?

I think he is of interest to such readers for at least two reasons. First, many of the phenomena that he identifies could serve as the inciting moment, or launch pad, for a horror story or novel. Assume that human flesh rains down upon the earth from a dark, overcast sky, as, according to Fort, it did on more than one occasion. Why? What caused such an unlikely event? Or why did fish or snakes suddenly fall from the heavens? The answers to such unusual questions should suggest some unusual possibilities, some of which might be horrific, indeed! (As I have already suggested, many of these same incidents could easily be the catalyst for a story as well.)

Second, Fort’s invention of theories suggests that a writer whose work includes bizarre incidents must have a theory that finally explains the origin, the cause, and the nature of these incidents, bizarre though they may be. Stephen King claims that he didn’t think he had to include an explanation of the remarkable events that unfold in his work, but, he says, his readers let him know, in no uncertain terms, that, yes, by God, he did have to explain himself. In Under the Dome, King offers multiple possibilities for the origin and the nature of the transparent barrier that descends over Chester’s Mill, Maine: aliens, rogue scientists, foreign terrorists are among these possibilities. The strangest (and, for me, the most intriguing) is that the dome might itself be a living organism of some sort. Outlandish? Perhaps, as Fort’s theories certainly were, probably by design. However, the very absurdity of Fort’s theories remind the writer of horror stories to offer a cause or a reason by which the bizarre incidents of his or her novel may be understood.

It is advisable for writers to acquaint themselves with criticism of Fort, too, of course, so as to have a balanced perspective regarding him and his work, and The Skeptic’s Dictionary helps in this regard, concluding, regarding Fort:

Fort was skeptical about scientific explanations because scientists sometimes argue "according to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence" and they suppress or ignore inconvenient data. He seems to have understood that scientific theories are models, not pictures, of reality, but he considered them to be little more than superstitions and myths. He seems to have had a profound misunderstanding of the nature of scientific theories. For, he criticized them for not being able to accommodate anomalies and for requiring data to fit. He took particular delight when scientists made incorrect predictions and he attacked what he called the "priestcraft" of science. Fort seems to have been opposed to science as it really is: fallible, human and tentative, after probabilities rather than absolute certainties. He seems to have thought that since science is not infallible, any theory is as good as any other.

Ghosts: An Endangered Species?

Copyright 2010 by Gary Pullman

For various reasons, from humanity’s earliest days, the spirits of the dead, or ghosts, are alleged to have visited the living. Some return to avenge their murders, other to warn loved ones of impending catastrophes, and still others to assuage guilt so powerful that it has survived the grave. If one can believe the stories associated with ghosts, they have haunted everything from ancient graveyards and medieval castles to modern mansions and hotels. Short story writers, novelists, and screenwriters would have their readers and audiences believe that some ghosts have a sense of humor while others are somber, indeed. They have appeared in literary works as diverse as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room,” Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Mark Twain’s “A Ghost Story,” Stephen King’s The Shining and Bag of Bones, and Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas. Ghosts have appeared as guest stars, so to speak, in such movies as Topper, Poltergeist, Beetlejuice, Ghost Busters, The Sixth Sense, The Others, An American Haunting, and many others, and in episodes of such television shows as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Bewitched, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ghost Hunters. There’s no doubt about it: ghosts have not only been reported throughout history, but they have also enjoyed plenty of airtime. The virtual omnipresence of ghosts is curious when one considers that such entities may not actually exist. Although men and women who believe in the existence of ghosts offer such evidence for their existence as eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation, this evidence can be explained without reference to the entities that are supposed to cause them, which makes the actual existence of ghosts questionable at best.

Since the beginning of time, people have claimed to have seen ghosts, and believers in the existence of spirits of the dead declare that so many people couldn’t be deceived or lying in providing eye-witness testimony. It does seem likely that some--perhaps many--such eyewitnesses really do believe that they have seen ghosts. Seeing isn’t believing, though, or shouldn’t be. Scientists regard eyewitness testimony, or anecdotal or testimonial evidence, as they prefer to call it, as being notoriously unreliable. In “anecdotal (testimonial) evidence,” an Internet article concerning such evidence, Robert T. Carroll points out that “anecdotes are unreliable for various reasons,” including the distortion that occurs as accounts are told and retold, exaggeration, confusion regarding “time sequences,” “selective” memory, misrepresented “experiences,” and a variety of other conditions, including the affect upon their testimony that “biases, memories, and beliefs” have. Carroll also suggests that gullibility, “delusions,” and even deliberate deceit also make such testimony “inherently problematic and usually. . . impossible to test for accuracy.”

Most people who investigate reports concerning the presence or appearances of ghosts also seek to photograph them. It has been said that cameras do not lie, but the problem with photographic evidence is that it is easy for photographers to doctor film. In his Internet article concerning “spirit photography,” James Randi gives an example of a rather crude attempt by some spiritualists to fool folks into believing they’d captured the apparition of the deceased author of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, as himself a spiritualist, was a frequent focus of “spook-snappers” who “claimed to summon him up after his death in 1930.” The problem, Randi says, with their evidence is that it is “apparently a cut-out of a reversed photo placed in what appears to be cotton wool”; otherwise, the spirit photograph “agrees in detail, lighting, and expression with the original” photograph of the Doyle which was taken in the author’s “prime” (“spirit photography”). In other words, the photograph is a fake. A favorite technique among those who create fake spirit photographs, Carroll points out, is the “double exposure,” an example of which appears on the article’s webpage. A double exposure occurs when the same film is exposed to first one, and then another, object, with the result that the image of the second object overlays or overlaps the image of the first object; both images appear to have been photographed together, at the same time and in the same place. However, pictures of supposed ghosts sometimes result from the photographer’s own incompetence or “natural events,” rather than deliberate deceitfulness, Carroll concedes, including

various flaws in camera or film, effects due to various exposures, film-processing errors, lens flares (caused by interreflection between lens surfaces), the camera or lens strap hanging over the lens, effects of the flash reflecting off of mirrors, jewelry. . . light patterns, polarization, [or] chemical reactions.

When deliberate deceit occurs, photographers may also use graphic art software or computer graphics software to deliberately manipulate photographs that are uploaded from the camera, into a computer.

If neither eyewitness testimony nor photographs prove the existence of ghosts, perhaps electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, do so. A sophisticated term for tape-recorded voices, EVP demonstrate the presence of ghosts, some contend, since sensitive instruments have recorded the disembodied voices of apparitions. However, as Carroll indicates, in his Internet article, “electric voice phenomenon,” skeptics point out that such sounds may not be voices at all, but may be nothing more than the results of “interference from a nearby CB [citizen’s band radio] operator or cross modulation”--one radio station transmitting over another station’s broadcast. Likewise, EVP may be nothing more than a listener’s interpreting “random noise” as the statements of a disembodied voice or voices. In the same Internet article, Carroll cites the explanation for this tendency by Jim Alcock, a psychologist: “When our brains try to find patterns, they are guided in part by what we expect to hear. . . . People can clearly ‘hear’ voices and words not just in the context of muddled voices, but in a pattern of white noise in which there are no words at all.” It seems that, for these reasons, EVP is just as problematic as the proof of ghosts’ existence as eyewitness reports and photographs have been shown to be.

Perhaps the abrupt drop in temperature that some ghost hunters have both felt and recorded will prove more convincing evidence of the existence of the spirits of the dead. According to an anonymous “paranormal researcher,” who writes, in answer to a question posted on Yahoo! Answers, it is believed that such “cold spots” result from ghosts’ draining of energy sources, such as electricity, as a means to produce sounds or to speak. Supposedly, the energy they draw from the environment heats their own energy, but this heat is then dissipated by the sound effect the ghost produces with this borrowed energy. Neither this researcher nor any other seems able to explain how a disembodied spirit--that is, an entity that has no lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, or lungs--can speak, even if it does help itself to ambient energy sources. Once again, Carroll finds such evidence to be less than persuasive. In his Internet article, “ghost,” he notes that “many people report physical changes in haunted places, especially a feeling of a presence accompanied by temperature drop and hearing unaccountable sounds” and agreeing that such people “are not imagining things,” he, nevertheless, discounts the notion that ghosts are responsible for these phenomena. Instead, he says,

Scientists who have investigated haunted places account for both the temperature changes and the sounds by finding physical sources of the drafts, such as empty spaces behind walls or currents set in motion by low frequency sound waves (infrasound) produced by such mundane objects as extraction fans.

Sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation are “produced by such things as power lines, electric appliances, radio waves, and microwaves,” Carroll observes, in his Internet article “EMF (EMT).” Therefore, he adds, the idea that ghosts somehow cause such radiation seems unlikely, and, indeed, “some think that electromagnetic fields are inducing the haunting experience” (“ghost”).

Occasionally, as a Halloween feature, some newspapers or television shows spotlight a supposedly haunted house. The ghostly phenomena are described, and then a natural explanation is provided for each of the supposedly supernatural elements of the tale. One such account, by Cathy Lubenski, appeared under the title “When your house has spooks, who are you going to call” in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her story included reports of slime oozing from walls, cold spots, lights flashing on and off, doors opening by themselves, knocking inside walls, foul odors, and howling. Were one living in a house in which such phenomena were occurring, it might well seem that the residence was indeed haunted. Instead, each of these phenomena had a natural cause, not a supernatural origin. The slime was from a bee’s nest in the attic; the cold spots resulted from an air-conditioner unit’s return airflow; the stench was an effect of dead rats in the wall and trapped sewer gas; the howling was the wind, blowing down a vent. Philosophers advise people to adopt the principle of Occam’s razor, which says, essentially, that one should never consider more possible causes than the number that are necessary to explain why something happens. As Carroll points out, “Occam’s razor is also called the principle of parsimony,” and “it is usually interpreted to mean something like ‘the simpler the explanation, the better’” or “as most people would put it today, ‘don’t make any more assumptions than you have to.’” To demonstrate the principle, Carroll offers this example: “[Erik] Von Däniken could be right: maybe extraterrestrials did teach ancient people art and engineering, but we don't need to posit alien visitations in order to explain the feats of ancient people.” Therefore, according to Occam’s razor, one should not attribute “art and engineering” to the human intelligence and ingenuity that men and women develop as the result of their evolutionary, genetic and environmental inheritance. The same applies, of course, with respect to ghosts. The fact that eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation that have been cited as evidence for the existence of ghosts can be explained without reference to these supernatural entities, which are supposed to cause them, makes the actual existence of ghosts questionable at best. Therefore, one can conclude that it is more likely that ghosts do not exist than to suppose that they do. Nevertheless, some are likely to believe in them because they add mystery to the everydayness of ordinary life, they suggest that there is some sort of existence after death, and they make interesting literary and dramatic characters that enliven short stories, novels, and movies. Likewise, they are convenient symbols of such emotional and psychological states and experiences as guilt, the memory of traumatic past experiences, and of actual historical events. In the sense that human beings are, to some extent, products of their own previous experiences and of historical affairs, they are haunted, after all--by the ghosts of their pasts.

Works Cited

Carroll, Robert. "anecdotal (testimonial) evidence." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

---. "electronic voice phenomenon (EVP)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009.

---. "EMF (EMR)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

---. "ghost." The Skeptic’s Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

"I believe spirits use energy to communicate with us. But which energy sources?" Yahoo! Answers. 2009. Yahoo!. 22 May 2009.

Lubenski, Cathy. "When your house has spooks, who are you going to call." The San Diego Union-Tribune 29 Oct 2000: C6. Print.

Randi, James. "spirit photography." An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. 2007. James Randi Education Foundation. 22 May 2009

Quick Tip: Redirect the Reader

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

I learned this trick from my sister, although, I suppose, other mothers and grandmothers may also know and use it. Certainly, mystery writers employ it. Authors of horror fiction may find the method useful, too. I call it redirection. Elsewhere, I’ve written about both misdirection (the use of red herrings and irony, dramatic, situational, or verbal, to frustrate readers’ expectations and keep them guessing) and indirection (the use of nonverbal, often figurative, means of communication to establish mood and intensify suspense).

  

Redirection is different. Here’s how a mother or a grandmother might use redirection. Little Johnny or Susie is angry or sad. To refocus his or her attention off of him- or herself or his or her predicament, mom or grandma refocuses the child’s attention, redirecting him or her to something else. “Why don’t we bake some cookies?” she might ask or suggest, “Let’s see what SpongeBob is up to!”

 

In mysteries, writers, especially when they are dropping clues or red herrings, often redirect their readers’ attention by focusing it upon a glamorous female character, having another character engage the protagonist in an offbeat or otherwise interesting conversation, creating a disturbance, or otherwise engaging the readers’ attention.

 

Horror story writers can benefit from employing redirection, too. For example, suppose one is offering a scientific explanation for a monster whose very nature or existence is of a paranormal or a supernatural character. Obviously, as such, its nature is beyond scientific explanation. The writer is caught between the rock of plausibility and unbelievably, so, soon after the scientific explanation begins (or ends), the writer could redirect the readers’ attention, perhaps by the arrival of the monster itself, a hysterical character who rushes in to announce that the monster has attacked and killed again, or an emergency communiqué from a government official.

 

Redirection works for mom. It works for grandma. It works for mystery writers. It will also work for authors of horror stories, including you.

Techno- and Other Phobias

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Rubens' Medusa: an image of both gynephobia and serpentephobia?

There seems little doubt that there are some real phobias. Plenty of people seem to be genuinely afraid of snakes, for example, and most people have met others who are terrified by just the thought of germs. However, it also seems clear that some “phobias” are products of little more than political correctness. Perhaps homophobia fits into the latter category.

Man-made phobias are a horror writer’s dream come true, because by inventing irrational fears, authors of such fiction have a means of creating an all-but-inexhaustible supply of fears, and, of course, fear (and disgust) is the mainstay of horror fiction.

Take technophobia--the irrational fear of technology. This phobia is the basis for all kinds of short stories, novels, and films. In fact, technophobia is the subject of an entire book, Technophobia!: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology by Daniel Dinello.

Technophobia knows many forms. According to Dinello, it is evident in science fiction’s (and, one might add, to a lesser degree, horror’s) “obsession with mad scientists, rampaging robots, killer clones, cutthroat cyborgs, human-hating androids, satanic supercomputers, flesh-eating viruses, and genetically mutated monsters” (2).

The most extreme expression of technophobia--and one which may soon be not only feasible, but also “inevitable,” according to artificial intelligence expert Raymond Kurzweil,” Dinello says--is the transfer of “human minds into death-free robots” as what science fiction writer Vernor Vinge predicts may be “the next stage of evolution,” which could end in the “physical extinction of the human race,” Hans Moravec, a “robotics pioneer,” warns(4).

Some of the stories in which such transformations are portrayed include Terminator, I, Robot, Blade Runner, Robocop, and, of course, Matrix. Likewise, such novels as H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Food of the Gods, Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, and Robin Cook’s Coma are based upon similar technophobic fears.

By adding “phobia” to the ends of other words that refer to basic human enterprises, scientific, cultural, social, or otherwise, might produce similar subgenres of science fiction and horror: biophobia (fear of life or maybe just biology), statuarophobia (fear of statues), cinematophobia (fear of motion pictures), gardenophobia (fear of gardens), meterophobia (fear of weather), androphobia (fear of men), gynophobia (fear of women), ephebiphobia (fear of children), serpentophobia (fear of snakes), and so on, ad infinitum.

Quick Tip: Futurological Predictions as Grist for the Mill

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

It is impossible to predict what shape horror fiction will take in the future. As Soren Kierkegaard points out, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” The same is true of fiction.

Nevertheless, there are some indications that the horror fiction of the future may address some of the concerns of the futurologist. As the science, or study, of the future, futurology attempts to discern future trends by studying present patterns and causes. Global warming, it might be argued, is an example of futurological thinking. At the heart of futurology are statistics and probability theory, but history, economics, mathematics, and most of the sciences also play key roles in efforts to discern possible and probable future events and to devise possible and probable future scenarios. As one article summarizes the science, “Future Studies is often summarized as being concerned with ‘three P’s and a W,’ or possible, probable, and preferable futures, plus wildcards, which are low probability but high impact events (positive or negative), should they occur” (“Futurology,” Wikipedia).

Of course, such a characterization is simplistic, as futurology also depends upon a nexus of other subordinate, often interrelated, disciplines and approaches, including anticipatory thinking protocols, systems thinking, causal layered analysis, environmental screening, the scenario method, the Delphi method, future history, monitoring, backcasting, back-view mirror analysis, cross-impact analysis, futures workshops, failure mode and effects analysis, futures biographies, futures wheels, relevance trees, simulation and modeling, social network analysis, systems engineering, trend analysis, morphological analysis, and technology forecasting.

The literary equivalents to futuristic societies are, perhaps, the dystopias and utopias of science fiction. In horror fiction, extrapolating from current, known scientific knowledge and theoretical understandings to possible or probable future states of affairs is also a way to anticipate the monsters to come. Some suppose that H. R. Giger’s biomechanical art and the short stories of Ray Bradbury which marry technology and art, such as “The Veldt,” point the direction to at least one likely future topic for horror fiction: mankind’s ambiguous and troubled relationship with the works of his own hands (and mind).

Needless to say, the very concept of futurology is itself very controversial.

Besides, fiction benefits from being fiction; it doesn’t have to be about actual, or real, situations; by nature, it is made up, invented, pretended, even when it is based upon actual events. However, an awareness of the predictions made by futurologists can certainly provide grist for the always-ravenous mill of the creative writer’s imagination.