Creating an Eerie Setting and Tone, Part II

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

In the first part of this series, we considered this same topic. In this post, we take a look at it from a different perspective.

Woods can be unsettling. Why? They are apart from developed areas, which are products of human knowledge, innovation, art, technology, imagination, and technique. Development takes (and shows) a mastery of the environment, control over nature.

We did not ask trees to assume the dimensions and configurations of floors and walls and ceilings. We used trees to make planks and boards, panels and drywall, just as we used lime or gypsum and sand and water to make plaster and converted sedimentary material into clay to make bricks. Every building, commercial, residential, or otherwise, is a human product, an example of humanity’s power and control over the earth.

Outside cities and suburbs and farms, though, nature, not humanity, rules. Beyond civilization, the wilderness reigns. Woods, like other natural landscapes, represent the untamed world of nature, “red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1992) reminds us. Our power centers are only fortresses and outposts in an indifferent universe in which menace and death are as likely as benefit and nurture.

Like deserts, islands, mountains, rain forests, swamps, and the open sea, woods, or forests, remind us that human power and authority over nature are limited, especially outside the cities and suburbs and farms that peoples have carved out of the wilderness, and “tamed” (to some extent) for themselves, as centers of human enterprise. (Blizzards, earthquakes, forest fires, floods, hurricanes, landslides, tornadoes, and other natural disasters are also reminders that human power and authority are limited and fragile; both can be lost in a moment of time.)

When we leave behind our homes and communities to venture into the wilderness, we leave behind the support and assistance of government, families, friends, and neighbors; we also leave behind the organizations and institutions we have created and developed over centuries: military forces, police, firefighters, paramedics, hospitals, doctors, nurses, jails, prisons, forts, highways, vehicles. We put ourselves, to a large degree, at the mercy of nature, “red in tooth and claw.”

Certainly, we may have some tools at our disposal: a tent, food, water, a knife, perhaps a pistol or a rifle, a telephone, matches or a lighter, maybe a hatchet. While such items certainly assist us with everyday tasks and provide the means to satisfy basic needs, they might not be all that helpful against a bear, a cougar, a forest fire, a flash flood, illness, or an escaped prisoner.

What copywriter Barbara Gips observed, in suggesting the tagline to her husband, artist Philip Gips, for the Alien movie poster he was creating, “In space no one can hear you scream” is as true in the woods as it is beyond the exosphere or, as Star Wars puts it, “in a galaxy far, far away.” We are cut off, isolated, on our own, without recourse to protection or any other kind of assistance.

People who read our fiction may not remember their vulnerability as they sit down to read a novel or a short story of watch a movie, but they will feel this helplessness and exposure, all right, if we, as writers, do our jobs well, because our fiction—and our settings—will put them at risk, if only vicariously, and the risk will not be slight; it will be the risk of the loss of life or limb. Described properly, an eerie setting can, and should, suggest this vulnerability to injury or death or, at the very least, to peril, to menace, to danger, to jeopardy, to pain and suffering, and, quite possibly, death.

“Think globally, but live locally,” we have been advised. Similar advice is good for writing: “Think cosmically but write personally.” As writers of horror, we have a Weltanschauung, or world view, that is likely pessimistic: we may hope for the best, but we expect the worst. Possibly, that’s the case because we are aware that the shadow of death falls across all things: friends, family, pursuits of happiness, love, and life itself. With some exceptions, for horror writers, life is a tragedy, ultimately: Life is a bitch, and then we die.

Again, we shouldn’t expect our readers to think about such glum ideas as they read our stories, but we should; we need to know what lies ahead, and, we know, what lies ahead is not a pretty or an encouraging sight. All may be well that ends well, but life does not end well. Instead of lecturing readers, we show them. What happens to our characters, we suggest, could happen to our readers. That’s what identification and vicarious experience are all about.

We describe settings as eerie; we show what happens to our characters in such a setting. We leave it to our readers to discern that they, too, could become prey or victims, whether of the environment itself or a wild animal, a monster, a serial killer, or some other peril. 

I am studying a picture, now, of woods. The image evokes a feeling of disquiet, of uneasiness; it is unsettling, eerie. I write, describing it.

The fog, white here, gray there, as if unable to settle on one shade or the other, is a wall. Rising from the forest floor, it ascends into the sky, a screen, a barrier that cuts off sight, rather than passage. It does not move, does not waver or drift, but stands, a wall immovable and resolute, sinister in its immovability, in its resolute intent.

Leafless trunks, sparse of branch and twig, stand, tall and thin and dark—at least up close; those more distant are vague suggestions, obscured by the pallid pall of the fog engulfing them, the mist that seems to leech away their vitality, their form, their very being. They are more the ghosts of frees, it seems, pale and thin in the motionless haze of the fog. The stand of trees is lost, kindling wood awaiting the flames, should lightning strike this dreary wood in a storm that has not gathered yet, but will.

The fog and the frail, thin trees I take in at a glance, but my eye is arrested by the leaves shed by the trees, the leaves lying, by the hundreds and the thousands, red, like drops of blood, upon the forest floor, lit by a moon unseen—or, perhaps, by an unearthly, unnatural light not of this world. It is as if the very trees or the earth itself bleeds! What power could injure the land itself, blight a forest, obscure the wilderness itself with a veil that is not of this world?

Let’s trek through this forest, the forest of my description, and mark the rhetorical trail we have forged through the narrative wilderness, the better to see the way we have come, and how.

We start with a personification, as the fog is unable to decide (“settle on”) whether to be white or gray and, consequently, is both. An effect of the weather, fog has no intelligence or will—except that we have given it both! If the fog is possessed of a mind that can consider alternatives and make choices, in principle, at least, it could decide to act against us and plan an attack upon us. Its indecisiveness may not work to our advantage. If the fog is unable to decide how best to kill us, it might try several methods, proceeding by trial and error. It is also a barrier, cutting us off—from what? Community? Society? Assistance? The infrastructure of organizations and institutions? Highways? Resources? Or is the fog preventing us from seeing whatever lies beyond it—our way out, perhaps, our avenue to rescue or escape? Whatever its aim, the fog’s intent seems hostile. It is also resolute, determined, staunch: it will not permit sight and the knowledge that vision provides. By blinding us, it keeps us ignorant and, therefore, vulnerable—perhaps to whatever it hides.

The trees of the forest suggest that nature itself is under attack. The trees are bare, leafless, perhaps lifeless. They are thin, pale, perhaps sickly. They are “engulfed” by the parasitic fog, which seems to “leech away their vitality, their form, their very being.” Whatever threatens the trees—the very forest itself—is likely to threaten any who enter the forest, including us. Seen from a distance, the trees appear to be already dead, to be mere “ghosts of” themselves. They seem to be “lost” souls, as it were, awaiting the destructive “flames” of divine judgment, of a wrathful god’s lightning bolt. We, who have entered the forest, are likewise under the sentence of divine judgment.

Finally, our gaze is “arrested” by the sight of the blood-red, fallen leaves, which make it appear that “the very trees or the earth itself bleeds!” We wonder, as does the omniscient narrator, “What power could injure the land itself, blight a forest, obscure the wilderness itself with a veil that is not of this world?” Whatever it is, it is a power with which to reckon, to be sure!

These techniques—personification; ambiguous, paradoxical personality traits; and suggestions of a force able to attack and drain the vital forces of nature itself, with specific references to tangible natural objects, fog, trees, and leaves—create an eerie setting that imperils both the forest and anyone, including the story's characters and we, readers who identify with the characters, conveying feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, confusion, and terror.

The Z Plot

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Although it would be ludicrous to suggest that a story could follow a “Z” plot, the concept is, nevertheless, a good reminder that thrillers and chillers should move from one action scene to another at a fairly fast pace.

What is a “Z” plot? It's an imaginary sequence of action that is on the fact that, in English, readers read from left to right and from top to bottom. In other words, their eyes, in reading, trace the figure of a “Z.” Sometimes the stem (the diagonal line connecting the upper and the lower arms of the “S”) is shorter; other times, longer, than typical, depending on the length of the paragraph the combined sentences of which make up the stem of the letter. For example, a short paragraph produces a short stem; a long paragraph, a long stem:

Think of the paragraph as representing a scene. Each point at the beginning or the end of the arm of the “Z” represents a point of possible change. Perhaps the first point would be to establish the setting, while the second point would be to introduce the protagonist. At the third point, maybe you would contrast two supporting characters. The fourth point might be that at which you relocate the main character. These four points, regardless of the length of the scene (represented, in the “Z” plot by a paragraph), would make up the entire scene. However, the next scene, with its four points, would provide opportunities for additional, perhaps different (depending on the scene's purpose), plot changes, such as changing the pace of the story (with a longer or a shorter scene), using dialogue between tow or more characters to inform the reader of necessary background material, having circumstances or an incident impede the protagonist, and arranging for the antagonist to confront the protagonist (or vice versa). The next scenes would, likewise, present opportunities, at each of their four points, to change the plot again, again, again, and again.

Besides the actions indicated above, writers can use these points of the “Z” plot to heighten suspense, bolster the protagonist (or the antagonist) with reinforcements or assistants, capture a character, have a character escape, pursue a character, bring about a character's return home or to an earlier point of departure, characterize a character, have a character learn something important, or change a character's attitude, beliefs, feelings, perspective, or values.

Although the structure of your story's your plot, in reality, is unlikely to resemble a “Z,” helping to think of the progress of the action in such a manner could help you to remember to change the course of action frequently not only throughout the story as a whole, but also during each and every one of its scenes. As a result, it's unlikely your readers will become bored; in fact, they should be as excited as hell!

Using Typical Genre Elements to Generate Horror Story Plots

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

By isolating the types of characters, actions, settings, processes, and motives or causes upon which horror movies are typically based, we can devise a plot generator.

Although this is a basic list, a starter, as it were, which can be extended by further considerations of horror, both on the sound stage and on the page, it suggests the method.

Who? What types of characters generally appear again and again in the horror genre?

Protagonist, antagonist, victim, authority figure, expert, parents, siblings, tormentor, extraterrestrial, supernatural being

What? What types of actions do many horror stories represent? In other words, what type of activity occupies the characters? What do they do, on a sustained basis, throughout the film or most of the film?

Filming, capturing, escaping, experimenting, rescuing, conceiving, avenging, exploring, invading

When? Where? What settings (times and places) are typical of horror fiction?

Isolated property, closed public property, private property, laboratory, spaceship, suburbs, school, town, forest

How? What processes are typical of the horror genre? In other words, what type of series of actions forms the basis, or vehicle, of the story's plot, as opposed to the actions of the characters themselves? What propels the story as a whole?

Traveling, visiting, creating, reproducing, disturbing, working, persecuting, vacationing, possessing, exorcising, trespassing

Why? What are the motives of the protagonist and the antagonist? If one or both of these characters is (are) otherworldly (e. g., extraterrestrial or supernatural) or a physical force (e. g., energy or disease), what causes them to “act”?

Revenge, financial profit, escape, conquest, insanity, invasion, survival, destruction

Now, it is possible to generate plots by mixing and matching these typical foundational elements. Here are a few examples.

This example uses the first words from each category:

Protagonist films on isolated property while traveling during a vendetta.

To make the plot more concrete, substitute more specific terms for the generic ones; in doing so, it is all right to eliminate an element that no longer seems to fit; in the following revision, “traveling” has been omitted.

The camera operator is hired as a member of a film crew shooting a documentary concerning life inside a prison so he can avenge his father's death by killing the inmate who murdered him.

Here is another example, based on the third term in each of the categories. In this example, it was necessary to add a noun after “by creating”:

A victim escapes from private property by creating a ruse in order to be free.

Again, to make the plot more concrete, substitute more specific terms for the generic ones; in doing so, it is all right to add or alter an element if doing so is desirable and appropriate.

An enslaved woman escapes from an island resort by disguising herself as a guest so she can leave with other departing visitors.

Horror Movies Are Mysteries, Too

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

 

This same formula can apply to plagues:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Make Sure that Your Story's Monster Is Integral to Its Setting: Aristotle and Poe Insist upon It

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Judging by its trailer, the monster of The Sand (2015) is integral to the movie's setting:

A red plastic cup lying, half-buried in the sand, litters an otherwise pristine beach. Waves roll toward the shore, carrying, upon the surface of their waters, green slime suggestive of pulverized vegetation or algae, implying that nature, too, is a litterbug of sorts. A mechanical device, embedded in the sand elsewhere on the beach, among dunes and reeds, is a sign of the presence of human technology amid natural landscape features.

Night. Teenage boys in loud shirts cavort on the beach with teenage girls in bikinis and other abbreviated attire. A boy tosses beer from a red plastic cup toward squealing, grinning girls. While performing a handstand on the sand, Marsha drinks beer, upside-down, from the spigot of an upright keg. Another girl quaffs her beverage from a red plastic cup. A boy does flips.

Vance warns, “Don't use Facebook or MySpace. Nothing leaves this beach.” The party continues, in full swing.

The next morning, Kaylee looks over the beach from the lifeguard tower where she's spent the night. The crowd is gone. Only a few red plastic cups and the teens' sleeping bags and towels remain.

Text appears, informing viewers that “66% of marine species are still undiscovered today.”

A seagull beats its wings, as it struggles to free its feet from the sand. Kaylee, looking on, declares, “He's heavy.” She asks the bird, “Are you stuck?” and is startled to see the bird sink (or being pulled) into the sand until it disappears. “Oh, my God!” she cries, backing up.

Text: “Until now.”

Holding her hand above the sand, Kaylee, with Mitch, who also slept on the lifeguard tower, kneeling beside her, watches water “rain” from her palm.

Kaylee runs across the platform, warning Marsha, “Don't touch it!” Marsha's foot presses into the sand. A hand clutches the girl's wrist, pulling upward.

The screen flickers as Kaylee's boyfriend Jonah and a girl named Chandra, in the front seat, and Vance and his girlfriend Ronnie, in the back seat, sit in a convertible parked on the beach and look out toward the sea.

Mitch asks Kaylee, “So do you want to tell me what just happened?”

“You saw,” Kaylee tells Mitch.

Gilbert frowns as he looks at something unseen by the viewer.

Jonah tries to start his car, as Chandra yells, “Start the car!”

“The car won't start,” he says. The teens are trapped in the convertible.

"We're all going to die,” Mitch predicts.

This is crazy,” Gilbert declares.

Mitch tosses a life preserver.

Mitch, his feet wrapped in towels, runs across the sand.

A police officer approaches a girl lying on on a picnic table on the beach.

Chandra balances on an inflated raft as she walks across the sand.

Jonah lies prone on the beach, suffering and unable to move.

Vance leaps from the stranded convertible.

The police officer sprays Mace on the sand.

Energy crackles around the fingers and arm of a fallen figure—the patrolman?—who lies on the beach.

Kaylee leaps from the lifeguard's tower, onto the sand.

Text: “like a monster.”

Kaylee waves her and shakes her head, saying, “I don't believe in monsters.”

Jonah jumps back into the convertible.

Vance falls onto the beach.

A boy is pulled into the beach as he struggles, clutching the bench of a picnic table.

Kaylee screams.

Night. A blonde in a red bikini backs up, screaming, as she stares, horrified, at a gigantic tendril of light sweeping across the sky. A car, the driver's door open, is parked beside her. The tendril whips down. She ducks, and the tendril slams the car door shut.

Against a black background, the film's title appear in large red, centered letters:

The Sand

An Anything Horror review of the movie posted on Horrorpedia is mixed. The film jumps the shark, so to speak, when the monster is introduced: director Isaac Gabareff apparently couldn't leave well enough alone. He had to “give us the Big Monster,” and one which he doesn't seem to have been able to afford, at that: “the money spent on attempting this wouldn’t pay for a Pizza Hut meal,” which, unfortunately, makes it look “cartoonish.”

There are other problems with the special effects, too, reviewer Phil Wheat, of Nerdy, complains: “especially during a couple of the bigger, and gorier, death scenes.” However, there's a silver lining: “it’s [a] testament toThe Sand‘s production that the low-budget nature of the effects don’t detract too much from the overall experience.”

Another reviewer has trouble with the plot, Luke Owen of Flickering Myth finding it “full of padding, a hammered[-]in love triangle and rather unfunny jokes.”

For his part, reviewer Christopher Stewart of UK Horror Scene finds the characters flat, the final girl somehow awkward, and the romance cringe-worthy. Stewart disagrees in part with the Anything Horror reviewer concerning the monster's credibility, seeing “the monster effects” as “decent” overall, although, he argues, “they don't seem entirely integrated into the scene and come off a little cheap looking.”

This movie itself shows how the monster in a story can (and, in the opinion of Chillers and Thrillers, should) be an integral part of the setting. It shouldn't be merely an afterthought tacked onto the environment, but should arise from the story's setting as naturally and believably as a shark rises from the depths of the ocean, as a bear bounds across the floor of a forest, or as an eagle swoops down from the sky.

It seems that the octopus-thing or the squid-thing, or whatever kind of thing the “undiscovered marine species” specimen-thing is (actually, it turns out to be a giant electric jellyfish), is clearly integral to the setting; it comes from the sea, onto the beach, to attack the teens during spring break. All the pieces fit; there are not only unity and coherence, but also integration and relevance. Of course, whether the effects are “integrated into the scene” as seamlessly and naturally as the could and should be is another question.

Moreover, the movie's posters also indicate that the monster is, indeed, integral to the setting.

One poster shows Kaylee running across the beach, leaning well forward. There's a full moon in the dark sky, but the sand is dark and looks more like both mud and water than sand as such. Indeed, at first glance, it appears that Kaylee is running upon the surface of the ocean, especially since the illuminated tentacle of the monster rises from the sand beside her. Beneath the title, in solid, block red letters is the caption, “This beach is killer.”

Another poster shows a blonde wearing a bikini top resembling seashells; she is buried in the beach up to her waist. Beneath the sand, two of the monster's illuminated tentacles stretch toward her, even as a third seems to attempt to surround her. On her knees, Kaylee reaches toward the other girl, as a third teen, perhaps Chandra, walks slowly toward the victim. A patrol car is parked behind Kaylee. Above the trapped teen, who stretches her arms overhead, the caption appears, in capitals, all red, above the film's sand-colored title: “This beach is killer. The Sand.”

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” wherein Edgar Allan Poe explains how he write his celebrated poem The Raven, Poe says he began the process with the particular emotional effect in mind that he wanted to create (horror, of course), and then chose each and every other element of the poem, it plot, its structure, its meter, its rhyme scheme, the raven's increasingly eerie refrain, and, of course, the setting so that, individually and together, these elements help both to create the preconceived effect and to maximize its impression upon the poem's readers. Like Aristotle, who warned against a tacked-on ending, or deus ex machina, insisting that the end of a story should be pertinent and seemingly inevitable, given all that had gone before, and led, to the culmination, the effect itself.

By ensuring that the characters, including the monster, are integral to the story's setting, writers can gain a sense of inevitability for their denouement that is as apt and satisfying as that of Poe's raven. The elements of The Sand, the monster included, do lead up to and emphasize the effect that the film, as a whole, produces. In this, the movie succeeds well, however well or poorly the film the “monster effects” themselves may be “integrated into the scene.”

The Covers of Gothic Romance Pulp Fiction Novels: Advertising a Genre

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

The covers of Gothic romance pulp fiction novels tip us off to the nature of the genre's fiction. Often monochromatic, perhaps to set the mood, which can be described as “brooding,” the paintings that grace the covers of such fare tend to feature a woman alone, either framed by the window of an isolated mansion, or fleeing from an unseen threat, often through rugged terrain, frequently with a manor house or castle in the background and a threatening sky above.

Whether indoors or out, the mood of menace is heightened by eerie statues, such as gargoyles or satyrs, strange obelisks, cemetery headstones, stunted or malformed trees, black cats and bats, and skies that look somehow as jagged as a predatory animal's teeth.

Sometimes milady, who's usually in her twenties, stands upon the precipice of a cliff, with the sea below. She might flee headlong down a rocky, snow-covered slope.


Occasionally, her flight takes her through an isolated cemetery. A full moon might hang in a cloudy sky.

Open land and sparse vegetation may expose her flight. The sea, a forest, a cliff, or otherwise impassible terrain features impede or prevent her rescue or escape.

As often as not, the damsel in distress is barefoot, suggesting she took to her heels in a hurry. Full, heavy dresses are likely to encumber her, forcing her to hike her skirts. Almost invariably, she looks over her shoulder, as if in search of a stalker. Fog or Spanish moss hanging from the boughs of a remote estate may lend an air of mystery and menace. One wonders what terror launched her sudden flight.

On the relatively rare occasions that the distressed damsel is shown indoors, she is usually confined by a window frame, a dimly lit staircase, or a shadowy hallway, which she negotiates carefully, perhaps with a flickering candle in hand, looking, all the while, for some lurking menace.

 

Her adversary is seldom shown, and, when the pursuer or pursuers are included in the painting, they are at a distance, indistinct: a lone figure, small in the distance, silhouetted in a the arched entrance to a castle above and behind the heroine or a small band of nameless, faceless pursuers.

Several covers mention “love” of a problematic or dangerous sort: “The lure of love led her through a jungle of horror to a house of blood” (Candace Arkham's Ancient Evil); “She came to Ravensnest to save a life—and found her own threatened as she sought love in a house shadowed by death” (Caroline Farr's Mansion of Evil); “At Whitehall Mansion, Susan's fairy tale romance became a honeymoon of horror” (Elisabeth Offutt Allen's The Hounds of the Moon).

Occasionally, a cover offers a bit of text to characterize the heroine, suggest her plight, and hint at the story's plot: “Innocent and alone, she found herself fighting the forces of Middle Age witchcraft,” reads a blurb on the front cover of Wilma Winthrop's Tryst with Terror. Paulette Warren's Some Beckoning Wraith asks, “Could love and common sense overcome the vengeful spirit that haunted Malvern Manor?” In Lady in Darkness, Evelyn Bond spins a tale in which her heroine's “memory gone, Ellen” cannot tell whether “Whit was her husband—or her jailer.”

Perhaps readers needed to know at least this much about the books they considered buying, but, for me (and perhaps for you), the artwork, which tends to be almost without exception more than simply sufficient and is often splendid, is far more mysterious and intriguing than the bald summaries such text sets forth and needs no explanation or elaboration. In any case, the covers invariably indicate and, indeed, highlight the conventional elements of the Gothic romance genre.

Setting: More Than Merely Time and Place

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In horror stories, as in other types of fiction, setting may be, and often is, more than merely time and space. A setting may provide a situation, evoke atmosphere, supply a context, suggest a character's inner world, or imply a metaphor.

In Luis Llosa's Anaconda (1997), the Amazonian rain forest provides the situation upon which the film's plot is based: the search of a documentary film crew for the Shirishamas, a lost tribe, which is replaced by their hunt, under the leadership of Paul Serone, a Paraguayan snake hunter, for a giant anaconda. The documentary film crew's expedition, which is hijacked by Serone, allows the plot of Llosa's movie's to unfold in a new direction, one involving horror and suspense far beyond that which the documentary crew might otherwise have encountered, including murder, humans being used as live bait, and multiple attacks (most fatal) by the giant reptile.

Alejandro Amenábar's 2001 film, The Others, takes place immediately after World War II. With her young children, Anne and Nicholas, Grace Stewart has retreated to a remote country house on one of the Channel Islands. She hires a trio of caretakers who mysteriously appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Soon after, Grace and her children discover that the house is haunted—or so it appears. Throughout their stay, Grace orders her servants, Bertha Mills, Edmund Tuttle, and Lydia, to keep the curtains drawn; her children, she explains, suffer from photosensitivity and cannot bear direct sunlight.

The darkness, like the heavy fog that often obscures the yard and the woods beyond the estate, create an atmosphere of dread. Symbolically, the darkness may represent ignorance (specifically, that of Grace and her children concerning their true state of existence); the fog, confusion and an inability to understand clearly; and the woods, the wilderness of nature, both human and otherwise. These elements of the setting, like the large house in which mysterious events transpire, create a disturbing atmosphere that adds to the movie's horror and suspense.

The vast Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) provides a context for the film. The isolated hotel represents the emotional distance that the caretaker and would-be novelist Jack Torrance maintains between himself and others, including his wife Wendy and their son Danny, just as the cold weather, the ice, the snow, and the drifting fog represent Jack's cold nature. His emotional coldness isolates him from himself and from those whom he claims to love. Although, outwardly, he can appear to be an amiable person, as he does during his interview, he is, in fact, a deeply disturbed man who's given to rage and violence.

The hotel's rambling corridors, its many closed doors, and its emptiness, like the remote, isolated landscape surrounding it, provide the context that allow viewers to understand Jack's true character as someone who is irrational. Outwardly, he, like the Overlook Hotel, seems sane and stable; inside, both the hotel and its caretaker are mad and anything but stable. The hallways seem to lead in all directions, but go nowhere, returning back upon themselves; the closed doors to the rooms are locked, providing no access; the vast, empty chambers available to Jack and his family echo with their footsteps. The hotel and Jack mirror one another so well that it's difficult, if not impossible, to say for certain whether the hotel is haunted or its “ghosts” are hallucinations produced by Jack's own madness.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Edgar Allan Poe's remote mansion doubles as an outward representation or expression of the inner world of Roderick Usher's tormented mind. Its fall, at the end of the story, reflects the “fall” of Usher into madness, although his insanity clearly occurs some time earlier, perhaps before the incidents of the story itself take place, as his madness causes many of these incidents. Poe himself suggests that Usher's madness precedes the incidents of the story; his narrator's description of a disturbing crack in the front wall of the house reads:

Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

As Kevin J. Hayes, the editor of The Annotated Poe, points out, “Many readers note the corollary between this barely perceptible but nonetheless worrisome fissure and Roderick Usher's broken, increasingly unstable mind. They are a source of considerable tension in the story” (99).

Even the furnishings of the house, Hayes observes, suggest a relationship between the House of Usher and Usher himself: “Roderick's weird, creepy painting of an underground vault, illuminated by a sourceless light, offers a glimpse into the terrible, frightening terminus—madness or despair—into which the artist has fallen.”

It is Usher, of course, who commits the insane act of entombing his sister Madeline alive in the house's family tomb, but it is inside the house that Usher commits this despicable deed. Throughout the story, the house and its estate depict the inner world of their owner's mind, a mind “fallen” into the madness that besets it.

As pointed out in a previous post, the cave explored by the characters of Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) is a metaphor for the uterus. In descending into the womb-like cave, the feminist female spelunkers are exploring their sexual selves, exploring womanhood itself, but female sexuality and womanhood as they are viewed through the lens of extreme feminism:

The contours of the cave they explore resemble the shape of the womb. Wide at the entrance (vagina), it narrows toward the middle (cervix), and then opens again, into another wider space (uterus, or womb). As the women negotiate their way through the womb-cave, Sarah, the wife and mother, gets stuck and, suffering from claustrophobia, panics. As subtext, her becoming trapped seems to represent pregnancy, which causes a woman to get “stuck,” physically and, to some extent, both emotionally and socially, if not vocationally, as well, for nine months in a process that, for many, epitomizes femininity. Beth, her best friend, plays the role of the midwife, delivering Sarah, but the birth process represented by Beth’s freeing Sarah from the cave’s narrowed passageway goes awry: the womb-cave collapses, burying the women inside a womb-become-a-tomb. Their gender, especially as it is involved in pregnancy, has not only trapped them, but it has also, in fact, buried them alive.

Since this metaphor is explored in detail in the previous post, there's no need to revisit it further in this post.

Clearly, setting need not be limited merely to representing a particular place at a specific moment in time. Skillfully employed, setting can represent or evoke, among other things, a situation, an atmosphere, a context, a character's inner world, or a metaphor.

Creating Hostile or Threatening Settings

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Writers of horror fiction have several ways by which to suggest threatening or hostile environments.

1. Writers can depict a setting that is, in itself, bizarre.

I know a homeowner, Bruce, who cut down all the trees in his yard. He'd had a swimming pool installed in his backyard, and he was frustrated when, each fall, his trees dropped their leaves, littering his lawn and the surface of his new pool. His solution was to chop down not only the trees in his backyard, but all his trees, including those in his front and side yards. At no charge, he even volunteered to cut down the trees of his neighbor, but the neighbor declined his offer. 

Most of us, I believe, would have said no thanks, because most of us love trees. They're big, beautiful symbols of life—and they provide shade. So what if they drop their leaves every autumn? Everybody poops. (Yes, dead leaves are essentially tree droppings.) 

But, when we're confronted with trees unlike any most of us have ever seen, trees that are not only unfamiliar to us but also strange-looking? Then, maybe we'd give Bruce a call.

A case in point: the dragon tree (Dracaena cinnabaril), which thrives on Yemen's remote Socotra Island an on the Canary Islands. Named for its red sap, this tree looks as though it was planted upside down, its limbs resembling roots at the end of which grow clumps of stubby leaves. In bloom, their blossoms grow among their leaves, looking pretty much like yellow versions of the former. Unfortunately, the population of these trees has been greatly reduced and now consists mostly of only mature trees. Scientists describe the tree's status as “vulnerable,” which places it between “near threatened” and “endangered.”

Another bizarre inhabitant of Socotra Island is the cucumber tree (Dendrosicyos socotrana). It has “a bulbous trunk and a small crown,” bearing 10-inch “round leaves” with “slightly toothed” bristles and inch-long yellow fruit.

The bottle tree (Pachypodium lealii Welw) is also a rather odd-looking specimen, resembling a turnip planted upside down. This tree grows is indigenous to the Namibia.

The Juniper Tree (Juniperus phoenicea), which grows on Spain's El Hierro Island, literally bends over backward. Some, such as the one shown here, resemble human figures. Coming unexpectedly upon such a tree at dusk might send a chill up one's spine.

This bizarre specimen, the Tree of Tule, a Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) makes its home in a Oaxaca, Mexico, churchyard. Did it not exist, a description of its appearance might seem unbelievable. Some see the shapes of jaguars, elephants, and other animals in the bark of the ancient tree's trunk, which gives it the nickname “The Tree of Life.”

 This West Australian boab tree (Adansonia gregorii ) allegedly doubled as a jail. Prisoners would be kept inside the tree overnight on their way from one place to another.

California's boojum tree (Fouquieria columnaris) is tall, exceedingly slender, and nearly leafless. Imagine walking up on a forest of these in the middle of the desert on a moonlit night. According to Seri beliefs, “touching this plant will cause strong winds to blow (an undesirable state).”

This kapok tree's strange trunk appears to consist of three branches that have grown woody “webbing” between one another. The trunk is broad enough so that two or more thick branches, each pointing in its own direction, can grow from the same side of the trunk.

The time-space continuum warp featured toward the end of my urban fantasy novel A WholeFull of World of Hurt, which was inspired by Steve Ditko's illustrations of the enchanted realms through which Marvel Comics's Dr. Strange traveled on his astral journeys, is (like Ditko's own mystical lands) a good illustration of this approach. The execution of this technique doesn't have to involve the use of surreal imagery, though, as Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King's Rose Red and The Shining, and Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine indicate.

2. Another way to suggest threatening or hostile environments is to make the familiar seem strange. The strange appearance of the trees we described (above) may not, in itself, be frightening enough to horrify readers (but their looks are a start!). Writers need to associate the odd-looking trees with bizarre origins or give them a back story (such as a legend) that gives them a horrific provenance. Imagining answers to questions about some of the trees described above may offer some possibilities.

What, precisely, is threatening the existence of the dragon tree? Could the tree's name derive from a source other than the accepted one? Could it have grown from the spawn of actual (now extinct) dragons, which would account for its blood-red sap? Perhaps such trees are capable, under the right circumstances, or spontaneous combustion.

Are the human shapes discernible in the bent-over-backward juniper trees actual humans who've been incorporated into tree branches, perhaps through dark magic? Were they dancers in some sort of fantastic ritual?

Do the animal shapes amid the bark of the Tree of Tule actually come to life at times? Do its elephants, jaguars, and other beasts spring from its bark to do the will of those who conjure them, returning to their passive, woody state after fulfilling their summoners' deadly missions? 

Is a character among your adventurers a criminal whose past catches up with him or her when the band passes the Boab Prison Tree? Is it more than a jail? Maybe the tree practices its own brand of vigilante justice, acting as judge, jury, and executioner concerning violent offenders who've escaped justice (until they encountered the Prison Tree). 

Why would someone generate a desert vortex—and who planted the mysterious boojum tree that creates such an effect? A Seri? Someone else? Research the Seri, and if their beliefs don't seem, by modern standards, strange enough to intrigue and, more importantly, frighten readers, substitute an imaginary people and their beliefs for those of the Seri. All is possible in fantastic fiction, after all, a genre which includes horror. Don't forget to include a bizarre motivation for the horrific horticulturalists.

Of course, the context in which the trees are introduced also makes them frightening. A writer must build toward his or her character's encounter of the mysterious trees, and the author's account of the tree's nature and origin must be fantastic and dark, if it's to generate fear.

Bentley Little is a master of this approach. In particular such of his novels as The Resort and The Influence are especially good examples of this approach. Dan Simmons's Summer of Night is also evocative of hostile landscapes, as is Stephen King's It and Dean Koontz's The Taking. Other masters of this technique include Nathaniel Hawthorne ("Young Goodman Brown") and Edgar Allan Poe ("TheFall of the House of Usher")

3. Authors can focus on the disconcerting, possibly sinister, details of an everyday place. An effective technique is to search an image browser using a phrase such as “eerie photos of landscapes.” Conducting such a search, using this same phrase, resulted in these (selected) images. (As my search term suggest, I restricted my search to scenes of actual, existing exterior places—as far as I can determine.) In considering your own gallery, ask yourself what characteristics make the photographs seem eerie. Think about both the literal (physical) and the psychological aspects of the environment.

This photograph shows dense foliage. The trees, bushes, and other forms of plant life are clothed, as it were, in thick growths of leaves that make the eye wander. One's gaze is easily lost in the abundance of detail. The tufts, clusters, and clumps of vegetation among the shadowy “hollows” between the leafy trees lead the eye in many directions and, at the same time, nowhere. We are genetically hard-wired to seek patterns in everything, but this mass of flora exhibits no discernible form or structure; it is a senseless tangle, a meaningless maze, offering no clue as to its location or context. However, our minds are reluctant to accept this symbol of meaninglessness; we are apt to stare, demanding that some meaning assert itself, even if we must invent such meaning ourselves, imagining faces or forms that exist only in our own minds, seeing her a visage, there a figure. Therein lies the possibility for terror: the abundance of foliage is a mirror of the soul, as we project upon it our own tortured fantasies; committing the pathetic fallacy, we envision a menacing place, a hell, of our own design. Denied orientation, we become confused and distraught; when meaning isn't forthcoming, we become anxious and unsettled.

At first, this slight, tree-lined berm may appear pleasantly bucolic, but this sense of sylvan beauty dissipates under closer inspection. What, we may wonder, lies buried under the extended mound? A monstrous worm, a serpent worthy of Ragnarok, a dragon? The trees, especially those in the foreground, are barren, and their sharp-pointed branches are stubby, as if they've been snapped off—but by what? Even more eerily, the row of trees on either side of the berm stand like sentinels, appearing to direct our steps, to channel us, suggesting that we take this elevated pathway to a point unknown. Are we the human equivalents of cattle being directed, along an arboreal chute, to the slaughter? How might these various perceptions—a grave for a snakelike monster, snapped-off branches, sentinel-like trees, a channeling landscape—add up to? What single scenario could unify and explain them? When we believe—or even feel—we have lost our autonomy, we experience panic.

A dark and foggy wood stimulates the imagination by depriving us of the light which is necessary for vision. In fog, as in darkness, our visibility is limited. We cannot see clearly or, sometimes, at all. Effectively blind, we can no longer be confident of our surroundings or of what threat to us may lurk ahead (or, for that matter, to either side or behind us). Dense clusters of branches and foliage also impedes vision. A remote location cuts us off from the aid of others. This photograph uses darkness, fog and the obstruction of abundant tree growth to obscure our vision, a remote site to isolate us, but it also seems to mock us. In a place devoid of human contact, we see a bench among clumps of grass, a bench green with lichen, moss, or algae, an artifact of human technology being overcome by nature. Shall this be our own fate? Cut off and alone, shall we succumb to our fate, our corpses taken over by invading plants? Perhaps we know why we began our journey, before we became lost, near nightfall, but where are we now? It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say, but, certainly, we are alone. Deprivation of sight and the company of others, we feel vulnerable and helpless.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child succeed admirably in employing this approach in many of their novels, including Still Like with Crows, Crimson Shore, and White Fire. Bram Stoker's short story "The Burial of the Rats" is a tour de force.